Narratives vs Theories
The question requires deeper handling so you will forgive me for the brevity of my response but you will get some idea of where I stand.
Regarding the first question as to whether we reject social science itself, I am aware that many people have made this suggestion. I am not so much hung up on the word ‘social science’ but I do believe that we need to systematically reflect on our experiences in the world. A systematic reflection on experiences in the form of a theory is what we can conveniently call social science. We need theories about the world to understand the World. Systematic thinking means use of certain criteria to decide which theories are good or not, etc. and which to choose. The best thing would be to appeal to the history of the natural sciences over say four hundred years to see how they have done it, what kind of criteria they used. Thus, I belong to the group which advocates systematic reflection on experience, and in that sense, I belong to the group which says we need social science.
Your second question was about Indians having different ways of understanding experience: you spoke of narratives and the autobiography of Tulsi Ram. This raises the question of what form these reflections are going to take. To give a crude example: are they going to be mathematized? Will they take the form of scientific laws or of narratives? That is a very interesting question. But all narratives are not social science: in that case every novelist would have a scientific theory. If a text is an autobiography, it is not social science.
pp 103-4 of “Classical Indian Thought and the English Language” edited by Mullick, et al.