INTRODUCTION

The journal article describes the making of one of the great social anthropologist, M. N.
Srinivas and it explains his great works, it mostly says about his book The Remembered Village.
Mysore Narasimachar Srinivas (1916-1999) was a globally well-known Indian sociologist. His
work on caste and caste systems, social stratification and Sanskritisation in southern India makes
him famous worldwide. His contribution to the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology
and to public life in India was unique. He was born in a Brahmin family in Mysore. Srinivas who
was himself belonged to a Brahminic background, emerged as a breath of fresh air in the over
Brahminised world of Indian scholarship. The author, Sujata Patel focuses mainly on his work of
The Remembered Village. The choice of the scholar and the book is very deliberate for the author
as she says M. N. Srinivas’s contribution to the making of sociology in India and which has
become institutionalized as ‘Indian Sociology’.

The caste system in India has long been the subject of scholarly interest, but there was a
distinct lack of ethonographic material on it as noted by Radcliffe-Brown. Inspired by this and
other works such as that of Robert Redfield and Fei Hsiao-Tung, he set out to India to carry out
fieldwork as part of the position he was offered by his teacher, Evans-Pritchard and ended up
choosing Rampura due to his fluency in Kannada and several emotional factors, including his
ties to Mysore and being awed by the local view. 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. So according to the author, Sujata Patel the making of Srinivas as a sociologist an
important aspect to sociology.
 M. N. SRINIVAS AND HIS VILLAGE
In Srinivas’s opinion, the system of Indian Sociology of being propagated from American
sociology would be ‘a national intellectual disaster of the first magnitude.’ 1 G. S. Ghurye, his
mentor in earlier days on one hand inaugurated his position in continuity with already established
traditions and on other hand by D. P. Mukherjee and Radhakamal Mukherjee, and all three of
them were concerned with the building the foundations of sociology and anthropology from
distinguishing Indian material. In 1952 Srinivas declared that he saw his role as constructing a
type of sociology that ‘we want’. Which meant that he longed to use Indian experience to
construct sociological principles and he also wanted to set the norms how to understand, evaluate
and grasp this experience and thus sociological principles. In Srinivas’s opinion the
ethnographical examination has to be started in a bounded concrete space which is a complex
entity of our society. And what was the society it was a ‘village’. And so he became the pioneer
of village studies in India. Srinivas started organizing the publication of a number of
ethnographic papers on villages in India, and then only he published a book called India’s
Villages (1955). Then he published his famous articles on Sanskritisation and Westernization in
1956 and in 1957 he published on Caste in Modern India. His works like Caste in modern India
and other essays (1962) and Social change in modern India (1966) were great sources for the
sociology students in Delhi University and other university.

Srinivas was not only delivering to the academic audience but he believed that sociology
is a matter of the society. He thought that sociologists ought to create a language for the public to
make them aware about the changes taking place in the society. The taking place in the
Nehruvian period had part of its representations in Srinivas’s views on caste in modern India, his
ideas on contemporary India, and his concept of dominant caste. In his terms his sociology can
be termed as indigenous sociology, it defined the sociology we want and as well as what we need
also.

His book The Remembered Village represents the best of Indian ethnography. Srinivas
involves himself in the study as if he is the one belonging to the section of peasant dominated

1
M.N. Srinivas, Religion and Society among the the Coorgs of South India (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 36.
village in Karnataka. The book is result of the study on the villagers who are the native of the
village named as Rampura in the state of Karnataka, then called as Mysore. This book is known
for its concern on the aesthetic, flowing prose and the important role of the ethnographer himself.
The background of the book is about the caste system, that has been the interest of the scholars,
but a distinct ethnographic material was needed for this study as noted by Radcliff-Brown. 2 The
Remembered Village is as much a disquisition of Srinivas’s perception of village life in India, the
kind of traditional social structure specially the system of caste in India, and the changing
measures of this structure in the contemporary phase as it is a work of what sociology in India is
all about in the first three decades after gaining independence. In this specific paper the author
tries to use Srinivas’s ideas to understand what was the universe he was representing, to
understand the theoretical and epistemological establishment that he was using and hoe they
were related to the ideas and ideologies of the Nehruvian period.

In the first volume of A Survey of Research in sociology and social Anthropology M. S.

A. Rao suggests to Srinivas that ‘one must attribute the responsibility of initiating the new line of
structural functional analysis in sociological and social anthropological research in India…’. The
critics who have written on Srinivas have suggested that the structural functional point of view
played a important role in determining Srinivas’s work. But according to the author the structural
functional paradigm fitted into the ideological canvas of Srinivas’s world view. It is no skill of
working that led him from Ghurye to Redcliffe Brown, from Bombay to Oxford and from
historically oriented indological studies to social anthropological ethnography. The author says
that it is always difficult to know that what came first for a social scientist, the ideology or the
theoretical paradigm.

As the author analyses Srinivas's life history she sees that Srinivas had a fairly average
upbringing, education was of a prior importance in his family. There it may be implied that he
had developed a liberal approach to traditional ways of life as presented by the Brahminic rituals.
He was not inclined to the political events of his life and he did not have any controversy around
him except for the case that he had a conflict with his mentor of earlier days G. S. Ghurye. His
stay in Bombay did not include him in any type of politics, the only negative and unpleasant
aspect while staying there was his conflict with Ghurye. The book The Remembered Village,

2
Srinivas, M.N, (1978), The remembered village (2nd ed.), New Delhi: Oxford University Press. P. 2.
provides the study in two aspects first of the village Rampura, which represents the creation of
social life in India steeped in traditions and the the second aspect says about Srinivas, the
sociologist himself. In the book Srinivas refers himself as a beginner who is in search of the
village India in the village of Rampura. And he is suprised by the pattern of behaviour which he
experienced there. And the fact that he didn't do more ethnographic work on the 'harijan'
households does not ponder him.

The chapter in the book that introduces the reader to Rampura and to Srinivas's experience
of doing fieldwork there remains the most compelling. Over the next few months he collects
genealogical data, conducts a census, and drinks copious amount of tea. He gets excited for
gathering fieldwork data and sets bi weekly targets for himself. He plays the clown, inverting
ideas about caste status and occupation by pretending to run a shopkeeper's shop. He tries to
form relationships with the natives across all the castes, not entirely successfully, and instead of
it also he is gradually absorbed to the fold of the village's high caste community. They treated
him like an educated Tamil Brahmin and as he grows close to them he repeatedly castigates
himself failing to build ties to the communities of Dalits and Muslims who also live in the
village. The remaining of the book is written like a classic anthropological monograph, with
studies on politics, economy and religion. 3 The book often feels like a personal report of his stay,
with a lot of episodes of his interactions with villagers in plenty. He mentions a time when he
challenges the religious ideologies of his good friend, Nadu Gowda. When asked about his
religious beliefs, he says he has none, simply to see his friend’s reaction as he is a staunch
believer in the almighty. Another instance is when he talks about the irritation felt by Kalle
Gowda when Srinivas refused to work and went on long walks. The book is sprinkled with
innumerable such memories and it is all these personal accounts that make the book an
enthusiastic read. It can be seen that Srinivas became one with the villagers, after sleeping, eating
and defecating like them.4

3
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/09/05/book-review-the-remembered-village-srinivas/ (Sep 8,
2017, 10:55 AM)
4
Badani,C. (2012,Aug 9) Book Review: ‘The Remembered Village’ by M.N. Srinivas. Retrieved from
http://betweenthelines.in/2012/08/book-review-the-remembered-village-by-m-n-srinivas/
 SRINIVAS’S IDEOLOGY
In a comment on the influence of Evans Pritchard's emphasis on the 'heuristic value of ideas'
on his theoretical position he states that ' In the context of functionalism it meant that the
institutions of a society were related to each other, that changes in one set of institutions led to
changes in other sets, and finally, that each set of institutions had a contribution to make to the
whole. This idea lead to better field work and analysis as it made the anthropologist mote
sensitive to connections between different areas of social life'. 5 Srinivas concludes that caste
system cannot be equated with the Varna system in his first major book, as Indian society is not
divided into four or five groups which are organized hierarchically. His sociology states Varna
system caste being completely replaced by jati. So, in Indian sociology caste is jati only not
varna. The conclusive evidence from The Remembered Village depicts the interconnections of
the villagers to the outside world. He conveyed that how the villagers had a network for being
interlinked to the world and he himself became a part of this network when a native asked him to
buy a motorcycle from Delhi. It was of no surprise that his enthnography made Rampura static,
he had his own view. A. C. Mayer in his commentary wonders that we are reading about the
village of 1948 or we are reading its Srinivasian imagination.6

CONCLUSION
5
M. N. Srinivas, The Remembered Village (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 3.
6
A. C. Mayer, ‘The rembered village: from memory alone’, Contributions to indian sociology, Vol. 12, no. 1 (1978),
pp. 39-48
 We saw how the author of the journal article describes the works of Srinivas specially
The remembered village with the help of the criticisms and commentaries of famous social
philanthropists. But despite of those criticisms today we still agree to use ethnography which was
Srinivas’s contention. We need to rethink radically on how to use ethnography. The enterprise of
ethnography should alert us to wonder details which connect relationships between cultural
products, social behavior and processes as they have been articulated in the received,
reconstructed and rising hierarchies in the global world. Hence according to the author to this
extent only Srinivasian theme still has a relevance.