'If this is Tuesday... it must be Social Roles' Sociology and Challenge of Gender Studies Sharmila Rege THE discussion that has followed Veena Dass analysis of the 'Crisis in Sociology in India' [Giri 1993, Murthy 1993, Deshpande 1994] encourages me to react and comment on the state of the art in Maharashtra. I see this comment as a step in collecting data from different regions and towards forming a base for what G B Venkatesha Murthy has called reorientation workshops [Murthy 1993]. These will have to be different from the 'refresher' courses and will have to be consciously guided towards building a community of discourse [Giri 1993], To avoid centralisation and metropolitanism in building such communities of discourse, a series of local and regional level deliberations would be necessary as a preliminary step. Such a strategy has been adopted by the all- India network of women's organisations and has led to more participatory and democratic proceedings at the national conferences. Satish Deshpande has aptly expressed our 'collective ineffectiveness' and most of us would agree with him that 'brilliance' or 'innovation' is collectively and institutionally reproduced [Deshpande 1994]. The preconditions of innovation require a further analysis of the state of our syllabi, our pedagogical practices and our responses to challenges from within and outside the academia.
