'Modi Tattva’ and a study in reverence

A new course module on the Prime Minister places personality above real analysis and critical inquiry.

A few weeks ago, the Department of Sociology at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda announced a new paper titled ‘Sociology of Patriotism’. Among its modules is one called ‘Modi Tattva’ – the essence, or principle, of Modi – to be studied alongside the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Chhatrapati Shivaji, and Sayajirao Gaekwad III.

The department head, defending the choice, invoked Max Weber: this was simply a sociological study of charismatic authority, comparable to analyses of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. “Whether you like it or not,” he said, “you will have to discuss PM Modi”.

The framing is, in principle, unobjectionable. Modi is plainly a legitimate object of sociological inquiry; refusing to study him would itself be a kind of failure. But the way an inquiry is framed is an inquiry’s first finding. And with every framing choice this course has made, sociology has already conceded ground to its object. Three things deserve our attention here.

The first is vocabulary. ‘Patriotism’ is not a sociological category; ‘Nationalism’ is. The discipline has long preferred the latter because it permits the object to be examined rather than affirmed. ‘Tattva’, likewise, is a term of Indic-philosophical reverence, i.e., essence or principle, not of analysis. We do not have ‘Kemal Tattva’ in Turkish Sociology, nor ‘Stalin Tattva’ in Russian. The vocabulary positions the analyst inside, not outside, the worldview being studied. A discipline that adopts the affective register of its object has already surrendered the discipline’s first task.

The second is structure. Placing a sitting Prime Minister in a syllabic line with monumentalised historical figures performs the canonical pedagogical work of personality-cult formation. The student is invited to read the contemporary figure through the reverential register reserved for memorialised ones. The discipline has a sociology of precisely this – Christel Lane on Stalin, Stephen Holmes on Atatürk, Robert Jay Lifton on Mao. The lesson of that literature is simple: the cult does not arrive announcing itself. It arrives as an ordinary curriculum.

The third point is the most consequential and invisible, unless one looks closely. The department head who designed this course is also, by his own statement, a member of a NITI Aayog project monitoring government schemes.

The same person, in his policy role, is evaluating the government’s projects and teaching students that the government’s head is an object of analysis in charismatic leadership. This is not a problem of personal politics. It is a problem of Role. In a more robust academic culture, this overlap would require disclosure, perhaps recusal. It does not, because the institutional norms that would have flagged it have already eroded.

Consent by attrition

Today’s Indian university shows a consolidation: the policy adviser, curriculum designer, and department head are all one person, creating an internal interlock within individual biographies. Andre Beteille’s deepest insight about the Indian university was that its character rested not on its statutes but on its mores – the informal conventions of academic civility, the unspoken protocol that the Vice-Chancellor does not interfere with examiners, that the department debates its own syllabus based on disciplinary reasons, that the discipline polices its own vocabulary.

These conventions are easy to mock when they hold and impossible to recover when they break. The MSU case is not a violation of any law. It is a violation of mores. No regulator will intervene; no court will rule. And precisely because nothing visible has been broken, the case will be remembered, if at all, as a curricular update.

This is what manufactured consent looks like in 2026 – not at the level of a captive press but at the level of the discipline itself. The consent manufactured here is sociology’s own. A whole department signed off on a course whose vocabulary and structure are inconsistent with the discipline’s methodological commitments. No one was coerced. The consent was given by attrition – by the slow accumulation of small decisions in which academic precarity, political alignment, and institutional reward happened to point in the same direction.

Throughout his career, Beteille worried that India’s universities were fragile public institutions, easier to destroy than to build. The destruction, he warned, would come not as dramatic capture but as ordinary administration. The genius of the MSU case is precisely its ordinariness. No one was arrested. No one resigned. No police entered the campus. A department updated a syllabus. And in doing so, it conceded – by a vocabulary, a structure, and an interlock – the discipline’s most basic commitment: that to study a worldview, one must not be entirely inside it.

(The writer is an assistant professor in the Department of Liberal Arts, Amity University, Bengaluru)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.