biography of m.n srinivas

M.N.Srinivas Biography and Contribution to indian sociology

M.N Srinivas full name Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas. He was born in 1916 in Mysore and passed away in 1999 in Bangalore. He was one of the best Indian sociologists. He was a Brahmin. His studies are prominent in the area of caste and its other classifications, Sanskritization and many other topics that revolve around caste itself.

Methodology:                                                    

Srinivas’s perspective was different from another sociologist as he did not want to rely on a western textbook to study his own country people. So, therefore, he himself participated and started with observation and fieldwork. Somewhere in 1940-42, He did a vast field work on Coorgs. He further talks about the unity and interaction among different castes present in Coorgs. Caste he covered was Brahmins, Kaniyas, Bannas and Panikas. He also discusses in villages we can see many independent castes.

Most of the years Srinivas only concentrated on studying caste and religion. He covered all the dimensions of the caste and religion prevailing in the society. He came up with the terms dominant castes, westernization, secularization and sanskritization . This all was the impact and outcome of the caste system .

Srinivas being from Brahmin caste which was believed to be superior he never hesitated to choose caste system as his main area of interest. He presented number studies on how caste has its role everywhere be it be village or cities.

Now when we talk about the book view. Srinivas always said what is given in the book might be good as a reference but completely believing it won’t be useful. He gave more importance to the field perspective. According to books all the caste elements, religion, kinship, geographical areas formulate Indian society’s foundation.

Srinivas always believed to know Indian society and its different aspects one has to go in the field use his own mind and observation and share what he or she has experienced. He said to study Indian society starts with visiting different regions. Study that region and its functions. This is how you can know the nativity of those regions of Indian society.

Recognition:

He was awarded and honored by different institutions. The University of Bombay, the government of France and Royal anthropological institute placed several awards on his hand. President of India awarded him Padma Bhushan. He was also seen as one of the foreigner members in the British Academy and American Academy of Arts and Science.

Srinivas was greatly influenced by Radcliffe Brown an English social Anthropologist and by his idea of structure. Radcliffe was also his teacher when he was studying at Oxford.

We would discuss briefly on a few topics which were of great importance to Srinivas:

We can see this when Srinivas talks about the village of Rampura in Mysore. There he witnesses that there were several castes each holding different positions. It consisted of Brahmins, peasants, and untouchables. But here peasants were stronger and dominant than Brahmins as many peasants had land were numerically stronger and had political power. That is why in this sense Srinivas said caste that was traditionally ranked below but having political and economic power proved them as dominant caste in the village.

Many have criticized him by saying he has at times eliminated religious minorities from his research during promoting the concept of Sanskritization.

In his studies, we can see he has focused on Indian traditions like caste and village which revolve around Hinduism trough this we can see he was using no secular concept. He focused more on upper caste or we can say, elite groups.

The concepts which were introduced by Srinivas were not completely unique as they might be having the same concept from Aryanization or Brahminization by Lyall and Risley as said by Mukherjee.

M.N Srinivas importantly focused on fieldwork rather completely falling for bookish knowledge. He was one of the popular first generation sociologists in India. He discusses all the complex functions in Indian society with ease. He shares his point of view on topics such as caste, religion, traditional villages and their impacts on Indian society.

Samreen Sagheer

Professor M. N. Srinivas

(16th november 1916- 30th november 1999).

Padma Bhushan awardee renowned social anthropologist and sociologist late Prof. M.N. Srinivas has inspired an entire generation of Social Scientists to shift from Book view of the Societies to its Field View.

Mysore Narsimhacharya Srinivas was born in a traditional Brahmin family in Mysore on 16th November 1916. He came from a family that valued education; thus, his father, a government servant, had shifted from Arakere , their native village, to Mysore to provide education to his children. He was the youngest of four siblings, and his eldest brother was a lecturer of English literature at the University of Mysore. His brother encouraged him to develop writing skills in English. Srinivas graduated in Social Philosophy from Mysore University in 1936. He then joined Bombay University to pursue his master's in Sociology under the supervision of eminent sociologist G S Ghurye, then Head of the Department of Sociology. Srinivas obtained his LLB and Ph.D.  from Bombay University in 1940 and 1945, respectively. In 1945 he went to Oxford, where he received his DPhil in Social Anthropology in 1947.

Under the supervision of Ghurye, Srinivas did short fieldwork and submitted a dissertation on marriage and family on the Kannada caste in Mysore. Later, this work was published as Marriage and Family in Mysore, which received much appreciation.  He was awarded a fellowship in 1940 to study the Coorgs of South India. Srinivas submitted a 900 paged dissertation titled The Coorgs: A Socio-Ethnic Study in 1944 in two volumes. The external examiner for his voluminous work was renowned anthropologist Raymond Firth, who appreciated this work for the richness of the data and accuracy of citations. After completing his doctorate, Srinivas left for Oxford in 1945 to undertake D. Phil under the supervision of well-known social anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe Brown. Under his supervision, Srinivas re-analysed the data on the religion of Coorgs in a functional framework. This was later published as Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India in 1952. It is a classic work, a must read for the students of Anthropology and Sociology.

In 1951, Srinivas joined Baroda University, where he founded the Department of Sociology. Later, after eight years, in 1959, he shifted to the Delhi School of Economics at Delhi University to join the newly formed Sociology Department. Srinivas’s reputation attracted students from all over the country to Sociology Department. He was instrumental in setting up the department and framed the syllabus that focussed on extensive readings of ethnographies. He had engrained tradition of anthropological field work while working under the supervision of A. R. Radcliffe Brown and carried forward the same legacy. Throughout his professional career, he insisted on training students in intensive fieldwork.

First generation of students getting M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from this newly founded department of sociology were trained in anthropological fieldwork tradition. He firmly believed that the fieldwork method was essential to know the ground realities of a society. He was primarily responsible for blurring any boundaries that may have existed between training in anthropology and sociology. His reflection on his experiences of fieldwork resulted in a well-known book, The Fieldworker and the Field (1979) . He also pioneered research in social transformations that rural and peasant societies experienced in just a decade after independence. Focus of these studies was to understand the interrelations among different parts of society. He insisted that students of society must do empirical studies.

Famously, he insisted on Field view of the society instead of Book view . According to him, the book view from the sacred texts can help us gain knowledge on religion, caste, varna, family and geographical structure of a society. But knowledge about different regions of a society, especially Indian society can be attained through fieldwork, and small regional empirical studies would help understand the nativity of the rural Indian society.

Prof. Srinivas became the President of the Indian Sociological Society between 1966-1969. He was instrumental in bringing together the ISS and the All-India Sociological Conference as a single professional body and reorganized the society’s journal, the Sociological Bulletin . In 1972, he returned to his home state of Karnataka and joined Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) as Joint Director. After retiring from ISEC, he joined the National Institute for Advanced Studies in Bangalore as J.R.D Tata visiting professor, where he worked till, he passed away on 30th November 1999.

He has received several awards, such as the Rivers Memorial Medal (1955), the S C Roy Memorial Medal (1958), and the Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain and Ireland (since 1964). He also received Dadabhai Naoroji Memorial Prize for social sciences other than economics (1971) and Padma Bhushan, third highest award given by the Government of India (1977) as a recognition of his extraordinary achievements.

Srinivas is acclaimed in India and across the world as a sociologist and social anthropologist who has immensely contributed to the discipline through his teaching, research, and institution building. Srinivas has written on many aspects of Indian society and culture and is known for his work on caste, religion, village community, social change, and research methodology. His field experience has been long, varied, and widespread. Most of his writings are based on his intensive fieldwork, particularly in Coorg and Rampura (pseudonym). His texts are a synthesis of his field observation and knowledge of the existing literature on different regions of the country.

His book Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952) is recognized as a classic in the study of Indian society and culture, where he applied the ideas of structure and function to understand people's ritual and social life. His training at Oxford prompted him to examine social interactions and social relations with a structural and functional approach. He did intensive fieldwork using participant observation, which helped him see different parts of society in their interrelatedness. This book made a discernible paradigm shift in viewing continuities in societies from theoretical underpinnings of evolutionism and diffusionism to structure-functionalism. It marked a beginning of a new approach in ethnographic writings in Indian anthropology. This book provided a theoretical framework to study the complex interrelationships between ritual and social order in the Coorg society. Discussion on the notions of purity and pollution at length is another significant contribution of this text. Inspired by this concept of purity and pollution, Mary Douglas furthered this idea and published Purity and Pollution in 1966. In an interview with A M Shah, Srinivas said:

Using Radcliffe Brown’s idea of ‘ritual idiom’, I analysed the complex and pervasive ideas of pollution and purity underlying Coorg and, indeed, all Hindu religious and social life. I also analysed the Coorg ritual complex of mangala , which was crucial component of all auspicious rituals of the Coorgs. My analysis of the pollution-purity ideas of the Coorgs stimulated Mary Douglas to do a more far-reaching analysis of them in Purity and Pollution. (cf. Shah 2000: 631)

Though Srinivas adopted a functionalist paradigm to explain the inter-relatedness of different aspects of the Coorg society, T N Madan in Pathways says that religion in the Coorg book is understood and reduced to ritual and is pursued to understand in terms of its function in the maintenance of the social order. So, the functionalist paradigm that is the strength of the Coorg book, its weakness also stems from the same source (Madan, 1995;39).  Srinivas himself has drawn attention to some of the limitations of the book:

As I looked at my material from the functionalist viewpoint, I found it falling into a pattern. The data was no longer unrelated and disorderly. The different levels of reality were discernible as were the links between them. In retrospect, one of the troubles with my analysis was that everything was too neatly tied up leaving no loose ends. I must also add that the data was too thin for my analysis. (Srinivas, 1973:141)

With all its strengths and limitations this book is an anthropological classic. Its strength emanates from the richness of data painstakingly collected over a period of four years from 1940-43. The text illustrated a functionalist approach in understanding ritual practises and influential ideas like the concept of ‘Sanskritization’. The concept of Sanskritization showed how imitating the ways of life of the higher castes- dwija (twice-born castes) by the lower caste may felicitate their rise to a higher social status. The process involves some lower castes emulating lifeways and the ritual practices of the Brahmins. The concept was initially understood as imitation of the culture of the upper castes by lower castes for upward mobility in the caste hierarchy.

Over the years, there was a perceptive change in his comprehensive understanding of the process of social mobility. Srinivas, then viewed it as the incorporation of certain values that are not directly connected to the caste system.  This concept was used as an illustrative device to study process of social change in India. It is important to note that Srinivas always maintained that Sanskritization is not proselytization. He analysed the concept and argued that Sanskritization is not just confined to and limited by the caste order and has much wider application. In a chapter on the ‘Cohesive Role of Sanskritization’ in Collected Essays Srinivas says:

Sanskritization is not confined to any single part of the country, but is wide-spread in the subcontinent, including remote and forested regions. It affected a wide variety of groups, both within the Hindu fold and others outside it. It was even carried to neighbouring countries such as Ceylon, Indonesia and Tibet (Srinivas, 2002:221)

The concept of Sanskritization has found a place in the Oxford English Dictionary (1971). Sanskritization has become a word of common parlance in Indianist studies and has generated cognate words such as Islamization and de-Sanskritization (Madan,1995: 41).

Besides his interest in religion and caste, Srinivas also contributed significantly to village studies. Encouraged by his mentor Radcliffe-brown in 1945-46, Srinivas conducted a study of Rampur-a Mysore village on his return from Oxford. Radcliffe Brown believed that although Srinivas’s study on Coorgs is a critical contribution to the discipline, it focused only on one caste and a comprehensive understanding of the Indian society would require a study on the interaction of multiple castes, especially in the context of the village. Thus, Srinivas conducted a village study in Rampura (pseudonym) and wrote numerous essays on the Indian village. The study also resulted in a well-known work, The Remembered Village (1976), where he discussed social and economic changes that have taken place in the Rampura.

Srinivas considered the village as the microcosm of Indian society and civilization and maintained that the village retains the traditional composition of India’s tradition. In chapter one of The Remembered Village [1] on ‘How it all began’ he describes how the choice of the village was made more on sentimental grounds (Srinivas, 1988:6). The book is a comprehensive account of the village of Rampura in south Karnataka, covering several aspects of the village life, social structure, economy, culture, religion, and social change. It also discusses his experience of fieldwork. The Remembered Village invited diverse opinions on the theoretical framework, method, and lack of hard data. Many scholars feel that Srinivas succeeded in presenting the totality of village life and captured the human element by reviewing his stay in the village and his memories of real people and events. T. N. Madan feels that though the book is about the village, it is pre-eminently about caste or more specifically about upper castes and the rural elite (Madan, 1995:46). But Srinivas pointed,

I spent ten months in Rampura in 1948 and it proved to be a great learning experience…it gave me valuable insights into the real nature of caste and its dynamics over time. I saw the local jati system as a dynamic one in contrast to the fossilized view inherent in varna . The importance of dominant landed castes became clear to me, and I saw Indian history very differently from popular views about it (Shah, 2000:632)

The concept of dominant caste in The Remembered village according to Srinivas resulted from the ‘field view’. This work increased recognition of the ‘field view’ in the studies of the Indian society. According to Srinivas, a caste may be said to be ‘dominant’ when it preponderates numerically over the other castes, has more economic and political power and ownership of land. There are four factors related to dominant caste, i.e., numerical strength, control of resources like land, possession of political power and socio-religious status. Apart from these, western education, jobs in administration and urban sources of income are also significant in contributing to the prestige and power of a particular caste group in the village. The concept of dominant caste first defined by Srinivas came to be widely used not only by anthropologists and sociologists but also by political scientists, journalists, and politicians.

Srinivas’s interest in caste led him to other emergent issues of the social situation in India like caste and politics, administration, education etc. But the publication of Homo Hierarchicus by Louis Dumont in 1970 brought back the book view and many regarded ‘field’ as only a reflection of the ‘book’. Critiquing Dumont’s ideas of caste, Srinivas maintained that the traditional caste system, characterized by interdependence between caste groups and practicing their specialized occupations, is practically not seen in modern times. Various caste groups are seen in conflict and competition.

Srinivas’s interest in caste and politics during the 1950s led him to write influential essays on themes like politics and caste, future of the caste system, Sanskritization, westernization, industrialisation etc, that were published together in 1962 as Caste in Modern India and other essays (1962). It became one of the most reprinted books. Srinivas said that sociologists would define caste as:

‘a hereditary, endogamous, usually localized group, having a traditional association with an occupation, and a particular position in the local hierarchy of castes. Relation between castes are governed, among other things, by the concepts of pollution and purity, and generally, maximum commensality occurs within the caste’ (Srinivas, 1962, 1998:3).

However, the caste is usually segmented into several sub-castes, and each sub-caste is endogamous. As a result of a long process of development, several cognate groups have come into existence, usually found scattered over a limited geographical region. Here he opined that the varna model has produced a distorted image of caste and the structural basis of Hindu society is caste. He gave the concept of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ solidarity of the Indian caste system. He observed that in a region, certain common elements of local culture are shared by all castes living in that region, i.e., they speak a common local language, observe some common festivals, and share some common deities and beliefs. He called this as ‘Vertical solidarity’. Whereas in ‘Horizontal solidarity’, members of a single caste share common rituals, beliefs, traditions etc., irrespective of their regions and languages. He also emphasised that for sociological analysis, a distinction must be made between caste at the political level and the social and ritual level. There is a wide gulf between caste as an endogamous and ritual unit and the caste-like units which are so active in politics and administration in modern India (Srinivas, 1962, 1998:6). And castes compete with each other for acquiring political and economic power and high ritual position (ibid;7). He maintained that the caste system was far from a rigid system and movement was always possible, leading to social mobility.

His other major book Social Change in Modern India discussed the macro levels of historical processes where apart from talking about Sanskritization and Westernization, Srinivas added chapters on Caste Mobility and Secularization and concluded it with some views on the study of one’s own society. Srinivas echoed that:

The ideas of Sanskritization and Westernization adumbrated in the Coorg book received further attention in my Social Change in Modern India (1966) and are now widely used in the study of South Asian culture and society. (cf. Shah,2000:631)

In Social Change in Modern India , Srinivas returned to the themes of Sanskritization, Westernization, caste mobility to see cultural and social processes and social transformations in an all-India perspective. Through the concept of Westernization, he depicts the fundamental changes that are taking place in the traditional society because of the British rule and the introduction of new technology, institutions, ideologies and values, there are visible changes that are occurring in the traditional society. The Westernization set in motion a process of Secularization that became more pronounced after Independence with the declaration of India as a secular state (D’Souza, 2001:150).

Srinivas's work has provided a solid foundation for us to discuss the problematic aspects of the Indian society. Through his significant contributions, M. N. Srinivas has contributed immensely to the body of social science repository and has left rich legacies. He constantly revised his ideas and enriched these with empirical inputs from field data. His writings on caste, village and Hinduism have influenced many branches of social sciences and extended beyond academia's confines. His concepts and ideas have gained currency in politics and journalism.

With a vast corpus of writings, Prof M N Srinivas is rightfully one of the founders of contemporary sociology and social anthropology. He exchanged views with social scientists in India and constantly endeavoured to provide an enlightened and holistic perspective. He had critical insights from the two disciplines and his writing was informed by the content of the two disciplines. He was also well informed of the socio-political and economic situation in the country and the subcontinent and thus wrote extensively on these issues.

Books and other publications by Prof M N Srinivas

Marriage and Family in Mysore , New Book Company (1942)

Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India, Oxford Clarendon Press (1952)

India’s Villages , Asia Publishing House (1955)

Ca ste in Modern India and Other Essays , Asia Publishing House (1962)

India: Social Structure (1969)

The Remembered Village , Oxford University Press (1976)

The Dominant Caste and Other Essays (1987)

Social Change in Modern India , University of California Press (1966)

Village, Caste, Gender and Method: Essays in Indian Social Anthropology (1996. 1998, 2001)

Edited Volumes

The Fieldworker and the Field: Problems and Challenges in Sociological Investigation , co-edited with A M Shah and E A Ramaswamy, Oxford University Press (1979)

Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar (1996)

Collected Essays

Collected Essays (Oxford University Press, 2002)

The Oxford India Srinivas (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Mathur, Nita. (2020). The Remembered Anthropologist: Engaging with the Insights of M N Srinivas. Journal of the Anthropological Survey of India , 69(@) 224-240.

Madan, T N. (1995). Pathways: Approaches to the Study of Society in India . New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Shah, A. M. (1996). M.N. Srinivas: The man and his work. In A. M. Shah, B. S. Baviskar, & E. A. Ramaswamy (eds.), Social structure and change, Vol. 1. Theory and method—An evaluation of the work of M.N. Srinivas . SAGE Publications.

Shah, A. M. (2000). An interview with M. N. Srinivas. Current Anthropology , 41(4), 629–636.

Shah, A. M. (2020). The legacy of M N Srinivas . Routledge.

Srinivas, M. N. (1942). Marriage and family in Mysore . New York Co.

Srinivas, M. N. (1952). Religion and society among the Coorgs of South India. Clarendon Press

Srinivas, M. N. (1956). A note on Sanskritization and Westernization. Far Eastern Quarterly , XV (4), 481–496.

Srinivas, M. N. (1962). Caste in modern India and other essays . Asia Publishing House.

Srinivas, M.N. (1973) Itineraries of an Indian Social Anthropologist. International Social Science Journal 25,1-2;129-48.

Srinivas, M. N. (1984). Some reflections on the nature of caste hierarchy. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 18(2), 161–167.

Srinivas, M. N. (1987). The dominant caste and other essays . Oxford University Press.

Srinivas, M. N. (1994). Sociology in India and its future. Sociological Bulletin , 43, 9–19.

Srinivas, M. N. (2002). Collected essays. Oxford University Press.

Victor S. D’Souza, 2001. "M. N. Srinivas: Ace Interpreter of Indian Society," Journal of Social and Economic Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, vol. 3(1), pages 144-151,

Contributed by:

Dr Gunjan Arora

Post Doc Fellow, Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health

Jawaharlal Nehru University

 Email: [email protected]

[1] Anecdotal evidence suggests that Srinivas called his book Remembered village as he wrote it with the help of recall method because the original data was destroyed in a fire. The fire at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford on 24th April 1940, had destroyed the processed fieldwork notes. (Srinivas mentions in Preface, xxvii in The Remembered Village )

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Home >> Indian Thinkers >> M. N. Srinivas

M. N. Srinivas

Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas (1916-1999) was a world-renowned Indian sociologist. He is mostly known for his work on caste and caste systems, social stratification and Sanskritisation in southern India. Srinivas' contribution to the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology and to public life in India was unique. It was his capacity to break out of the strong mould in which (the mostly North American university oriented) area studies had been shaped after the end of the Second World War on the one hand, and to experiment with the disciplinary grounding of social anthropology and sociology on the other, which marked his originality as a social scientist.

It may be important to point out that it was the conjuncture between Sanskritic scholarship and the strategic concerns of the Western bloc in the aftermath of the Second World War which had largely shaped South Asian area studies in the United States. During the colonial era, the Brahmins or Pandits were acknowledged as important interlocutors of Hindu laws and customs to the British colonial administration. The colonial assumptions about an unchanging Indian society led to the curious assemblage of Sanskrit studies with contemporary issues in most South Asian departments in the U.S. and elsewhere. It was strongly believed that an Indian sociology must lie at the conjunction of Indology and sociology.

Srinivas' scholarship was to challenge that dominant paradigm for understanding Indian society and would in the process, usher newer intellectual frameworks for understanding Hindu society. His views on the importance of caste in the electoral processes in India are well known. While some have interpreted this to attest to the enduring structural principles of social stratification of Indian society, for Srinivas these symbolized the dynamic changes that were taking place as democracy spread and electoral politics became a resource in the local world of village society.

By inclination he was not given to utopian constructions - his ideas about justice, equality and eradication of poverty were rooted in his experiences on the ground. His integrity in the face of demands that his sociology should take into account the new and radical aspirations was one of the most moving aspects of his writing. Through use of terms such as "sanskritisation", "dominant caste", "vertical (inter-caste) and horizontal (intra-caste) solidarities", Srinivas sought to capture the fluid and dynamic essence of caste as a social institution.

As part of his methodological practice, Srinivas strongly advocated ethnographic research based on fieldwork, but his concept of fieldwork was tied to the notion of locally bounded sites. Thus some of his best papers, such as the paper on dominant caste and one on a joint family dispute, were largely inspired from his direct participation (and as a participant observer) in rural life in south India. He wrote several papers on the themes of national integration, issues of gender, new technologies, etc. It is really surprising as to why he did not theorize on the methodological implications of writing on these issues which go beyond the village and its institutions. His methodology and findings have been used and emulated by successive researchers who have studied caste in India.

Important Books by M.N Srinivas

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M. N. Srinivas

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…with locally grounded knowledge was M.N. Srinivas. He had studied with Ghurye in Bombay before seeking admission in 1945 for the D.Phil. in social anthropology at Oxford. At Oxford Srinivas first studied with A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and then completed his doctorate under the supervision of Edward Evans-Pritchard. Srinivas adapted the structural-functionalism…

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Revisiting the Legacy of M N Srinivas

A new sociological imagination is needed to capture the totality of the social world of the village and beyond, the rapidly changing relationship between caste and class (and power), and especially of the subjective experiences and perspectives of the subalterns that did not figure adequately in M N Srinivas’s field-view.

The sociological imagination is a powerful tool in capturing and understanding social reality. M N  Srinivas made a major contribution to establish sociology in newly independent India. The Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) in Bengaluru organised an international seminar on the legacy of Srinivas to commemorate the occasion of his 100th birth anniversary. The ISEC was co-founded by V K R V Rao and Srinivas in 1972. The conference emphasised the need to move beyond his legacy and to re-imagine the sociological imagination for the 21st century and beyond.

As a pioneering architect of Indian Sociology and Anthropology, Srinivas was the founder of three prominent Sociology departments in Baroda, Delhi and Bengaluru, teacher and patron of more than a generation of sociologists and anthropologists and the creator of such widely used concepts as “Sankritisation”, “Dominant Caste” and “Vote Banks”. The conference focused on Srinivas’s favorite themes of Mobility and Change. It brought together eminent scholars from India and abroad, several of them Srinivas’s former colleagues and students.

“Re-visiting” a scholar like Srinivas, now already a legend (even a “fiction” according to the valedictorian Shiv Visvanathan), requires placing him and his legacy in today’s context, and asking critical questions about the relevance and significance of his legacy.  The conference participants, who included admirers, critics, and some in the middle, rose to the occasion, openly and vigorously discussing the “many Srinivases” and their legacies. 

Srinivas’s Sociological Imagination

As may be expected, the sociological imagination of Srinivas, his methodology and theoretical perspective, loomed large in the early discussions.  Srinivas is renowned to have effected a paradigm change in Indian Sociology in two respects. First, rejecting what he called the “book -view” of society as promoted by indologists, orientalists and others (thus anticipating the later critique of orientalism, etc) he pioneered a “field-view”, one that was to be obtained by intense field -work in local communities, most prominently in the Indian “village”.  The result was the rejection of an essentialised and static view of Indian society as a rigid and inflexible, chaturvarna system, governed by unchanging religious beliefs and laws, a view adopted even by Henry Maine and Karl Marx. 

Srinivas’s field view showed a dynamic social system  (village and caste) that is fluid, resilient and adaptive to changing social forces; his concepts such as of Sankritisation and dominant caste were central to this new understanding. He also effected a paradigm change in another respect by aiming to transcend the dichotomy of two different yet similar social sciences, Sociology and Anthropology. The former was developed by western scholars to study “their” on society, and the latter to study “Other” societies (in effect what they saw as (the now colonised) primitive, homogenous and undifferentiated societies devoid of history), Srinivas collapsed the two into one, adding his own innovations, in order to create “a sociology we want” for India.

But in effect he adapted the approach and the ethnographic method of British Social Anthropology as the most suitable for the study of Indian society. To be fair, it must be added that he did not reject historical and macro-studies, but insisted that micro studies generated by intense fieldwork using the method of participant observation should be the starting point for the latter kind of inquiry if it was to avoid the pitfalls of the book-view and the use of what he termed “conjectural history”.

Gopal Guru brought a novel perspective to the discussion by arguing that Srinivas’s sociological imagination was rooted in a “root text” of the social and political thought of modern India, especially in those of Ambedkar (a statement, especially the latter part left largely unexplained). To this, Sujata Patel responded by arguing that Srinivas could never free himself from the legacy of colonial ethnography, and asserted that such a legacy “should be completely erased” from the sociological imagination of India. 

While Patel’s view may represent an interesting standpoint, some other serious   shortcomings of Srinivas’s “Field –View” were highlighted by other speakers ( Tharamangalam). First and foremost, following the line of Patel’s argument, it was explained how Srinivas’s Sociology suffered from the legacy of the structural functionalism of British Social Anthropology, a quintessentially colonial discipline that constrained Srinivas  to look for and see the Indian village (and caste) as a system of reciprocity, cooperation, interdependence and harmony (even mutual empathy and friendship). Even as this super-star fieldworker did not fail to note and document instances of violence deployed to enforce compliance of caste rules, of sheer exploitation and meanness, such violence and force did not become part of his analysis; he does not see a structure of violence, neither physical, nor what Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence” in the way the upper castes owned the definition of the situation and its rules and enforces these on the subalterns. 

There is no theory of economic and political power, though these figure prominently in such concepts as Sankritisation and Dominant Caste, concepts used to explain mobility, resilience and adaptation “within the system”, especially in its middle ranges. The limitation of his perspective was compounded by Srinivas’s “top-down” view, necessitated by his location in the village as guest and neighbor of the “headman” of the dominant caste, with limited and somewhat controlled access to the social world of the Dalits, physically separated by a highway. While Srinivas admitted this shortcoming in many of his writings, the fact remains that his field -view from the top may have failed to capture the social world of the Dalits and their subjectivity “with sensitivity, empathy, and from the perspective of the people”, the stated aim of the field -view. We neither hear their voices nor learn how they view the caste system and the material and ideological forces that support the system.

Caste and Village Today

Many presentations drew on recent and ongoing empirical studies exploring economic and political changes, and how these have impacted the structure of caste and the village. This important question, initiated and pioneered by Srinivas himself, was extensively dealt with by several speakers, mostly based on their own ethnographic work. On the economic front, a general finding that has been well established by researchers, and confirmed at the conference, is the increasing concentration of poverty and multiple deprivations at the bottom, especially among Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes SCs and STs. The reasons are complex, landlessness combined with jobless growth, decline of jajmani relations in favour of a growing free market for labour, increasing availability of migrant and footloose labour and so on.

Behind this has been a model of development that neglected agriculture (except in the Green belt during the Green Revolution period), neglected primary education and health care, and from the perspective of the theme of the seminar, entrenched caste-based exclusion. What may be surprising is that the gap has increased even in educational achievements and educated and skill-based employment due to such factors as unequal access to elite and professional education (exacerbated by increasing privatisation with the advent of neoliberalism) , and, of course caste-based discrimination at all levels, in particular in the most important private sector (K P Kannan, S Madheswaran). Nevertheless, some new economic forces may be bringing about radical changes in the caste structure, even decline of some dominant castes following decline of their economic status (V Anil Kumar).

A somewhat different picture emerges when examining the impact of democratic politics, especially at the village level. In rural Karnataka where the decentralised and democratic planning exercise by the  Panchayati Raj Institutions   has been relatively more advanced, there is increasing contestation and Dalit assertion, leading also to realignment of caste forces, even fragmentation within castes. There is increasing access to benefits from such rights-based programmes as the MGNREGA despite low awareness of their entitlements (Kripa Ananthpur, R Siva Prasad).

Dalit assertion and the refusal to accept caste rules have led to increasing violence (“atrocities against Dalits” and the law against it). However, as James Manor argued drawing on years of research across Karnataka, the dominant castes have been showing increasing willingness to negotiate to prevent such violence, not because of any change of heart on their part, but because of a “change of mind”, of rational calculation to minimise opportunity costs. Even as the incidents of violence has increased, those of “accommodation” and ‘stalemate” has outnumber such incidents of violence. 

John Moolakkattu and Jos Chathukulam examined the interface between caste and class and argued that Srinivas had finally moved away from his sankritisation days and came to appreciate the importance of a class approach (property relations)  to  social change, particularly in the urban areas.  Sobin George highlighted the dilemma sociologists face when multiple Dalit perspectives (many narratives) emerge from the micro level (one village)  and argued that it is the situation in which a person encounters caste that gives meaning to caste relations. Valerian Rodrigues felt that the vaunted Human Development Index (HDI) is inapplicable for groups like the Dalits since it fails to factor in self-respect and dignity, which are so crucial in the emancipation of such groups. G K Karanth warned that sociology and social anthropology are increasingly becoming dependent on secondary data, the web, rather than Srinivas’s field-view.

D. Rajasekhar described the caste-wise and region-wise differences in awareness on and access to social security benefits in Karnataka. Sujit Kumar chronicled how neoliberal industrial strategies like outsourcing in the coal sector have impacted on the livelihood of workers in places like Dhanbad. Janaki Abraham argued in the context of the Sree Narayana Guru movement in Kerala that what is often described as imitation or mimicry of upper caste practices is actually a kind of political appropriation. Tanweer Fazal examined the Pasmanda movement within the Muslim community in Bihar and Maharashtra in a comparative perspective to demonstrate the connections between caste, religion and class in that movement. Marchang Reimeingam, drawing on the experience of Manipur, talked about how the means of livelihood of STs in Northeast India have changed from subsistence-based agriculture to a diversified modern market oriented economy. There was also an off-theme presentation of a technical nature on the role of road infrastructure and air pollution in the recent suburbanisation of India's cities by Matthew J. Holian and Kala Sridhar.

A new sociological imagination is needed to capture the totality of the social world of the village and beyond, the rapidly changing relationship between caste and class (and power), and especially of the subjective experiences and perspectives of the subalterns that did not figure adequately in Srinivas’s field- view. Srinivas’s former students and colleagues (including the first author of this paper) are almost unanimous in asserting that their Guru par excellence would have been only too happy to see his legacy being revised and taken forward to engage with a rapidly changing India.

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M. N. Srinivas is acclaimed as a doyen of modern sociology and social anthropology in India. In this book, A. M. Shah, a distinguished Indian sociologist and a close associate of Srinivas’s, reflects on his legacy as a scholar, teacher, and institution builder.

The book is a collection of Shah’s five chapters on and an interview with Srinivas, with a comprehensive introduction. He narrates Srinivas’s life and work in different phases; discusses his theoretical ideas, especially functionalism, compared with Max Weber’s ideas; deliberates on his concept of Sanskritisation and its contemporary relevance; and reflects on his role in the history of sociology and social anthropology in India. In the interview, Srinivas responds to a large number of questions from the style of writing to the dynamics of politics. It shows that while his scholarship was firmly rooted in India, it was sensitive to global ideas and institutions.

This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers in sociology, social anthropology, history, and political science. The general reader interested in these subjects will also find it useful.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter | 7  pages, introduction, chapter 1 | 18  pages, m. n. srinivas, chapter 2 | 13  pages, m. n. srinivas in baroda*, chapter 3 | 6  pages, m. n. srinivas, max weber, and functionalism*, chapter 4 | 10  pages, sanskritisation revisited*, chapter 5 | 14  pages, an interview with m. n. srinivas*, chapter 6 | 9  pages, in memory of m. n. srinivas*.

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The Legacy of M. N. Srinivas His Contribution to Sociology and Social Anthropology in India

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M. N. Srinivas is acclaimed as a doyen of modern sociology and social anthropology in India. In this book, A. M. Shah, a distinguished Indian sociologist and a close associate of Srinivas’s, reflects on his legacy as a scholar, teacher, and institution builder. The book is a collection of Shah’s five chapters on and an interview with Srinivas, with a comprehensive introduction. He narrates Srinivas’s life and work in different phases; discusses his theoretical ideas, especially functionalism, compared with Max Weber’s ideas; deliberates on his concept of Sanskritisation and its contemporary relevance; and reflects on his role in the history of sociology and social anthropology in India. In the interview, Srinivas responds to a large number of questions from the style of writing to the dynamics of politics. It shows that while his scholarship was firmly rooted in India, it was sensitive to global ideas and institutions. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers in sociology, social anthropology, history, and political science. The general reader interested in these subjects will also find it useful.

Table of Contents

A. M. Shah is former Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, and National Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi, India. Felicitated with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian Sociological Society in 2009, he has also been the recipient of the Swami Pranavananda Award from the University Grants Commission and the Distinguished Service Award from the University of Delhi. He has held fellowships at the University of Chicago; the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, Stanford; the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, UK; and the University of New England, Australia. He has authored and edited many books, including The Household Dimension of the Family in India (1973); Division and Hierarchy (authored with I. P. Desai (1988); The Family in India: Critical Essays (1998); Exploring India’s Rural Past (2002); The Writings of A. M. Shah: The Household and Family in India (an omnibus, 2014); and　 Sociology and History (2017); The Structure of Indian Society (2012, 2019). He has contributed extensively to academic journals and symposia, including ten articles in Gujarati. He has been honoured with a festschrift,　 Understanding Indian Society: Past and Present (2010), edited by B. S. Baviskar and Tulsi Patel.

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M. N. Srinivas Is Dead at 83; Studied India's Caste System

By Barry Bearak

• Dec. 3, 1999

M. N. Srinivas, a sociologist who steered Indian scholarship away from the stolid notions of classical texts and into the real world of field work in villages and factories, died on Tuesday in Bangalore.

He was 83, and, until his last days, was writing and lecturing about the caste system.

''He moved sociology from the so-called 'book view' toward the 'field view,' '' one of Mr. Srinivas's students, A. M. Shah, said. ''Earlier generations explained society from descriptions in the ancient texts. M. N. Srinivas encouraged his students to look at society in the raw, to get out into the villages, hospitals and trade unions.''

In the South Indian style, Mr. Srinivas used initials rather than a first name. The ''M'' stood for Mysore, his birthplace, and the ''N'' for Narasimhachar, his father's name.

Born into a traditional Brahmin family in Mysore, then the capital of a princely state, Mr. Srinivas wandered from the stately houses on College Road and lingered in a nearby area known as Bandikeri, home to people from the weaver and shepherd castes. Their entire culture ''was visibly and olfactorily different from that of College Road,'' Mr. Srinivas wrote late. ''Bandikeri was my Trobriand Islands, my Nuerland, my Navajo country.''

He did some of his best work in a village a few miles from Mysore, Rampura. After earning Ph.D.'s from both the University of Bombay and Oxford, he lived among the villagers in 1948 and again in 1952. He overcame the handicap of being an educated, urban, prosperous Brahmin. He blended in.

''I began to view the village and its environs more like a native than an outsider,'' Mr. Srinivas wrote. ''Not only did I get used to smells, dirt, dust, winds, noise, the insects and vermin and the lack of privacy, I learned to distinguish good land from bad and the various properties of the plants and trees commonly found in the area.''

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M.N. Srinivas Professorship in the Anthropology of India

The Study of India and South Asia at Oxford

The study of India and South Asia  is undergoing a renaissance in the University of Oxford. The endowment of the M.N. Srinivas Associate Professorship in the Anthropology of India will ensure that it has the prominence it deserves, and that anthropological approaches contribute to new cohorts of Oxford students being trained both in the MSc/MPhil in Contemporary South Asia (which has a strong focus on India), and in Anthropology generally. To ensure that future generations of students receive the best possible grounding on India, it is essential to include the anthropological view, to provide bottom-up, field-based perspectives on the rapidly changing cultures and societies of the region.

M.N. (Mysore Narasimhachar) Srinivas (1916-99)

M.N. Srinivas

From 1949 to 2008, Oxford had a University Lecturer specializing in the anthropology of South Asia, within the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (or Institute of Social Anthropology as it once was). The first holder of the post was the great Indian anthropologist MN Srinivas, who came to Oxford as a doctoral student, was strongly influenced by his two supervisors Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard, and began lecturing in the Institute in 1949. He returned home in 1951 to launch the modern form of the discipline of social anthropology in independent India, setting up departments and research institutes in Baroda, Bangalore, and Delhi.

M.N. Srinivas’s pupils are to be found in all leading departments of sociology and social anthropology of India. He contributed some of the key sociological concepts (Sanskritization, the dominant caste) for the understanding of modern India, and his insistence on the ‘field view’ as necessary to complement the ‘book view’ of India inspired numerous field studies and the convergence of sociology and social anthropology in the country. After M.N. Srinivas, the Oxford lecturership was held by possibly the most important and influential European anthropologist of India of the twentieth century, Louis Dumont, author of the classic analysis of the caste system,  Homo Hierarchicus .

Current inhabitants of Rampur (David Gellner)

Following Dumont’s return to France, the lecturership was held in turn by David Pocock (1956-66), Ravi Jain (1966–74); Nick Allen (1976–2001), and David Gellner (2002–08). Following David Gellner’s election to the Professorship of Social Anthropology, the lecturership was not refilled, and is unlikely to be so, given current economic constraints. We therefore began a campaign to endow a post in the Anthropology of India, in MN Srinivas's name, so that it is guaranteed that the position will continue in perpetuity. The Government of Karnataka, through the Karnataka State Higher Education Council, recognized the importance of this initiative and has generously contributed the sum of one Crore rupees (approximately £108,000) to start the campaign off. David Gellner gave a lecture on MN Srinivas and his links to Oxford at the Bangalore International Centre on 10 December 2019.

The Headman's house (David Gellner)

We hope you will consider joining the University in the exciting and important endeavour of endowing this Associate Professorship, so that new generations of students can continue Srinivas’s legacy of the anthropological study of India at Oxford.

There is a webpage for  Anthropology fundraising  by card or direct debit on the University website. You should receive an instant email acknowledging your gift.

Any questions about the fundraising itself can be directed to  Rachel Kirwan  in the University's Development Office.

Two inhabitants of Rampur peruse the pages of Srinivas' famous book 'The Remembered Village' (David Gellner)

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M.N. Srinivas

2018, The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Mysore Narsimhachar Srinivas is by common consent the foremost social anthropologist of India in the period following independence in 1947. For nearly four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s, he exerted a strong influence on Indian social anthropology , helping it to acquire a distinctive disciplinary identity, a specific conceptual and methodological orientation, and an intellectual-institutional presence in the Indian as well as the global academy. From a world anthropologies perspective, M. N. Srinivas is an important member of that crucial cohort of non-Western anthropologists trained in the West who returned to academic careers in their countries at the time of decolo-nization. This cohort has a special place in the history of world anthropologies because its professional identity was shaped by the tension between the popular perception of anthropology as a colonial-imperial discipline and the high nationalism characteristic of the newly independent ex-colonies of Asia and Africa. After an undergraduate degree in social philosophy at Mysore University, Srinivas went to Bombay University to study with Govind Sadashiv Ghurye, then considered the doyen of Indian sociology. During his years as Ghurye's student and research assistant (1936-44), Srinivas published a master's thesis as well as a two-volume doctoral thesis on the Coorgs of Karnataka. Faced with no immediate job prospects, Srinivas elected to go abroad for further study and arrived at Oxford to study with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in 1945. As he frequently noted, his time at Oxford under Radcliffe-Brown and then E. E. Evans-Pritchard transformed him. A committed, if also somewhat skeptical, convert to the structural functionalism propounded by his gurus at Oxford, Srinivas developed a lifelong belief in the value of intensive fieldwork as the ideal method for social anthropology. Though he was offered a teaching position at Oxford and taught there briefly, Srinivas decided to return to India in 1951 to take up a professorship at the University of Baroda. His relocation to the newborn republic of India led Srinivas to insist on the unity of sociology and social anthropology. Since anthropology was viewed with hostility and suspicion as a tool of colonialism, it was expedient for the discipline to acquire a more neutral name like sociology. Moreover, the conventional division of labor between the two disciplines, with one studying advanced Western societies and the other "primi-tive" non-Western societies, was breaking down even in Western centers of learning. In practice, however, the "unity" of the two disciplines meant that social anthropology replaced sociology in all but name. A much more consequential issue was the urgent need to develop a disciplinary agenda that would resonate with the nationalist sensibilities of a newly independent The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

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Almost two decades into the twenty-first century, in a somewhat uncertain phase in the history especially of anthropology but also of the social sciences in general, "anthropology in India" needs to be reassessed in its current global context. Much more is now known about the history of the discipline in other non-Western and ex-colonial contexts, not to speak of the West itself. Having gone through an extended period of turbulence in the last quarter of the twentieth century, anthropology is still assimilating the cumulative impact of numerous powerful interventions telegraphed through book titles and labels such as Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, Orientalism, Writing Cultures, colonial discourse, postcoloniality, multiple modernities, the politics of location, and, most recently, the world anthropologies project. Needless to add that "India," the stage on which anthropology has been (and is being) enacted, has also been changing rapidly and comprehensively. Given so much change, it is necessary to begin by reexamining the older reasons why anthropology in India seemed so distinctive. This disciplinary history needs to be framed within a broader history of ideas that is itself embedded in the story of the subcontinent's successive encounters with colonialism, nationalism, the developmental state, the neoliberal market, and globalization. However, issues of content and scope need to be settled before proceeding further. This entry offers an overview of a field that would be called social anthropology in contexts outside India (and especially in the West). In India, much of social anthropology is practiced under the disciplinary label of sociology, and influential voices in the academy beginning with M. N. Srinivas have insisted on the indivisibility of the two. The main argument offered in defense of this stance is that the conventional division between these disciplines based on the distinction between "primitive" and "advanced" societies is no longer tenable even in the West (where it originated) and has never made sense in non-Western contexts such as India. However (as acknowledged by Srinivas himself), in the mid-twentieth century, educated Indians disliked anthropology because they saw it as a condescending colonialist discipline eager to portray "natives" as backward, and so it was also expedient to rename anthropology as "sociology." In terms of institutional practice, the two disciplines lead parallel lives without much explicit interaction. Of the "four fields" of traditional (Boasian) anthropology, the Indian discipline today focuses on variants of physical and cultural anthropology, with archaeology and especially linguistics having become separate disciplines. Historically, physical anthropology has been a strong subdiscipline in India, particularly anthropometry.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Satish Deshpande

Almost two decades into the twenty-first century, in a somewhat uncertain phase in the history especially of anthropology but also of the social sciences in general , "anthropology in India" needs to be reassessed in its current global context. Much more is now known about the history of the discipline in other non-Western and ex-colonial contexts, not to speak of the West itself. Having gone through an extended period of turbulence in the last quarter of the twentieth century, anthropology is still assimilating the cumulative impact of numerous powerful interventions telegraphed through book titles and labels such as Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, Orientalism, Writing Cultures, colonial discourse, post-coloniality, multiple modernities, the politics of location, and, most recently, the world anthropologies project. Needless to add that "India," the stage on which anthropology has been (and is being) enacted, has also been changing rapidly and comprehensively. Given so much change, it is necessary to begin by reexamining the older reasons why anthropology in India seemed so distinctive. This disciplinary history needs to be framed within a broader history of ideas that is itself embedded in the story of the subcontinent's successive encounters with colonialism, nationalism, the developmental state, the neoliberal market, and globalization. However, issues of content and scope need to be settled before proceeding further. This entry offers an overview of a field that would be called social anthropology in contexts outside India (and especially in the West). In India, much of social anthropology is practiced under the disciplinary label of sociology, and influential voices in the academy beginning with M. N. Srinivas have insisted on the indivisibility of the two. The main argument offered in defense of this stance is that the conventional division between these disciplines based on the distinction between "primitive" and "advanced" societies is no longer tenable even in the West (where it originated) and has never made sense in non-Western contexts such as India. However (as acknowledged by Srinivas himself), in the mid-twentieth century, educated Indians disliked anthropology because they saw it as a condescending colonialist discipline eager to portray "natives" as backward, and so it was also expedient to rename anthropology as "sociology." In terms of institutional practice, the two disciplines lead parallel lives without much explicit interaction. Of the "four fields" of traditional (Boasian) anthropology, the Indian discipline today focuses on variants of physical and cultural anthropology, with archaeology and especially linguistics having become separate disciplines. Historically , physical anthropology has been a strong subdiscipline in India, particularly The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

Patricia Uberoi, Nandini Sundar and Satish Deshpande (eds.), Anthropology in the East: Founders of Indian Sociology and Social Anthropology, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2007.

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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There is need of a rigorous and comprehensive history of Indian sociology-anthropology, constituted as a full-fledged research area, to study the material, ideological and institutional context in which these disciplines developed. A report on a national workshop on the issue.

A survey of the changing aspects of different disciplines-belonging to different faculties-informs us of the impact that anthropological methods, perspectives, theories, and the conclusions of their cross-cultural studies have exercised on them, which indirectly confirms the analytical strength, explanatory power, and methodological sophistication of anthropology. Notwithstanding this, the growth of anthropology in India has been both uneven and slow, a consequence of which has been the 'interiorisation' of anthropologists, or which T.H. Ericksen has termed 'inward-gazing'. Contemporary anthropologists have become aware of what they have been passing through, and are striving their best to recover the past glory of their discipline when they were active participants in public debates. One of the points that this article puts forth is that anthropologists are 'dispassionate observ-ers' as well as 'citizens'. In the first role, they are committed to understanding the social and cultural processes; in the second, like any other conscientious citizen, they expect all societies and states to be just, civil, and inclusive. In the dialectics of these roles, the state of contemporary anthropology can be properly located.

The author shows the how the British influence on Indian social anthropology and sociology played its role and how Indian anthropologists aspired for positions at British Universities. The theme of Anthropology's colonial encounter as worked out in Talal Asad's book has been followed in this paper.

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• Dr. G. S. Ghurye (1893-1983)
• Dr. Iravati Karve (1905-1970)

Basic Concepts in Sociology

• Introduction of Society
• Definition of Society
• Characteristics of Society
• Introduction of Community
• Definition of Community
• Elements of Community
• Introduction of Social Group
• Definition of Social Group
• Characteristics of Social Group
• Types of Social Group
• Concept of Social Status
• Types of Social Status
• Concept of Social Role
• Social Role Related Concept
• Concept of Social Norms
• Types of Social Norms

Social Institutions

• Concept of Social Institutions
• Characteristics of Social Institutions
• Concept of Family
• Functions of Family
• Forms of Family
• Twenty-first Century Families
• Concept of Marriage
• Forms of Marriage
• Family, Marriage and Kinship
• Economy and Work
• Concept of Education
• Types of Education
• Importance of Education
• Education and Social Division
• Concept of Culture
• Types of Culture
• Classification of Culture
• Components of Culture
• Characteristics of Culture
• Importance of Culture
• Concept of Ethnocentrism
• Hybridization of Culture

Socialization

• Introduction of Socialization
• Concept of Socialization
• Re-socialization
• The Process of Socialization
• Agencies of Socialization
• Social Stratification
• Characteristics of Social Stratification
• Types of Social Stratification
• Caste and the Caste System
• Characteristics of Caste
• Concept of Class
• Characteristics of Class
• Concept of Gender
• Concept of Social Mobility
• Types of Social Mobility

Social Change

• Concept of Social Change
• Nature of Social Change
• Characteristics of Social Change
• Factors Responsible for Social Change

Dr. M. N. Srinivas

M.N Srinivas full name Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas. He was born in 1916 in Mysore and passed away in 1999 in Bangalore. He was one of the best Indian sociologists. He was a Brahmin. His studies are prominent in the area of caste and its other classifications, Sanskritization, and many other topics that revolve around caste itself.

Srinivas’s perspective was different from another sociologist as he did not want to rely on a western textbook to study his own country people. So, therefore, he himself participated and started with observation and fieldwork. Somewhere in 1940-42, He did vast fieldwork on Coorgs. He further talks about the unity and interaction among different castes present in Coorgs. Caste he covered was Brahmins, Kaniyas, Bannas, and Panikas. He also discusses in villages we can see many independent castes.

We would discuss briefly on a few topics which were of great importance to Srinivas:

• Social changes are occurring from the evolution of society but when we talk about Indian society there are certain social changes that have gained much popularity. Concepts like Sanskritization, Westernization, and Secularization, etc are an example of social changes.
• Sanskritization is the process in Hinduism in which the low caste Hindu person or group tries to acquire values, ideologies, and rituals of higher caste Hindu. Westernization in India when the culture of the West is gaining more importance than the culture of India. Indian people borrowing the culture of the West is said to be the process of Westernization.
• Secularization in India is a process in which all the religions existing in India will be treated as equal and neutral. These are some of the social changes which Srinivas emphasized.
• View on Religion, caste and its impact : He emphasized on many topics related to religion and village. How religion plays an important role to formulate Indian society. Religion, therefore, carries a caste system which again produces subdivision of these castes. He later discusses how these castes affect different caste groups differently. Each caste carries its position in society and treated on the basis of those ranks. He further talks about how these caste differences bring out more differences among people differences like occupational differences, a hierarchy in society, the system of pure and impure, caste panchayats, and assemblies.
• Dominant caste: according to Srinivas any caste that has three main powers of numerical strength, political power, and economic power is said to be a dominant caste.

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Short biography of mysore narasimhachar srinivas.

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Professor Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas was one of the founders of modem sociology and social anthropology in India. He was born in 1916 in the city of Mysore and passed away in 1999 in Bangalore. Prof. Srinivas studied anthropology and sociology in B.A. course at Mysore.

He moved to Bombay for his M.A. and found G.S. Ghurye as a teacher who integrated sociology and social anthropology under the rubric of sociology. Srinivas also secured a L.L.B. degree at this time. But, after this he went to Oxford for Ph.D. degree. In Oxford he got an opportunity to work closely with eminent social anthropologists namely A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and E.E. Evanspritchard. He was appointed there as a lecturer in Indian sociology.

In 1951 Srinivas felt homesick and returned from Oxford to join Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He became the first Professor and Head of the Department of Its newly opened department of sociology. Prof. Srinivas devised new syllabi not only for B A and M.A. course but he also chalked a new guideline for Ph.D. work. He made two faculty appointments—I.R Desai was chosen from sociology stream and Y.V.S. Nath from the anthropology stream. In 1959 he moved to Delhi and founded the department of sociology in Delhi University In this respect he got the cooperation of V.K.R.V. Rao, the then vice-chancellor of Delhi University.

There also Srinivas gave four faculty appointments including equal number of persons from each discipline of sociology and anthropology. Andre Beteille and Gouranga Chattopadhya were taken from anthropology while M.S.A. Rao and Savitri Sahani came from sociology. M.N. Srinivas wanted an integration of social anthropology and sociology rather than their mere juxtaposition. He patterned his staff-structure accordingly.

M.N. Srinivas spent twelve years in Delhi University and during this period the academic standard of this University rose so high that it attracted a large number of students from all over India, even from other countries. The focal attention of Srinivas was on Ph.D. students; he established a strong fieldwork tradition through them.

The University Grants Commission in 1968 bestowed the crowning glory of this department through its recognition as a centre of Advanced Study. This yielded generous grants for scholarships, fellowships, faculty positions, secretarial staff, and visiting professorship Is well as a separate building for this department.

When V.K.R.V. Rao established the Institute for social and economic change in Bangalore (1972), Srinivas was invited to take the post of its Joint Director A brilliant role was performed by Srinivas to make this Institute an outstanding centre for sociological and social anthropological learning in South India.

He was also selected as a visiting professor in National Institute of Advanced Studies, which was set up within the campus of the famous Indian Institute of science at Bangalore. This position was held until death. In all places and positions he carried forward the tradition of integrating sociology and social anthropology to fulfill the idealism of his teacher G.S. Ghurye.

Prof M.N. Srinivas was greatly influenced by the views of eminent sociologists and social anthropologists namely Durkheim, Max Weber, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans Pritchard, Raymond firth Talcott Persons, Merton, Bottomore and others. At the time of course formulation for B.A. and M.A. in Sociology at Baroda as well as in Delhi, he included some important basic books of anthropology.

Further, in every course he prescribed texts dealing with wide varieties of society and culture, both traditional and modern. Srinivas believed in close contact between student and teacher. He became a pivotal figure in the emergence of Indian anthropology.

The researches and enquiries of Prof Srinivas were concentrated mainly on the traditional subject’s viz. religion, caste and village. He also took interest in the new subjects like industry, urban community, hospital etc He preferred participation observation as important method of fieldwork. His idea about fieldwork has been reflected in the book entitled “The field-worker and the field’ (1979) which he wrote with A.M. Shah and E.A. Ramaswamy.

Prof Srinivas not only established and strengthened several academic institutions; he was an active member of several institutions like the University Grants Commission, Indian Council of Social Science Research, Economic and Political weekly as well as many Committees and Commissions of Government. Although he was very selective in accepting a membership but once it was accepted, he used to work very hard with heart. He blended seriousness with witticism.

Prof Srinivas forwarded the concepts of Sanskritization (1962) and Westernization (1966) to account for the social change in India. Although these concepts do not affect the social structure but the concepts are very important to analyze the superficial change processes particularly in the latter half of nineteenth century and first half of twentieth century.

Srinivas owned many honours through prizes, medals, awards, fellowships etc. for his outstanding work at regional, national and international levels’ Some of the important books are as follows: “Religion and Society among the Coorgs”(1952), “India’s Village”(1955), “Caste in Modern India”(1962), “Social change in Modern India”(1966), “The Remembered Village”(1976) is a reflexive and affectionate return to his original fieldwork. In the later years the work and thought of his writing was changed. He wrote the “Itineraries of an Indian Social Anthropologist” (1973), “My Baroda Days”(1981). “Sociology in Delhi”(1995) and “Reminiscences of a Bangalorian”(1995).

Three of these later writings have been reprinted in his book ‘Indian Society through Personal Writings’ (1996). In the last few years he had been writing his autobiography. Indian Sociology and Social Anthropology, both are indebted to M.N. Srinivas for his critical and diligent work.

Related Articles:

• Short Biography of Govind Sadashiv Ghurye
• Mysore Narsimhacharya Srinivas : Biography and Contribution to Indian Sociology

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Remembered village

A visit to kodagahalli, made famous as rampura by the social anthropologist m.n. srinivas in his book the remembered village, shows how caste relations have mutated in the 60-odd years since his stay in the village. a tribute to his legacy on the occasion of his birth centenary year..

Published : Nov 09, 2016 12:30 IST

Paddy fields in Kodagahalli. Srinivas notes how agriculture was the main activity in the village then.

THE death of M.N. Srinivas on November 30, 1999 marked a profound moment in the field of social sciences in India—an intellectual giant had passed. In an obituary, Andre Beteille, a distinguished sociologist who knew Srinivas well, wrote: “The passing of M.N. Srinivas marks the end of an era in the life of the social sciences in India. He dominated sociology in the country more than any other single person among his contemporaries or his predecessors, and it is difficult to think of anyone who can fill the place vacated by him” ( Economic & Political Weekly , January 2000). During his long career, Srinivas wrote a number of books and essays on a wide variety of themes, but, in this extensive corpus, it was clear that The Remembered Village , his monograph based on his intensive study of a single village, meant a lot to him.

In 1948, Srinivas, then in his early thirties, landed in Kodagahalli, a few days after the death of Mahatma Gandhi, to start his fieldwork. He writes: “After what appeared to me a long period of waiting, I moved into the village with Nachcha, my cook, and twenty-six pieces of luggage.” Srinivas was not new to fieldwork then. He had already published his first work, Marriage and Family in Mysore (1942), which was based on his PhD dissertation at the University of Bombay. He had also done extensive fieldwork in Coorg by this time, which would lead to the publication of the landmark Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India (1952). This book popularised his concept of “Sanskritisation”.

There was nothing in Kodagahalli to distinguish it from the thousands of villages in the subcontinent, but it fulfilled Srinivas’ requirements as it was a relatively large multi-caste village (it had 19 Hindu caste groups and one Muslim group with a population of 1,523) which was not “progressive” or “modern” and seemed ideally suited to an intense study. It was located around 30 kilometres from the city of Mysuru (formerly Mysore). Srinivas’ natal village was also not far away and his fluency in Kannada was another factor that influenced his choice of this village for his study. He would live in Kodagahalli for 11 months, collecting material for his academic study and going back for shorter durations over the next few years.

Rising from the ashes Srinivas intended to write the much-postponed monograph of the village in 1970 while he was at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University, but the project was almost stillborn as he lost his edited notes in a fire set by student arsonists protesting against the United States’ war in Vietnam. Srinivas writes about this incident: “The arsonists had adopted a simple but effective technique, leaving Molotov cocktails in the glass-walled telephone booths outside the studies, and, as ill-luck would have it, there was a telephone booth just outside mine. In about two hours or less my study was burnt down.”

While he was in the throes of the deep depression that overwhelmed him after this incident, Srinivas was urged by the American anthropologist Sol Tax to write the book from memory. Srinivas did that in a phenomenal mental exercise, a fact that explains the book’s title The Remembered Village . Published in the 60th year of Srinivas’ life (1976), it went on to become a classic and endure as one of the most fascinating social anthropological studies of an Indian village. By this time, Srinivas had won the reputation as a leading institution-builder as well. He had already established sociology departments at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and the Delhi School of Economics (DSE), apart from founding the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bengaluru along with V.K.R.V. Rao.

Prof. A.M. Shah, 85, former head of the Department of Sociology at the DSE, and Srinivas’ first student in India after he came back from the University of Oxford, described The Remembered Village as a “…mature work. It can be considered to be the novel that a writer writes after accomplishing himself as a short story writer.” The short stories in this case were the many academic papers that Srinivas had written about the village in the intervening period between his fieldwork and the publication of The Remembered Village .

Readers will find it interesting to note that the actual name of the village that Srinivas immortalised in his book is not Rampura, but Kodagahalli. Srinivas describes the geographical location of the village with tremendous precision but chose to use a generic name for the village. This subterfuge continues through the book as he uses pseudonyms to describe the various characters that populate the village. The strongest character in the book, the headman, who serves as the locus for the elaborate universe of the village, remains unnamed throughout.

According to Shah, it was a common practice for anthropologists to use pseudonyms considering the staggering amount of personal information that they collect during the course of their study. The risk of defamation cases from individuals was also a real possibility. Srinivas’ account is candid and he freely discusses the personal lives of his characters and customs, including the relative ease with which some of them were carrying on extramarital affairs and consuming cannabis. “What is important in anthropology is not that particular person but the ‘type’ of individual,” said Shah.

An ethnographic portrait The book, an ethnographic portrait of a village, does not have a bibliography or the theoretical discussions that mark academic work and is accessible to a layperson interested in the multifarious world of an Indian village. An epigraph by Marcel Mauss, a well-known French sociologist, sets the tone for the writing that is to follow: “The anthropologist has ‘to be also a novelist able to evoke the life of a whole society’.”

The book is divided into 11 chapters. Perhaps the best chapter is the one on the “Three Important Men” of the village: the authoritative headman, his mate Nadu Gowda, and the unambitious Kulle Gowda. The manner in which Srinivas constructs these three characters would be the envy of an accomplished storyteller. In later chapters, he discusses the universe of agriculture, gender relations, caste, religion and factions in the village, social relations and the impact of modernity, and preliminary linkages with urban towns like Mysuru. His close study of Kodagahalli provided him with the intellectual resources to make inferences that stood him in good stead in the remainder of his academic career.

As an observer with a camera, Srinivas wrote about the village from his perspective and many of his observations remain germane to research even today. He writes with great warmth and humility. The writing is marked by a lack of indignation and polemical flourish. For a student of social anthropology as well as a discerning journalist, the takeaways are many.

Writing style Part of the popularity of The Remembered Village comes from its writing style, which has been compared to that of a novel, a journal as well as a lyric. Sample this description of one of the characters: “Chenna had a big hooked nose, pointed chin, and his mouth was in a recess between the two. He had several teeth missing and as he laughed, he looked like a Walt Disney cartoon.” Srinivas’ descriptions of the villagers and their lives are a major draw of the book. Lakshmi Srinivas, daughter of Srinivas and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, commented on his writing: “My father’s writing style was his own and he wrote short stories when he was younger which were published in newspapers. He also loved literature and appreciated good and clear and unpretentious writing.”

It is hard to say now whether Srinivas’ great friendship with R.K. Narayan had any influence on his writing style. G.K. Karanth, Srinivas’ student and former professor of sociology at the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) in Bengaluru, seems to think so. He said: “There was a strong intellectual bond between Srinivas and Narayan which went back a long time…. One could see a reflection of Malgudi in The Remembered Village which was Srinivas’ Rampura.”

Some social scientists have called out The Remembered Village for not presenting a coherent and consistent argument but nonetheless find it redeeming itself as an academic work. A review in Modern Asian Studies (1980), for instance, says: “ The Remembered Village has many fascinating details… but its lack of apparent point (and the lack of intellectual energy in its composition) is disappointing to the point of irritation.”

When Srinivas died in 1999, the village that he had studied so closely and from where some of his ideas about caste, especially the notion of the “dominant caste”, seem to have originated, was unaware of his passing. Conversations with Srinivas’ acquaintances give one a sense that while he maintained his ties with the village for some time, these weakened over the years and after the publication of his work, he consciously tried to dissuade people from visiting Rampura. “After the popularity of the book, people were curious about the village. Srinivas was aware that people’s lives could get affected because of this. It would be like reading Hamlet and wanting to go to Helsinger,” said Karanth.

Rampura now Dr B.R. Vijayendra of the southern regional centre of the Anthropological Survey of India (ASI) in Mysuru says that he tracked down the village in 2004 by following the clues provided by Srinivas in his book. “We followed the description given by Srinivas in the book faithfully to reach Kodagahalli,” said Vijayendra. He has been doing an anthropological survey of the village over the past few years along with two of his colleagues, B.V. Raviprasad and Kanchan Mukhopadhyay. There has also been an effort at studying the changes in the village by a team from the North Eastern Hill University (NEHU), which camped in the village for a month in 2007.

The current headman of the village, K.J. Chikkajavarappa, 78, remembers Srinivas’ stay in the village. “I was a young boy of around 10 years old then and hung around Srinivas. After his first visit in 1948, he used to come casually and often,” he said. Chikkajavarappa and his family currently live opposite the house where his father (the headman during Srinivas’ time, who died in 1974) stayed. The family has maintained the original house, diagonally opposite the “bullock house” where Srinivas stayed during his sojourn in the village. It is now slightly run down but still stands.

Chikkajavarappa was able to immediately identify the characters that Srinivas writes about when their quirks were mentioned to him. So, Karim, the faithful Muslim servant who worked as a conduit between the Vokkaliga and the Dalit parts of the village, was actually Qasim. The headman’s great friend, called Nadu Gowda in the book, was actually Putteswamy Gowda. The faithful assistant of Srinivas, whom he called Kulle Gowda, was Subbe Gowda in reality. The unnamed headman of Srinivas’ Rampura was Patel Javare Gowda, who remained at the helm of the village affairs until his death in 1974.

Kodagahalli remains a large village even now. It has a population of 2,851 according to the 2011 Census, with a sex ratio that favours females. The dominant caste is Vokkaliga. Many of the castes that were present in 1948 are still there. Srinivas writes that there were three Brahmin families in the village. The number has come down to one now—the family of the Brahmin priest looking after the Ram temple in the village. It is interesting to note that Dalits in the village are still referred to as Harijans, a term that Srinivas uses as well, but which has fallen into disuse across the country because of its patronising connotations.

Caste in Rampura How does caste operate in the village? Caste continues to have a strong presence in the village. It is most starkly evident in the spatial segregation of households and in the access to places of worship. The segregation that Srinivas observed in 1948 continues in the village, with Dalit houses being divided from the Vokkaliga and other caste members’ houses by the main street that passes through the village. There are a few Muslim households between the Vokkaliga and the Dalit households buffering this divide.

The headman, a Vokkaliga, is not chosen through an election process but has some authority over village affairs. A resident of the village who did not want to be named said that some women were conscious of not taking food from the houses of the “lower” castes, but he was quick to add that compared with the neighbouring villages, Kodagahalli was far more “progressive” as far as caste relations were concerned.

There are two prominent temples in the village: the Basava temple and the Madeshwara temple. The small population of Lingayats in the village has traditionally been responsible for looking after these temples. The façade of the Basava temple remains unchanged from the time Srinivas visited it in 1948. The Dalits in the village patronise two temples, the Saalamma and the Maarigudi temples, where the deities and the rituals are different. In the ritual hierarchy of the village, three divisions can be discerned: the Brahmin and the Lingayats; other castes, including the dominant caste of the Vokkaligas; and the Dalits.

The headman gave an example of how he treated people of different castes: “The Brahmin priest is a soft man. I invite him home and give him milk in a silver tumbler. I can’t do that with the sweepers [Dalits], who are usually drunk when they come to visit me, can I? Otherwise, who will respect my authority and how can I resolve issues?” The headman’s authority stems from his traditional status and the wealth that has accrued to the family, both from agriculture and from their wise investments in Mysuru and Bengaluru. The headman’s family is truly globalised now, with some members living abroad as well. The rhythm of village life, which mainly revolves around agriculture, has changed significantly since Srinivas’ time, with strong linkages to cities.

Vijayendra’s 2004 study of the village, while still incomplete, provides several clues as to how caste relations have changed significantly over the years. Vestiges of the jajmani relationship (a system where the lower castes performed various functions for the upper castes and received grain in return) continues to be present in the village and while caste members are not linked to their traditional occupations (for example, the kurubas are no longer involved in sheep rearing but are agriculturists), caste identity still retains a strong hold on the people’s imagination. This mutation of caste is something that Srinivas had also discussed in his last paper, provocatively titled “An Obituary on Caste as a System”, which was published after his death.

In Kodagahalli, there is an easy hospitality that has come with the awareness of Srinivas’ work. The headman owns a copy of the Kannada translation of The Remembered Village and welcomes curious readers with enthusiasm. “The headman’s family continues the tradition of hospitality that Srinivas described in his book,” said M.N. Panini, nephew of Srinivas and a former Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who lives in Mysuru. On being asked whether he gets disturbed by people who come asking about Srinivas, Chikkajavarappa exclaimed, “Why would we get disturbed? Srinivas has made our village famous. People all over the world know Rampura now!” At some point during the conversation, Chikkajavarappa had unconsciously begun to refer to his village as Rampura—as Srinivas always had in his work.

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