THE LEGACY OF M. N.

SRINIVAS

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.

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 (coauthored 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.
 THE LEGACY OF
M. N. SRINIVAS
His Contribution to Sociology and Social
Anthropology in India

A. M. Shah
 First published 2020
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 CONTENTS

Preface vi

Introduction 1

1 M. N. Srinivas: the man and his work 8

2 M. N. Srinivas in Baroda 26

3 M. N. Srinivas, Max Weber, and functionalism 39

4 Sanskritisation revisited 45

5 An interview with M. N. Srinivas 55

6 In memory of M. N. Srinivas 69

Appendix: an outline of M. N. Srinivas’s biography 78

References 80
Author Index 85
Subject Index 87

v
 PREFACE

In this book I have presented five articles on and one interview with M. N.
Srinivas published over the years 1996–2000. The original publication details
of every article and the interview are provided at its beginning in an unnum-
bered footnote. The references of all the articles, the interview, and the
introduction are put together at the end of the book. Otherwise the articles
and the interview are reprinted as they were in the original, except for minor
editorial changes.
I am grateful to Lancy Lobo, Pravin J. Patel, Tulsi Patel, and N. R. Sheth
for their comments on the draft of the introduction.
I thank Amba Gamit and her colleagues at the Centre for Culture and
Development, Vadodara, for help in preparing the manuscript.
It has been a pleasure working with Shoma Choudhury and Brinda Sen
at Routledge.
A. M. Shah
Vadodara, 22 June 2019

vi
 INTRODUCTION

M. N. Srinivas (1916–1999) is acclaimed in India as well as in other parts

of the world as a sociologist and social anthropologist who contributed
immensely to development of sociology and social anthropology in India
through his research, teaching, and institution building. This book is a col-
lection of my five papers on and an interview with him, published over the
years 1996–2000. I have narrated in them mainly my understanding of his
legacy as a scholar, teacher, and institution builder.
After his brilliant academic achievements as a student and a teacher in
Oxford University, Srinivas joined the Maharaja Sayajirao University of
Baroda as the professor and head of its new Department of Sociology on
15 June 1951. I had the unique opportunity of knowing him on the day he
arrived in Baroda (now Vadodara) from Oxford till almost the day he passed
away in 1999. I was first his student in the University of Baroda and then his
colleague there as well as later in the University of Delhi.
In the five-volume festschrift for Srinivas, edited by me, B. S. Baviskar,
and E. A. Ramaswamy, Vol. I is devoted to Theory and Method – An Evalu-
ation of the Work of M.N. Srinivas (1996). I wrote for it an essay on the
academic biography of Srinivas. That essay is included as Chapter 1 in the
present book. This chapter is followed by an essay in Chapter 2 on Srini-
vas’s work as the professor and head of the Department of Sociology in
the University of Baroda, 1951–1958. There is no separate chapter on his
work as the first professor and head of the Department of Sociology in the
University of Delhi, 1959–1972, but it is covered in parts of Chapters 1, 5,
and 6. Chapter 3 deals with “Srinivas, Max Weber and Functionalism” and
Chapter 4 with Srinivas’s concept of Sanskritisation. Chapter 5 is the record
of my interview with him in August–November 1998, that is, a year before
he passed away. It provides his thoughts on a wide range of issues. Chapter 6
was written soon after his death as my tribute to his memory as scholar,
teacher, and institution builder.
Srinivas was born on 16 November 1916 in the city of Mysore, then
capital of the princely state of Mysore in South India. Chapter 1 begins with
a brief narration of his early life in the family and the school.1 He passed

1
 INTRODUCTION

the Secondary School Leaving Examination in 1931 and the Intermediate

Examination in 1933. He then joined the Maharaja’s College in Mysore as
a student for B.A. (honours) in social philosophy, which included the study
of sociology and social anthropology amongst several other subjects. Subse-
quently, for studying for an M.A. in sociology he went to the highly reputed
Department of Sociology at the University of Bombay (now Mumbai), led
by the eminent sociologist of the time, Professor G. S. Ghurye (see ‘Bombay
Phase’, in Chapter 1). Most of the students in the M.A. programme there
studied the subject through lectures in the classroom, followed by an exami-
nation. However, Ghurye allowed Srinivas to write a dissertation due to his
creditable performance in sociology and social anthropology at the B.A.
level. His dissertation was so good that it was published as a book, Marriage
and Family in Mysore (1942), which received appreciative reviews.
When Srinivas began to work for his doctorate under the supervision
of Ghurye in 1940, he was thus already a mature scholar. He completed
his dissertation in 1944, an unusually long one – two volumes with nearly
900 pages – based on ethnographic material he collected amongst the Coorgs
of the former small principality of Coorg, now in Karnataka state, in South
India. It was highly commended by the two examiners: one, Raymond Firth,
an eminent social anthropologist at the London School of Economics, and
the other, Ghurye.2
Srinivas went to Oxford in 1945 to work for a second doctorate. (See
‘Oxford Phase’ in Chapter 1.) There his work was supervised by renowned
social anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. He found Srinivas’s already
available ethnographic material on the Coorgs so good that he exempted
him from doing another fieldwork and allowed him to write his disserta-
tion by analysing the same material, using new theoretical ideas of structure
and function. Srinivas received the doctorate in 1947 and published the dis-
sertation as a book, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India
(1952a).
Although the Coorg book is widely recognised as a classic in the study of
Indian society and culture, its foundation in the theory of structure and func-
tion is not fully appreciated or sometimes even fully understood (for detailed
discussion of this issue, see Chapters 2, 3, and 5). This theory had become
common in Oxford in particular and in British social anthropology in gen-
eral. It became common after critical examination of the evolutionist and
diffusionist anthropology that had prevailed during the 19th century. The
structural-functionalists found this kind of anthropology to be conjectural
and pseudo history and, therefore, rejected it, while they welcomed genuine,
documented history. They also found that the evolutionists and diffusion-
ists viewed different parts of a society in isolation from one another (see
Evans-Pritchard 1951). The method of intensive fieldwork or participant
observation that went hand in hand with the functionalist theory helped
the anthropologist to view different parts of a society in their interrelations.

2
 INTRODUCTION

Evolutionist and diffusionist anthropology had influenced the study of

Indian society and culture by sociologists, anthropologists, as well as histo-
rians during the 19th and first half of the 20th century (for a review of this
literature, see my paper 1959). Srinivas’s Bombay University doctoral thesis
was written under the influence of evolutionist and diffusionist anthropol-
ogy. Application of new ideas of structure and function, however, made his
Coorg book a classic. It represented critical change from the old theoretical
foundation to a new one.
Srinivas did of course include the theory of structure and function in
teaching sociology at Baroda and Delhi universities, and his students did
the same when they became teachers in these and other universities. The
critics of functionalism, however, argued that it supported a static view of
society rather than social change. This was, however, a mistake. In Oxford
itself, Radcliffe-Brown’s view of social anthropology as a natural science of
society was giving way to Evans-Pritchard’s view that anthropology was a
historical discipline, and Srinivas was influenced by this theoretical shift.
For him, functionalism did not prevent study of social change. I have nar-
rated in ‘Baroda Phase’ in Chapter 1 and in Chapter 2 on ‘M. N. Srinivas
in Baroda’ how he began to write papers on social change soon after he
joined Baroda University. These papers were collected in the well-known
book Caste in Modern India and Other Essays (1962). And then came the
classic book Social Change in Modern India (1966). Subsequently, he wrote
a number of articles on social change in professional journals and symposia
and in the print media. He also encouraged his students to study change in
various sectors of society. He encouraged me to study historical archives
along with my field study. In fact, for an effective understanding of change,
an understanding of interrelations amongst different parts of a society at
some point in the past is essential. After all, the assumption of the inter-
relatedness of elements of a whole is a sine qua non of science. The idea of
function has thus a heuristic value in sociology and social anthropology. (For
an extensive discourse on the theory of structure and function, see Merton
1968, enlarged edition.)
Although Radcliffe-Brown considered Srinivas’s study of the Coorgs an
important contribution to the study of Indian society and culture, he thought
it was focussed on only one caste. A comprehensive understanding of Indian
society required a study of interaction amongst multiple castes, especially in
the context of the village. He made this point in his foreword to the Coorg
book (1952b: viii–ix). Hence, when Srinivas was appointed as lecturer in
Indian Sociology at Oxford University in 1947, he decided to devote the
first year of his appointment to an intensive study of a village in India.
Thus began the study of village Rampura (pseudonym) and publication of a
number of pioneering essays on the Indian village (see the collection of his
essays, 2002, 2009) and finally the magnum opus, The Remembered Village
(1976). His vigorous advocacy of village studies as critical for developing

3
 INTRODUCTION

Indian sociology and social anthropology led many to identify him as the
village studies man.
Although Srinivas was not required to do fieldwork for his Oxford doc-
torate, he observed during his stay in Oxford that British social anthropol-
ogy had advanced largely due to the practise of intensive fieldwork methods.
For similar advancement of Indian sociology also, he thought, even while in
Oxford, that it would be necessary to turn its path away from the dominant
textual studies to field studies. Therefore, not only did he himself carry out
an intensive field study of Rampura, but also when he joined the Maharaja
Sayajirao University of Baroda to establish a new Department of Sociology
there, he placed all his students on the path of fieldwork. He did the same
when he shifted to the University of Delhi. Although he himself continued
to work on the village, he believed that the fieldwork method could be used
to study any aspect of society, rural or urban. He asked his students to do
field studies of, for example, a small town, a caste, a factory, a trade union,
a cooperative society, a hospital, a school, a college, and national elections.
He firmly believed that the fieldwork method was essential to know the
ground realities of society as well as for training of young sociologists. He
often contrasted the field view with the book view and sometimes joked that
he had a worm’s eye view rather than a bird’s eye view. He reflected and
asked his students to reflect on field experiences; this led to publication of
the well-known symposium The Fieldworker and the Field (Srinivas, Shah
and Ramaswamy 1979). The totality of Srinivas’s own writings and of his
students based on fieldwork helped build up sociology as a robust empirical
social science in India.
Srinivas brought about a more realistic view of religion in India through
his Coorg book and many later writings. He achieved this by integrating
the study of religious behaviour with that of religious beliefs. For a long
time, Hinduism was known almost entirely through the Indologists’ work
on sacred texts, and early sociology was also deeply influenced by Indology.
The Coorg book showed the primacy of understanding ritual behaviour.
Radcliffe-Brown spelled out the general approach in this regard in his Fore-
word to the Coorg book.

In any system of ritual each ritual action has its meaning, and the
totality of such meanings constitutes the idiom of that system. Just
as different societies have different languages, so also they have their
systems of ritual idiom, and it is the task of the social anthropologist
to investigate a system of ritual idiom in the same way that he stud-
ies a language. To understand the way a people talk it is necessary
to know the idiom of their language; to understand a religion it is
necessary to have some understanding of the ritual idiom in which
they express their religious sentiments.
(1952b: vi)

4
 INTRODUCTION

Srinivas presented his analysis of the meaning of Coorg ritual in the Coorg
book (1952a) in two chapters (III and IV) on “The Ritual Idiom of Coorgs”.
This analysis then became the building block of his concepts of Sanskritic
and Non-Sanskritic Hinduism: the former considered as textual, scriptural,
and all-India Hinduism and the latter as folk, local, and popular Hindu-
ism. The process by which Sanskritic Hinduism spreads and changes non-
Sanskritic behaviour is called Sanskritisation.
The concept of Sanskritisation is widely known – it has found place in
the Oxford English Dictionary (1971). After enunciating it originally in the
Coorg book (1952a), Srinivas went on refining it from time to time (for nar-
ration of the chequered career of the concept, see Chapter 4 in this book).
Initially he considered it to be a process of emulation of the culture of the
upper castes by lower castes for upward mobility in caste hierarchy. How-
ever, soon afterwards he provided a wider view: “Sanskritization . . . means
also the spread of certain values which are not directly connected with the
caste system” (1956b: 93). “Sanskritization is a profound and many-sided
cultural process, only a part of which has structural relevance” (1967). In
other words, its link with the caste order is only a part of the whole. Upper
castes are not the only agents of Sanskritisation. It is spread by a plethora
of sects, god-men and god-women, temples, religious books and periodicals,
and the print and electronic media.
A clear understanding of Sanskritisation requires familiarity with the
changing culture of the lower castes and the Adivasi tribes, which is his-
torically largely non-Sanskritic. Sanskritisation has been spreading gradu-
ally amongst all of them over centuries. One can understand this spread by
observing closely, over time, interpersonal relations in the neighbourhood, in
the network of kinship and affinity, and even within the family. It is worth
reflecting that the success of the present Hindutva movement is largely due
to the increasing level of Sanskritisation in the population throughout India,
although the two should not be considered identical. Srinivas always main-
tained that Sanskritisation is not proselytisation. Hinduism by tradition is
not a proselytising religion, whereas Hindutva forces are proselytising. It
is also necessary to avoid mistaking Sanskritisation as Brahminisation, as
Srinivas clarified repeatedly. The agents of Sanskritisation are far too many
than mere Brahmins.
Amongst the scholars of caste in his generation, Srinivas was the fore-
most. He studied its ritual as well as secular aspects. The latter led him to
formulate the concept of ‘dominant caste’ (1959a), which has helped deepen
understanding of the political dynamics of the country. It is widely used not
only by sociologists and anthropologists but also by political scientists and
historians and in public discourse by the media.
Srinivas identified patron–client relationships as a crucial element in vil-
lage life. They cut across the boundaries of caste and religion. A village
leader owes his position to his cultivation of a large number of clients by

5
 INTRODUCTION

distributing favours of various kinds from time to time. He uses them as

and when required to play his role in village politics. In an early paper, “The
Social System of a Mysore Village” (1955d), Srinivas explains the kind of
role a patron plays during elections. He says, “Each patron may be said
to have a ‘vote bank’ which he can place at the disposal of a provincial
or national party”. This term coined by Srinivas spread widely, not only
amongst social scientists but also amongst journalists and politicians, and is
now part of popular language, even in Indian languages without translation.
It is indeed remarkable how a term used by an anthropologist for analysing
a field situation in a small village has acquired such country-wide usage.
In his fieldwork in Rampura, Srinivas devoted a great deal of attention
to observing disputes and their settlement – an interest he derived from his
friend Max Gluckman’s work at the University of Manchester on the judicial
process in tribes in Africa (1955). He spent almost the whole of the year of
his Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester in 1954 analysing his
data and writing papers on disputes. He published several of these papers
(1952b, 1954b, 1959b, 1959c; reprinted in 2002 and 2009), but several
remained unpublished. He wished to write a book on customary law in India
on the basis of these papers, but that remained an unfinished agenda. We
may note here that when he was studying for his M.A. in sociology in Bom-
bay, he studied for his Ll.B. alongside at the Government Law College there.
I have narrated in Chapters 1 and 2, and Srinivas himself has narrated in
a paper (1981) how he developed a new Department of Sociology at the
Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda on his return from Oxford in 1951.
In eight years of his hard work, it became a leading department. Although,
regretfully, it declined over time, I have indicated how it contributed richly to
the discipline in terms of research projects, doctoral and graduate students,
and publication of books and papers.
Srinivas joined the University of Delhi in 1959 to develop a new Depart-
ment of Sociology there. I have narrated briefly in ‘Delhi Phase’, in Chapter 1,
and Srinivas has narrated in a long paper (1995a) about how it developed
into a world-class department. In about eight years of time its distinction
was recognised by the University Grants Commission of India by giving it
the status of a Centre of Advanced Study, the only such centre in sociol-
ogy in India. I recall, in 1977, when Srinivas delivered the T. H. Huxley
Memorial Lecture arranged by the Royal Anthropological Institute at the
London School of Economics, Professor David Pocock of the University of
Sussex introduced Srinivas to the distinguished audience as creator of the
best department of sociology east of Suez Canal.3
When Dr. V.K.R.V. Rao decided to establish the Institute for Social and
Economic Change in Bangalore in 1972, he persuaded Srinivas to leave
Delhi University and join him as joint director of the institute with a view to
develop an eminent centre of research in sociology there (see ‘At ISEC, Ban-
galore’ in Chapter 1). Due to a variety of reasons, Srinivas could not develop
a centre of his imagination there.
6
 INTRODUCTION

The Indian Sociological Society was founded by G. S. Ghurye in Bom-

bay in 1951 (see ‘Contribution to Professional Organisations’ in Chapter 1).
Although it claimed to be an all India association, it was perceived to have
been monopolised by what was called the ‘Bombay Group’ of sociologists.
The rival ‘Lucknow Group’ of sociologists, therefore, formed a few years
later the All-India Sociological Conference. Srinivas tried his best to be neu-
tral between the two, but because he was a student of Ghurye’s in Bom-
bay and worked in nearby Baroda, he was perceived to be a part of the
Bombay Group. It was only after he shifted to Delhi University that this
perception changed. He and his friends brought about rapprochement, and
the two associations were united under the banner of Indian Sociological
Society. Srinivas was elected as its president,4 and its office was also shifted
from Bombay to the Department of Sociology in Delhi University. Under his
leadership the society acquired a new constitution, sound management, and
financial viability. Its journal, Sociological Bulletin, earned high academic
respect worldwide. Above all, the Society became a symbol of the unity of
the discipline of sociology in the country.
Srinivas was offered many coveted public offices such as those of univer-
sity vice chancellor and secretary of the Ministry of Education. However,
he declined all of them and remained devoted to scholarship and scholarly
institutions. He left rich legacies in all these fields.

Notes
1 For an outline of Srinivas’ biography, see the appendix.
2 Firth and Ghurye, in their joint report, praised the dissertation for the quality
and quantity of its field material. Ghurye has reproduced the entire report in his
autobiography (1973: 114–115).
3 I happened to be in England at that time and attended the lecture.
4 I worked with Srinivas as the secretary of the society for the first year. For a
detailed account of the society, see my paper (2011).

7
 1
M. N. SRINIVAS
The man and his work*

I first met Professor M. N. Srinivas on 15 June 1951, when he was 35 and I

was 20 years of age. He had just joined the Maharaja Sayajirao University
of Baroda as its first professor and head of the Department of Sociology, and
I had enrolled as a student in the first year of the B.A. programme. The gap
between us was wide; however, with the passage of time it became narrow.
The association between us has been long, intimate, and many sided. I men-
tion these facts at the outset because, although I am writing a biographical
account of Srinivas and not my autobiography, the reader should not expect
a perfectly objective biography. I am, however, helped in reducing my biases
by the several autobiographical accounts provided by Srinivas, particularly,
‘Itineraries of an Indian Social Anthropologist’ (1973a), ‘My Baroda Days’
(1981), and ‘Sociology in Delhi’ (1995a). I have paraphrased portions from
these accounts.1
Srinivas was born on 16 November 1916 in a traditional Brahmin family
in the city of Mysore, then capital of the princely state of Mysore. His father
Narasimhachar was a minor official in the government. The initials M and
N in Srinivas’s name stand for Mysore and Narasimhachar, respectively.
Narasimhachar’s native place was Arakere, a village about 20 miles by
road from Mysore and about 3 miles from Rampura (real name Kodaga-
halli), which shot into prominence following Srinivas’s anthropological writ-
ings. Srinivas named his house ‘Arakere’, which he constructed in Bangalore
city in the 1970s.
Srinivas’s family environment was conducive to education. His father had
moved from Arakere to Mysore mainly with the intention of providing edu-
cation to his children. Members of his mother’s family had made a name
for themselves in the educational field. His maternal aunt was one of the
two earliest women graduates in the old princely Mysore state. The other
woman was also related to Srinivas. Srinivas was the youngest of Narasim-
hachar’s four sons. His eldest brother had completed his education by the
time Srinivas was in school. He had a postgraduate degree in English litera-
ture and was teaching in the Maharaja’s High School in Mysore. (He was
later appointed assistant professor in English in the University of Mysore.)

8
 M . N . S R I N I VA S

When Srinivas’s father passed away at an early age – Srinivas was 17 at that
time – his eldest brother became the head of the family and took decisions
about his younger brothers’ and sisters’ education.
Srinivas’s natal family owned a house on College Road (as it was then
called) in Mysore. He lived there till he was in his teens. All the houses on
this road were occupied by Brahmins hailing from different parts of South
India. Most of the people concentrated in the streets behind these houses
were Kurubas (shepherds or weavers by caste), and they had migrated per-
haps in the early years of this century from their natal villages a few miles
to the south of the city. They were villagers who had urbanised, and a good
number of them in the city retained contacts with the village.
The area inhabited by these villagers was known as Bandikeri (literally,
bullock cart street), and its culture was different from that of College Road in
several respects. Whereas the inhabitants of Bandikeri were non-vegetarian,
those of College Road were vegetarian. Those living in Bandikeri performed
manual work, whereas the residents of College Road did no manual work
as they owned land and were literate. The people in Bandikeri celebrated
their own festivals, and even when the ‘same’ festivals were celebrated, there
were differences.
Srinivas has narrated in detail how he was fascinated by the life in Ban-
dikeri and how he received many of his first culture shocks there. He writes,

As an overprotected Brahmin boy growing up on College Road, I

experienced my first culture shocks not more than fifty yards from
the back wall of our house. . . . The entire culture of Bandikeri was
visibly and olfactorily different from that of College Road. Bandik-
eri was my Trobriand Islands, my Nuerland, my Navaho country
and what have you. In retrospect, it is not surprising that I became
an anthropologist, an anthropologist all of whose fieldwork was in
his own country.
(Srinivas 1992: 141)

The Brahmins living on College Road spoke different languages and

belonged to different sects. College Road spanned nearly 700 yards; Srinivas
lived in a section that was about 120 feet in length and housed five families
of Sri Vaishnava Brahmins, popularly referred to as Iyengars, and followers
of Ramanuja, the medieval reformer of Hinduism and propounder of the
theological doctrine of qualified monism (vishishtadvaita) in contradistinc-
tion to Shankara’s advocacy of pure monism (advaita). But even amongst
them there were differences of language, affiliation to a monastery or guru,
Westernisation, and education.
Srinivas was scrawny and grossly underweight, and his relatives and friends
thought that he was too delicate to pursue a serious course of study such
as medicine or engineering. He did reasonably well at the Secondary School

9
 M . N . S R I N I VA S

Leaving Certificate Examination (1931) conducted by the University of

Mysore, and he could have opted for a two-year intermediate course in science
in a college in Bangalore like many others who had secured good marks. How-
ever, his eldest brother vetoed the idea and advised him to enrol in a course
in modern history, logic, and mathematics at Maharaja’s College in Mysore.
Srinivas passed the intermediate examination in a third division, securing
low marks, particularly in mathematics. In view of his poor performance, a
considered decision had to be taken about the course he should pursue for a
bachelor’s degree. At this juncture, as he stated,

Fate intervened in the person of Acharya, a friend of EB’s [Eldest

Brother’s], a Marxist and a rebel. EB asked Acharya what course I
should take. He flipped the pages of the university handbook and
gave his verdict: the honours course in social philosophy was a
‘broad’ humanizing one and good for me. I sent in my application
for it and was admitted without difficulty.
(Srinivas 1973a)

The course in social philosophy was an ambitious one; it included papers

in sociology, ethics, political thought, history of ethics, comparative religion,
Indian social institutions, Indian ethics, and political theory. The ‘minor’
subjects included social anthropology, social psychology, comparative pol-
itics, and Indian economics. The curriculum had been designed by A. R.
Wadia, the head of the Department of Philosophy from 1917 to 1942, who
was more interested in ethics, sociology, political thought, and social work
than in metaphysics. The inclusion of sociology, social anthropology, social
psychology, and politics in a philosophy course was an innovative step if not
a courageous one, for the climate in the country at that time was suspicious
of sociology as a discipline. Because there were only four other students
besides Srinivas in his class, the student–teacher relationship was close.
Srinivas passed the B.A. (Honours) Examination in the summer of 1936,
missing a first class by a narrow margin. He has reflected on this performance:

I was an extremely unintelligent examinee and did not know the

first thing about preparing for an exam. I thought I had to read
conscientiously everything that had been prescribed. All first-class
students in arts subjects concentrated on certain topics, if not ques-
tions, but gambling was not in my nature. But I became aware of
my shortcomings as an examinee only long after I had ceased to
take exams.
(Srinivas 1973a)

Srinivas grew up in an environment where he was encouraged to write in

English. As mentioned earlier, his eldest brother was a teacher in English, and

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 M . N . S R I N I VA S

through him Srinivas came into contact with others in the field of English
literature. The most important of them was R. K. Narayan, the celebrated
novelist. In an interesting article on Narayan, Srinivas (1994) informs that
he had also started writing and used to show his writings to Narayan. Srini-
vas, of course, did not pursue a literary career in English, but he wrote
lucid English prose, and some of his anthropological works, particularly The
Remembered Village (1976), are of high literary quality.

Bombay phase
Having passed the B.A. examination, Srinivas and his family members toyed
with the idea of his appearing for the Mysore Civil Service examination, pre-
paratory to take up a government job. However, this idea was given up, and
Srinivas decided instead to go to Bombay to enrol in the master’s course in
sociology and to work for a law degree in the evenings. The Department of
Sociology at the Bombay University was the first postgraduate department
of sociology to be set up in the country and had earned a high reputation
within a short period of time due to the distinction of its founder, Patrick
Geddes, and his successor as head of the department, G. S. Ghurye. Srinivas
went to Bombay armed with recommendation letters addressed to Ghurye
from Wadia and from his teacher in social anthropology, M. H. Krishna.
Ghurye himself had set and evaluated Srinivas’s B.A. paper on sociology and
had given him 66 per cent marks.
In those days a student could do his master’s either by taking an exami-
nation at the end of two years’ attendance at lectures or by writing a dis-
sertation. In view of Srinivas’s honours degree in sociology, Ghurye asked
him to submit a dissertation. Srinivas believed that this would give him a
better chance to prove his abilities than an examination: ‘There was no
sharp deadline for a dissertation, and I did not have to compete with thirty
other students as I would have to if I had to ‘take papers’ (Srinivas 1973a).
He completed his dissertation, ‘Marriage and Family among the Kannada
Castes in Mysore State’, drawing upon the available ethnographic litera-
ture, folklore, fiction, questionnaire, and a short period of fieldwork. The
fieldwork was undertaken mainly to seek information on customs and
rituals from informants. The dissertation was completed in 1938 and pub-
lished in 1942 under the title Marriage and Family in Mysore. It received
favourable reviews in professional journals, including an enthusiastic one
in Nature. (Ghurye has quoted a part of the review in his autobiography
(1973: 108–109).2
The Department of Sociology awarded a research fellowship to Srinivas
in June 1940 to carry out a field study of the Coorgs of South India for his
doctoral degree. Srinivas had for some time toyed with the idea of doing his
doctorate on a ‘theoretical’ subject such as the relation between the individ-
ual and society in Indian thought. But Ghurye rejected the idea, saying that

11
 M . N . S R I N I VA S

no fellowship would be available if he chose a theme that did not involve

fieldwork.
Srinivas submitted his thesis, titled ‘The Coorgs: A Socio-Ethnic Study’, in
December 1944. He is modest about his fieldwork in Coorg, “My field study
of the Coorgs could not be as deep or thorough as I wanted it to be. . . . I was
forced (due to a stomach ailment) to collect my data in short hit-and-run
trips” (Srinivas 1973a). But obviously he collected a large amount of data
that enabled him to write an unusually long thesis – two volumes, number-
ing nearly 900 pages. The quality of his work was laudable as testified by the
external referee Raymond Firth, the eminent anthropologist at the London
School of Economics, and Ghurye, the internal one, in their report on the
thesis. Ghurye says that Firth wrote the report and he added only, “I agree”:

The referees have read this thesis on the Coorgs or Kodagus with
great interest, and regard it as suitable for the award of the Ph.D.
degree. In putting forward this opinion the referees have been
impressed by several aspects of the thesis, in particular, the very able
manner in which the citation and analysis of documentary material
have been combined with the results of the candidate’s own field
research; the quantity and quality of original material collected in
the comparatively short period of about five months in the field;
and the presentation of the data in a way which draws significant
sociological and ethnological inferences from the detailed mass of
ethnographic facts set down. Moreover, though the thesis is primar-
ily a study of traditional Coorg institutions, a considerable amount
of material is given to show how these institutions are changing and
becoming adapted to modern conditions. The treatment of the the-
sis material is scientific in character and modest in tone. The work is
claimed as only a preliminary survey to form a basis for more inten-
sive studies, and the referees hope therefore that Mr. Srinivas will be
able in due course to pursue these further investigations, especially
on the economic side, and so add to the distinct contribution he has
already made to Indian sociology.
(Ghurye 1973: 114–115)

Besides the favourable comments of the referees, the quality of ethnographic

material was exceptionally high, such that Srinivas later used the same mate-
rial to write another doctoral thesis using a different theoretical approach.
When Srinivas’s research fellowship expired in June 1942, he was appointed
as a research assistant in the same department, a post he held till June 1944.
The work required him to assist Ghurye in his research, including undertak-
ing field trips to collect data. A part of the data he collected was related to
folklore in Tamil Nadu and Andhra, and he published two papers (1943,
1944) using this data.

12
 M . N . S R I N I VA S

Srinivas’s relations with Ghurye were complicated. He has mentioned that

they began to sour in1943 (see 1973a, 1983). There was one immediate cause:

Two lectureships were advertised in the department, and Ghurye

asked me to apply for one of them. He more than hinted that in view
of my publication and extensive field work experience, I stood a
very good chance. He said even more. But at the actual selection two
others were chosen. Both Wadia and Radhakrishnan were members
of the Selection Committee, and they were unhappy with the way
things had gone.
(1983)

Srinivas has also mentioned an intellectual cause for the souring of his
relations with Ghurye:

More than eight years of apprenticeship under Ghurye had left me

with a feeling of deep dissatisfaction. I had started out wanting to
be a theorist of society but had ended up by becoming a conjectural
historian and a collector of ethnographical facts without being able
to integrate them into a meaningful framework. My interest in ideas
had been starved.
(1973a)

Srinivas, however, continued to be decent and at times even cordial with

Ghurye.

Oxford phase
After completing his doctorate, Srinivas considered the idea of pursuing higher
studies abroad. He was admitted to the B.Litt. course in social anthropology
at Oxford, with provision for its later conversion to a D.Phil. with retrospec-
tive effect. For his dissertation he submitted a proposal on ‘Culture Patterns
among Three South Indian Ethnic Groups – Coorgs, Todas and Chenchus’.
With financial support from his family, he went to Oxford in May 1945.
Later he received a Carnegie research grant for two years.
Srinivas’s initial encounters with his teacher A. R. Radcliffe-Brown at
Oxford were not happy. The main reason for this was that Radcliffe-Brown
did not appreciate Srinivas’s idea of studying ‘patterns of culture’ derived
from Ruth Benedict. Instead Radcliffe-Brown advised him to examine –
rather re-examine – the relation between religion and society amongst the
Coorgs on the basis of the material he had collected earlier. Srinivas readily
accepted the suggestion.
Ghurye has reported in his autobiography (1973: 115–116) that Srinivas
was ‘very communicative’ and wrote to him nearly two dozen letters during

13
 M . N . S R I N I VA S

his stay at Oxford, some of which Ghurye had preserved. Ghurye has quoted
from two letters describing the initial period of his stay at Oxford. In one of
the letters, Srinivas wrote:

I am quite certain I can never forget what I owe to you intellectu-

ally. It is mainly due to this training which I received under you
that today I am not swept away by Radcliffe-Brown. He must have
found me a ‘tough nut to crack’ as I rejected his anti-historicism and
regarded his functionalism as only supplementary to the so-called
historical approach. My fundamental point remains the same – it is
because I know it to be correct. I also know that I have derived it
from ‘you’. . . . I am reading John Embree’s ‘Suye Mura’3 which is
in our Library. It is supposed to be one of the developments of new
anthropology. It is nothing very different from Bhagat’s and M.N.
Desai’s work.4 I am quite glad I am getting disillusioned.

Nearly a month or so later Srinivas wrote:

R-B seems to have ‘warmed up’ a bit. He read the Coorgs [the thesis
on Coorgs which had earned Srinivas the degree of Ph.D. of the
Bombay University] during the ‘long vac’. It is this which seems
to have changed his attitude. May I thank you as, but for your
goading, I wouldn’t have taken up that subject, and worked it with
sustained enthusiasm.

Although Srinivas (1973a, 1983) has stated that his relations with Ghurye
had begun to sour in 1943, these letters do not reveal any tension between
the two.
The first two years at Oxford were a period of intense intellectual activity
for Srinivas, in the course of which, as he says (1973a),

I became an enthusiastic convert to functionalism a la Radcliffe-Brown.

I had the feeling that I had at last found a theoretical framework
which was satisfactory but like all new converts I was fanatic. I sup-
pressed my natural scepticism, one of my few real assets, to accept
such dogmas as the irrelevance of history for sociological explana-
tion, the unimportance of culture, and the existence of universal laws.

Srinivas had completed the major part of his dissertation by the middle
of 1946, when Radcliffe-Brown retired. Srinivas then worked for a while
under E. E. Evans-Pritchard. He was awarded the D.Phil. degree in July
1947. Evans-Pritchard’s influence had the effect of steering Srinivas away
from Radcliffe-Brownian functionalism and towards a more balanced view
of social anthropology.

14
 M . N . S R I N I VA S

A few days before Srinivas left Oxford in July 1947, Evans-Pritchard

informed him of the possibility of a new post of lecturer in Indian sociology
being created at Oxford and whether he wanted to be considered for it. This
unexpected offer came when ‘I was homesick, and eagerly looking forward
to going home, and the prospect of returning to England in the immediate
future went against my plans’. However, at that moment ‘I was overwhelmed
to find that I was thought good enough to teach at Oxford. . . . [I]t was no
doubt a dream come true’. (1976: 3).
Following the completion of his D.Phil. thesis, Srinivas planned to do
research on an Indian village. He was aware that the village was at the cen-
tre of the constructive programme in independent India; that economists,
particularly those in Bombay, were studying villages; and that Ghurye had
also initiated studies on rural communities. It has been mentioned earlier
that in a letter to Ghurye (1973), Srinivas compared John Embree’s work on
a Japanese village under Radcliffe-Brown’s supervision with Bhagat’s and
M. N. Desai’s work on rural society in India under Ghurye’s supervision.
What was required, however, was a village study in India using the new
theoretical ideas and methods developed in social anthropology in Britain.
Such a study had emerged clearly as the most exciting and fruitful one to
undertake Indian sociology and social anthropology at the time. When,
therefore, following his appointment as lecturer at Oxford in November
1947, Srinivas was permitted to devote the first year to fieldwork, he spent
almost the whole of 1948 doing fieldwork in a village in his native Mysore
state.
Before leaving Oxford Srinivas had applied for a post in the Anthropo-
logical Survey of India. He was interviewed for the post in New Delhi in
November 1947, where he had a difficult time with B. S. Guha, the director.
Soon afterwards he received the letter of appointment at Oxford (see Srini-
vas 1976: 4).
During his second spell, spanning two and a half years, at Oxford, Srinivas
of course performed his teaching duties and prepared his thesis for publica-
tion. But more important, he was involved in intensive intellectual and social
interaction with a large number of scholars, students, and others at the time
when social anthropology at Oxford was at the pinnacle of its glory. He
formed lasting friendships with many eminent persons.
Srinivas’s second spell at Oxford was also marked by the dilemma as to
whether he should return to India or continue to stay in England. He says,

[U]nderneath my seeming contentment I was homesick for the sun

and warmth of India. And I also realized that if I did not make an
effort and pull myself out of Oxford before it was too late, I would
probably not return home. Throughout the year 1950 I was both-
ered by the nagging desire to return home.
(1973a)

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 M . N . S R I N I VA S

We learn from Ghurye’s autobiography (1973: 127–130) that Srinivas

had applied for the post of reader in the University of Bombay, where a seri-
ous dispute arose between Vice Chancellor Justice N. H. Bhagawati, who
favoured Srinivas, whereas the experts on the selection committee, namely,
Ghurye, D. P. Mukerji, and B. S. Guha, favoured K. M. Kapadia. The dispute
was referred to the chancellor, that is, the governor of Bombay, who ruled
that the opinion of the experts be accepted. This dispute was perhaps the
beginning of the rupture in Srinivas’s relationship with Ghurye.

Baroda days
Srinivas has narrated in some detail how he came to occupy the Chair of
Sociology in Baroda University (1981). Having failed to secure a job in the
Anthropological Survey of India and the University of Bombay, Srinivas
turned his attention to new universities that were being established fol-
lowing the independence of India. Baroda was one such university. His old
teacher Wadia was pro vice chancellor there.
Wadia played a crucial role in bringing Srinivas to Baroda. Following his
advice, Srinivas sent in his application. At Wadia’s suggestion, Dr. S. Rad-
hakrishnan also wrote to Vice Chancellor Hansa Mehta. (Apart from the
fact that Radhakrishnan was an eminent figure in the academic world, he
was also the chair of the committee set up by the Maharaja of Baroda to
work out the blueprint of Baroda University.) With such powerful support
Srinivas’s selection was smooth, although it is worth noting that two senior
sociologists of the time, Radhakamal Mukerjee of Lucknow and Kewal
Motwani of Annamalai, had also applied.
Wadia visited England in May 1951 and had discussions with Srinivas
about Baroda and the work he was expected to do. Srinivas left London
on 12 June, arrived at Baroda via Bombay on 15 June, and joined Baroda
University the same day, the first day of the new academic year.
Baroda University is one of the few universities in India with what is
called a unitary structure. That is to say, unlike most other universities,
it does not have affiliated colleges for undergraduate teaching. Each of
its departments offers teaching programmes from the undergraduate level
upward to the doctoral level, and the departments are grouped into faculties.
A few preexisting colleges in Baroda city affiliated with Bombay University
were merged into the new university and reorganised into departments and
faculties. Several new departments were created, sociology being one such
department.
Because the Sociology Department had been recently set up, Srinivas was
faced with the task of organising the teaching of a new subject at all levels.
However, he had an opportunity to make his own appointments, unlike in
the other departments that inherited the teaching staff from the preexisting
colleges, and he was at liberty to introduce his own teaching programme.

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 M . N . S R I N I VA S

In the initial years, Srinivas also faced a technical problem in organising

the teaching. Baroda University had decided to continue with the syllabi of
Bombay University as long as its own syllabi were not prepared. Because
Srinivas was the only teacher in sociology in June 1951, he decided to intro-
duce the teaching of only one programme and that too a minor one, namely,
the subsidiary subject of cultural anthropology, which the B.A. (honours)
students in other subjects could combine with the main subject. It had two
papers, one on social anthropology and the other on material culture. There
were only two students in the first batch, Indubhai Shelat and myself. Srini-
vas taught social anthropology. He discarded all the textbooks prescribed by
Bombay University, which in effect meant discarding the textbooks chosen
by his teacher, G. S. Ghurye. These were Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture
(1949), Goldenweiser’s Anthropology (1937), and R. H. Lowie’s Primitive
Religion (1952). Instead, he recommended Evans-Pritchard’s Social Anthro-
pology (1951), Firth’s Human Types (1950), and Radcliffe-Brown’s unpub-
lished manuscript, ‘Method in Social Anthropology’ (of which he had a
personal copy, which he edited and published in 1959). He also asked us to
review two other books: Evans-Pritchard’s Divine Kingship among the Shil-
luk (1948) and Verrier Elwin’s Indian Aboriginals (1949). His prescription
of these readings was informal. When Indubhai Shelat and I once asked him
about the formal syllabus for examination, he firmly said that we need not
worry about the Bombay University syllabus and that we would be exam-
ined on what we were taught. Such firmness was obviously rooted in the
support he enjoyed from Wadia and Hansa Mehta.
Srinivas’s method of teaching was markedly different from that of other
teachers who gave formal lectures to classes of 100 or more students. Srini-
vas adopted the method of dialogue and discussion. Because Indubhai Shelat
was less regular in attending classes, often I was the only student whom
Srinivas taught. Sometimes the class was held at his house.
A new syllabus for B.A. honours was prepared during 1951–1952 and
became operative from June 1952 onwards. Two more teachers were also
appointed by this time, Y.V.S. Nath, an M.Sc. in anthropology from Delhi
University, as Research Assistant, and I. P. Desai as Reader. The syllabus
represented perhaps the first attempt at integration of sociology and social
anthropology under the rubric of sociology at the undergraduate level in India.
A similar new syllabus for the postgraduate level followed in 1955–1956.
During the first academic year Srinivas also encouraged students to reg-
ister for the Ph.D. programme. In all four students registered: three teach-
ers from the Faculty of Social Work – P. T. Thomas, Sugata Dasgupta,
and C. Gopalan – and one from the Department of Archaeology – H. R.
Trivedi. Simultaneously, Srinivas introduced the idea of research seminars.
‘They were perhaps the first seminars to be held in the university and well
before an expensive “seminar culture” took hold of the country’ (Srinivas
1981).

17
 M . N . S R I N I VA S

Srinivas had definite views about teaching in general and about teaching
sociology in particular. He believed that a university teacher should not be
overloaded with teaching and should have enough time to do research –
the two should go hand in hand. He implemented this view in Baroda and
later in Delhi. He has narrated (1981) how he struggled to implement it in
Baroda:

When Mr. Ramanlal Vasantlal Desai, a member of a committee vis-

iting the Faculty of Arts, asked me how many periods I was teaching
per week, I told him six (or five). He replied that I ought to be teach-
ing 26 periods a week. I took him on that and told him that since I
was expected to do research as part of my duties, any such teaching
load was antagonistic to research. I added that I was determined to
go on with my research.

Srinivas had definite ideas about the kind of sociology he wanted to teach
in Baroda:

When I joined Baroda, it was usual for universities in western India

to copy blindly the Sociology syllabus of Bombay University. I did
not want to do that: for one thing, that syllabus had not been revised
for some years, and secondly, I had my own conception of Sociology
which I wanted reflected in my syllabus. I wanted students to have
a firm knowledge of Indian Social Institutions and in a comparative
context. Secondly, I found American textbooks of sociology really
ethnocentric, uncomparative, and failing to distinguish between
sociology and social work. Also, I found the separation of social
anthropology and sociology untenable, particularly in the Indian
context. Finally, I wanted students to study intensively, at least at
the Master’s level, a few classics in the subject. And all this had to be
while paying attention to the background of the students.
(Srinivas 1981)

Srinivas had decided to give emphasis to fieldwork in the research at the

department in Baroda. He went on a field trip to Rampura, a village in
Mysore, in the summer of 1952 (in continuation of the fieldwork he did
there in 1948) and took me along with him to initiate me into fieldwork.
Within two years or so of his joining Baroda University, almost everyone
in the department was doing fieldwork. Srinivas secured a grant from the
university to purchase two sets of field equipment, such as a camera, pots
and pans, plates, and a trunk, and pressured the university bureaucracy to
simplify rules for accounting of field expenses.
When Srinivas joined Baroda University, his book Religion and Society
among the Coorgs of South India was in press. It was published in 1952 and

18
 M . N . S R I N I VA S

was on all accounts a landmark in the development of modern sociology and

social anthropology in India.
Soon after Srinivas came to Baroda, the results of his fieldwork in Ram-
pura began to appear. He published an article ‘The Social Structure of a
Mysore Village’ in the Economic Weekly (1951). He also persuaded other
sociologists and anthropologists engaged in village studies in India at that
time to publish articles on their work in the same journal. These articles were
published in a book titled India’s Villages (1955a), which was an instant suc-
cess. He also published several papers on the different aspects of society in
Rampura and on the significance of village studies (1952b, 1954b, 1955c,
1955d, 1959a, 1959b, 1959c; reprinted in 2002, 2009). This established
Srinivas as a pioneer of village studies in India.
Srinivas was under the influence of structural-functional anthropology dur-
ing his initial years in Baroda. However, his focus shifted to social change. This
shift was clearly discernible in the seminar discussions as well as in the topics
he asked his research students to study. For example, he asked N. R. Sheth to
study a modern industrial factory and asked me to study historical documents.
Amongst Srinivas’s writings the first two major papers on social change were
‘A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization’ (1956a) and ‘Caste in Modern
India’ (1957). The latter was included in a book with the same title (1962).
Srinivas was the most eligible bachelor on the campus of Baroda University
and rumours were rife about his relations with eligible women, particularly a
few South Indian women. Everyone was pleasantly surprised when he decided
to marry Rukmini from Tanjore, the centre of Tamil Brahmin tradition. The
wedding took place in the South, and the newly married couple was given a
warm welcome by friends, colleagues, and students in Baroda. Rukmini (Rukka
to family members and friends) and Srinivas were blessed with their first
daughter, Lakshmi, when Srinivas was still in Baroda. I vividly remember how
Ramesh Shroff and I bade farewell to Srinivas, Rukka, and baby Lakshmi at
the Baroda railway station when they left for Delhi in December 1958 to join
the University of Delhi. Their second daughter Tulasi was born in Delhi.
As Srinivas has stated,

I had built the Department at Baroda from scratch, and it had been
recognized as a good and upcoming one by those who mattered.
The University Grants Commission (UGC) had sanctioned in 1958
funds for the expansion and development of the Department, which
included a new building, a grant for the library, a few new teaching
positions, and a few scholarships for Sociology students. Neverthe-
less, I did not see myself staying for a long time in Baroda.
(1981: 145)

I wanted to move to a metropolitan city.

(1995a: 2)

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 M . N . S R I N I VA S

Delhi phase
Dr. V.K.R.V. Rao, the vice chancellor of the University of Delhi, had been try-
ing to persuade Srinivas to join the university for some time, but Srinivas was
reluctant. However, a decisive moment came in 1958. In June when Srini-
vas was travelling from Mysore to Baroda, Dr. Rao went to the Guntakal
railway station to meet Srinivas to invite him to join the university as the
first professor and head of a new Department of Sociology. The University
of Delhi was in the process of becoming a national centre of distinguished
scholars in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. It offered a wonder-
ful opportunity to develop a new department of sociology.
Although Delhi offered new opportunities, Baroda had begun to show
signs of decline, at least according to Srinivas. A. R. Wadia, Srinivas’s mentor,
had left Baroda; a person less distinguished than Hansa Mehta had succeeded
her as vice chancellor in 1957; the city politicians had begun to play an unde-
sirable role in the decision-making bodies of the university; and despite the
fact that Srinivas and I. P. Desai were good personal friends, there were visible
strains between them in managing the affairs of the department. The grow-
ing lack of a broader vision amongst teachers in social science departments
became apparent while considering a proposal to set up a national institute
of social sciences in Baroda. Although Srinivas and a few of his close friends
were in favour of this idea, others opposed it on petty grounds.
Srinivas joined the University of Delhi in February 1959, and the new
department began to function soon thereafter. The first major task in setting
up the department was to prepare a syllabus for the master’s programme.
He gave it more or less the same general thrust that he had given to the
syllabi in Baroda: a broad comparative perspective entailing integration of
sociology and social anthropology. The themes of research for Ph.D. stu-
dents had a similar thrust: a broad spectrum varying from the traditional
themes of social anthropology such as caste, kinship, and religion to the
traditional themes of sociology, such as urban community and industrial and
other complex organisations. In dealing with these varied themes, Srinivas’s
emphasis was on the method of intensive fieldwork or participant observa-
tion. As a result there was a tilt towards anthropology in the department.
He justified this tilt in his writings and lectures around the world by firmly
asserting that it was the best strategy for developing a sound study of Indian
society and culture for many years to come.
Srinivas gave close attention to the organisation of the postgraduate
teaching programme. First, to keep the teacher–student ratio low, so essen-
tial for good teaching, he enrolled a small number of students. Second, he
emphasised a vigorous tutorial and seminar programme besides lectures.
This was possible due to the small number of students. Third, he ensured
that all teachers, irrespective of their rank, shared the teaching work, includ-
ing tutorial work, equally.

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 M . N . S R I N I VA S

When Srinivas took over as the founder head of the department, there
were only a few posts, one for professor and three for lecturers. At the end of
his tenure as the head in January 1970, there were four posts for professors,
five for readers, and four for lecturers. The number of research fellowships
for doctoral students had also increased from two to eleven, and the techni-
cal and office staff from three to nine. In addition, the department had its
own building and other infrastructural facilities.
Srinivas made ceaseless efforts to build up the department. Apart from
monitoring the teaching and other activities within the department, he also
cultivated relationships with people outside the department and influenced
and lobbied them in the interest of the department. He frequently agreed to
be a member of a committee or to attend a seminar not necessarily because
of its intrinsic worth but because it gave him an opportunity to promote
the interests of the department. Unlike other heads of academic institutions
who refused to meet ‘clerks’, even ‘glorified clerks’, and hence jeopardised
the interests of their institutions, Srinivas always agreed to meet low-ranking
bureaucrats. Of course, much of his scholarly work was sacrificed in the
process. Many of his detractors often said that Srinivas had become an
administrator!
During his twelve-year tenure as head of the department, there was always
some exciting new development or activity taking place in the department.
The high point, however, was the academic year 1967–1968, during which
several important developments took place one after another. First, the UGC
set up a Special Cell for the Development of Sociological Study of the North-
Eastern Hill Areas and the Pakistan Area Studies Programme (in collabora-
tion with the Department of Economics) in the department. Second, the
department undertook the teaching of a B.A. (Honours) programme in soci-
ology. And third and most important, the UGC recognised the department
as a Centre of Advanced Study.
A. R. Wadia played an important role in the decision regarding the Cen-
tre of Advanced Study. He was at that time a member of the UGC. He was
appointed chair of the UGC’s Visiting Committee to assess the department’s
request for status as a Centre of Advanced Study. The other members of the
committee were Srinivas’s friends, M. S. Gore and R. N. Saksena. The com-
mittee as well as other friends in the UGC helped the department in securing
both high status and funds for further development.
Having successfully established the department, Srinivas turned his atten-
tion to devoting himself entirely to scholarly work.

For many years, I had been dreaming of getting away from my

teaching and other professional activities to write an authoritative
book on the social structure of Rampura. I had done fieldwork in
Rampura in 1948 and in the summer of 1952, and I had tried hard

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to organize my field notes in the intervals of teaching and adminis-

trative duties.
(1995a)

But the final planning, thinking, and writing remained to be done. A one-
year fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
at Stanford in 1970 gave him an opportunity to do just that. ‘I was itching
to go to Stanford’, Srinivas said (1995a).
Srinivas’s stay at Stanford, however, proved to be disastrous. On 25 April
1970, all the copies of his processed notes on Rampura were burnt in the
fire started by anti-Vietnam War arsonists at the centre. However, at Pro-
fessor Sol Tax’s suggestion, Srinivas wrote the book The Remembered Vil-
lage (1976), based almost entirely on his memory of field experiences in
Rampura.
The new building for the Sociology Department was nearing completion
when Srinivas returned to Delhi from Stanford in July 1971. It was inau-
gurated on 27 September 1971 by Dr. V.K.R.V. Rao. The new building was
symbolic of Srinivas’s efforts to create an excellent department with an iden-
tity of its own.

At ISEC, Bangalore
The day the department’s new building was inaugurated, Dr. V.K.R.V. Rao
informed Srinivas that he was setting up a new institute – the Institute for
Social and Economic Change (ISEC) – in Bangalore, and he wanted Srinivas
to join it as Joint Director. Srinivas accepted the offer. When this plan was
announced, it was by all accounts considered to be a momentous event in
social sciences in India. Its importance lay not so much in Rao founding yet
another institute – he had founded the Delhi School of Economics and the
Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi – but in his success in persuading
Srinivas to migrate from Delhi to Bangalore. A number of people considered
it to be a kind of scoop, and Rao proudly stated that he had highjacked a
scholar of Srinivas’s stature from Delhi to Bangalore. (By this time Rao had
acquired the image of being a politician.) He went so far as to say that while
naming the earlier two institutes, he had given primacy to the economic
factor, and he had given primacy to the social factor in naming the new
institute, because he believed the social factor to be more important than the
economic factor in changes taking place in India. He was also implying that
Srinivas would play a vital role in the new institute.
On his part, Srinivas usually gave two reasons for moving to Bangalore.
First, he had been planning to settle down in Bangalore after his retirement
from Delhi, and this offer only hastened his departure. Second, he believed
that sociology was not well developed in South India – there was significant
truth in this belief – and that his moving to Bangalore would have an impact

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 M . N . S R I N I VA S

on the development of the discipline in the South. Although both these rea-
sons were convincing, there were all kinds of rumours about Srinivas’s real
intentions. Far more important, however, was the widely held belief that Rao
was such a difficult person that Srinivas would not be able to get along with
him. This was precisely the argument that Dr. Sarup Singh, vice chancellor of
the University of Delhi, offered – rather bluntly – to Srinivas (in my presence)
in his efforts to persuade him not to leave Delhi.
Srinivas joined the ISEC in May 1972. Initially things proceeded
smoothly. But soon Srinivas began to complain about the load of adminis-
trative work and its adverse effect on his academic work. He gave up the
joint directorship, and relations between him and V.K.R.V. Rao began to
sour after a few years. What followed was bitterness and confrontation.
Never before had anyone seen Srinivas in such a mood. Only formal resig-
nation and consequently retirement as a faculty member in January 1979
put an end to this.

Contribution to professional organisations

One of Srinivas’s lasting contributions to the profession of sociology in
India has been the unification of two professional organisations, the Indian
Sociological Society and the All-India Sociological Conference in 1967.
The Indian Sociological Society, founded by Ghurye in 1952, published the
journal Sociological Bulletin. The society was a legally registered body and
conducted its financial and other affairs in a systematic manner. However,
for various reasons it began to languish around 1965. Moreover, it was per-
ceived to be dominated by Ghurye and his pupils, mainly in western India.
On the other hand, the only activity of the All-India Sociological Conference
was to organise conferences. It was neither a legally registered body, nor
were its affairs conducted in an organised manner. For example, its accounts
were in shambles. More important, it was perceived to be a north Indian
organisation.
With Srinivas’s migration from Baroda to Delhi, he emerged as a soci-
ologist who could unite sociologists in all parts of the country. It is this
perception which led to the unification of the two bodies. The All-India
Sociological Conference was merged into the Indian Sociological Society
under Srinivas’s leadership. He became the first president under the new
arrangement. The office of the society was also shifted to the Department of
Sociology at the University of Delhi. Since then sociology is perhaps the only
social science which has only one representative professional association in
the country. Other social sciences have each two or more rival associations.
Srinivas has a high reputation as a committee man. He has been not only a
member but also chair of many committees. He has won admiration for his
being fair but firm, open to differing views but able to cut through them and
arrive at a meaningful conclusion, always making witty remarks to make

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 M . N . S R I N I VA S

the proceedings smooth and lively, but taking firm and unpleasant stands
when necessary.
Srinivas has received widespread recognition for his contributions to soci-
ology and social anthropology and to academic life in general. He has been
conferred with honorary degrees and visiting professorships and fellow-
ships from many universities, research institutions, and foundations; med-
als, prizes, and awards; honorary memberships and fellowships of learned
societies and associations; invitations to deliver lectures; and so on. The list
is too long to be given here. Srinivas, however, wears his successes lightly.

A synoptic view of scholarly work

Srinivas’s fieldwork experience has been long, varied, and widespread. Begin-
ning with the work for his master’s degree on marriage and family in Mysore,
he collected Tamil and Telugu folk songs as Ghurye’s research assistant. His
marathon two-volume thesis on the Coorgs for his doctoral degree is a tes-
timony to the richness of data he had collected. Using the same data, he
wrote another thesis, with a different theoretical orientation, at Oxford. His
fieldwork reached high standards when he worked in Rampura. In addition
to the theoretical sophistication he had cultivated at Oxford by this time, he
had also acquired intimate knowledge and understanding of the fieldwork
done by luminaries such as Evans-Pritchard, Firth, Fortes, and Gluckman as
well as of the failures of a number of lesser-known anthropologists. He put
this knowledge and understanding to good use in his own work in Rampura.
I had the privilege of observing him when he did his fieldwork in Ram-
pura in the summer of 1952. He worked hard from early in the morning
till late in the night and wrote detailed notes, frequently interspersed with
theoretical comments. Not even a tenth of these notes have been used in his
publications.
Although Srinivas has written on many aspects of Indian society and cul-
ture, he is best known for his work on religion, village community, caste,
social change, and methodology. Whereas most of his writings are based on
intensive fieldwork in South India in general and Coorg and Rampura in
particular, his writings on Indian society at large provide a synthesis of his
personal observation and knowledge and the existing literature on different
regions of the country. His concepts of ‘Sanskritisation’ and ‘dominant caste’
have been used by a wide range of scholars to understand Indian society and
culture, past and present, and have become part of the public discourse in
India. The distinction he made between the ‘book view’ and the ‘field view’
in the study of civilizations has tremendous significance.
Srinivas does not describe himself as belonging to any ‘school’ or ‘ism’
except empiricism. His writings are free from jargon and from references to
grand sociological theories. His empiricism is related to his belief that for
many years to come, field studies, particularly intensive studies, will provide

24
 M . N . S R I N I VA S

deeper insights into Indian society and culture, although he is not averse to
using data from macro surveys and developing overall perspectives of social
processes.
Although Srinivas tends to disagree with some of his critics that he is
a structural-functionalist, he has frequently mentioned that the ideas of
social structure and function have had a profound influence on his work.
He has also maintained that the full potential and implications of the idea
of social structure have not yet been worked out. Although Srinivas has
not propounded any general anthropological theory, his discussions of the
contributions of Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard, including his edito-
rial introduction to Radcliffe-Brown’s posthumous work Method in Social
Anthropology (1959), have provided illuminating commentaries on theo-
retical developments in anthropology. As far as fieldwork is concerned, he
has demanded from his students not only methodological competence but
also the sensitivity of a novelist. To disseminate the knowledge and insights
of anthropology amongst the common people, Srinivas has contributed to
numerous newspapers and magazines and has frequently delivered lectures
in public forums.
Srinivas has remained active even after his formal retirement from the
ISEC. He has taught at several universities, colleges, and institutes both in
India and abroad as a visiting professor. He has also been involved in writ-
ing and publishing, delivering lectures, sitting on important committees, and
performing many other public functions. By a happy turn of events, his
differences with Dr. V.K.R.V. Rao were resolved, so much so that at Rao’s
initiative, Srinivas was elected chair of the board of governors of ISEC in
1990. Srinivas has not really retired. He is in good health and is active and
agile. May God bless him with many more years of active life.

Notes
* Excerpts from this chapter were previously published in Social Structure and Change,
Vol. I, Theory and Method – An Evaluation of the Work of M. N. Srinivas. Copy-
right 1996 © A. M. Shah, B. S. Baviskar, and E. A. Ramaswamy. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders and the publishers, Sage
Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi.
1 I have also used Parthasarathy’s (1991) article on Srinivas. I am thankful to him
for giving me a copy of the typescript.
2 Srinivas studied for Ll.B. at the Government Law College alongside studying soci-
ology at the Department of Sociology. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar was one of his teachers
there.
3 Embree (1946).
4 M. G. Bhagat’s doctoral thesis (1941) was titled ‘The Farmer, His Welfare and
Wealth’, and M. N. Desai’s thesis (1942) was ‘Life and Living in Rural Karnataka’.

25
 2
M. N. SRINIVAS IN BARODA *

I
Srinivas arrived in Baroda in the middle of June1951 to join the Maharaja
Sayajirao University. This university, established in 1949, has a different
structure from that of most other universities in India and of all other uni-
versities in western India. It is a ‘unitary’ university, where all teaching in a
subject from the undergraduate to the doctoral level is done within a single
department. It does not have separation between postgraduate departments
and undergraduate colleges as in an affiliating university. The university’s
jurisdiction is confined to the city of Baroda.
I had heard about Srinivas a few days before his arrival in Baroda. I
had just passed my intermediate (arts) examination and decided to take
six papers in economics as the honours subject for my two-year B.A. pro-
gramme but was unable to decide the subsidiary subject comprised of two
papers. My friend Indu Shelat was also not sure about it. So, two of us went
to a friendly teacher, G. B. Pandya, Professor of history and Dean of the
Faculty of Arts, for advice. He advised us to opt for cultural anthropology
for two reasons. First, it was a novel subject in the university at that time,
and second, an eminent anthropologist named M. N. Srinivas from Oxford
was to join the university as professor and head of the new Department of
Sociology, who would teach this subject. We had only a vague notion of
anthropology at that time. Pandya had taught us in the intermediate class H.
G. Wells’s famous book on world history (1922), which included a portion
on prehistory related to primitive society studied by anthropologists. It had
fascinated us, and we accepted Pandya’s advice. I suspect one more reason
behind his advice: Pandya had studied at Oxford and wished to establish a
friendly relation with another Oxonian.
Shelat and I met Srinivas on the first day of his joining the university:
15 June 1951. We had to obtain his signature on the admission form for
his consent to enrol us as students of cultural anthropology. He looked a
thin and tall man with grey hair parted in the middle and wore a dark grey
woolen suit, the typical Oxford college tie, and thick, round, and thin-rim

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 M . N . S R I N I VA S I N B A R O D A

glasses. All of us were surprised that he wore a woolen suit on a hot and
humid day in the middle of June. We later learnt that he had come on a flight
from London to Bombay on 13 June and taken a train to Baroda the next
evening, arriving in Baroda the next morning. As he has said in an article
(1981), he could not buy readymade cotton suits in Bombay – such clothes
were not easily available those days – and therefore bought cotton cloth for
three suits and ordered a tailor there to stitch them.
Srinivas was invited to be professor and head of the Department of Sociol-
ogy in Baroda. A. R. Wadia, the pro vice chancellor of the university, played
a key role in his appointment. Wadia was his teacher in the B.A. class at
Maharaja’s College in Mysore and encouraged him to go to study sociol-
ogy at M. A. with G. S. Ghurye in Bombay University. Wadia offered him
the Baroda post during his visit to Oxford about a month ago. Although
Hansa Mehta was the vice chancellor, Wadia was far more knowledgeable
about the academic world than she and therefore more influential in making
academic decisions at the university. S. Radhakrishnan also recommended
Srinivas’s appointment. He had known Srinivas in Mysore and Oxford.
Apart from Radhakrishnan being Wadia’s good friend, he was the chair of
the committee set up by the Maharaja of Baroda to plan Baroda University
and knew well two key persons in establishing it, namely, Hansa Mehta and
her husband Jivaraj Mehta. The latter was the chief minister of Baroda state
and later the finance minister of Bombay state. Srinivas thus came to Baroda
with strong recommendations.

II
Srinivas came to Baroda with a definite vision of sociology and social
anthropology and an agenda for their development in India. He laid bare
his ideas in a paper in the first year of his joining Baroda University (1952c).
Significantly, it was published in the first issue of Sociological Bulletin,
the journal of the newly established professional association of sociolo-
gists, Indian Sociological Society. Secondly, because Baroda University was
located in Gujarat, Srinivas knew he had a special responsibility to promote
research on Gujarat. He formulated his ideas in this respect soon after he
joined Baroda University and published them in a paper, complete with a
bibliography and a map showing castes and tribes of Gujarat, prepared by
his student Harshad Trivedi in the second year (1953). Thus, Srinivas went
about developing his department systematically with both general ideas
about India and particular ideas about Gujarat.
Srinivas introduced the teaching of only one programme in the beginning,
namely, the B.A. (subsidiary) programme in cultural anthropology, which
included two papers on social anthropology and material culture. Shelat and
I were the only students. Srinivas taught social anthropology in the first year.

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 M . N . S R I N I VA S I N B A R O D A

Because Baroda University did not have its own syllabi in the beginning, it
had adopted those of Bombay University. The syllabi for sociology, includ-
ing cultural anthropology, were formulated by Srinivas’s teacher Ghurye.
The prescribed textbooks for social anthropology included Ruth Benedict’s
Patterns of Culture (1949), Alexander Goldenweiser’s Anthropology (1937),
and Robert Lowie’s Primitive Society (1921), all three from the United States.
Srinivas disapproved all the three. Fresh from Oxford, he was critical of ‘cul-
tural’ and ‘evolutionist’ anthropology prevalent in the United States at that
time. Instead, he taught us three main texts: E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Social
Anthropology (1951), a slim book containing his BBC lectures on the Third
Programme, which had just been published; Raymond Firth’s Human Types
(1950); and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s typescript of what was later published
as Method in Social Anthropology, edited by Srinivas (1959). Radcliffe-
Brown had given, at the time of his retirement from Oxford, the typescript to
Srinivas. He got several copies made and gave one to us. Srinivas also asked
us to read two booklets: Evans-Pritchard’s Frazer lecture, Divine Kingship of
the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan (1948), and Verrier Elwin’s Indian Aborigi-
nals (1949), an Oxford University Press pamphlet. Although Srinivas disap-
proved of the books prescribed by Ghurye for teaching social anthropology,
he went along with Ghurye’s plan to include social anthropology under the
rubric of sociology in India.
Because Shelat and I were the only students, Srinivas did not have to fol-
low the usual method of teaching by lectures. We two sat on chairs in front
of him, usually in his office but sometimes also in his home. Because Shelat
was not very regular in attending classes, I was often the only student. Srini-
vas discussed one topic after another in an informal style, often involving
us in the discussion. Although he used British texts based mainly on African
and other non-Indian materials, he often discussed general ideas with refer-
ence to Indian society and culture. This made his teaching lively. I recall one
example vividly. While discussing the topic of marriage, he referred to hyper-
gamy and its practise amongst the Kanbi-Patidars of Gujarat. I intervened to
say that this practise was related to female infanticide and cited an article on
it by Vinodini Nilkanth, an eminent social worker and author, in a Gujarati
newspaper published a few days ago. He asked me to give him its English
translation, which we discussed in another class. I thus experienced a kind
of guru-shishya relationship in an ashram.1
Because Srinivas was teaching us textbooks not prescribed by the statu-
tory syllabus, we were worried. We asked him, “What will happen at the
examination? On the basis of which textbooks will the question paper be
set?” He firmly said, “Don’t worry. You will be examined on the basis of
what you have been taught”. Obviously, Srinivas was flouting the statutes
and ordinances of the university. No other head of department would have
been able to do this, but Srinivas could do it because he had strong support
of both the vice chancellor and the pro vice chancellor. The registrar, B. K.

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 M . N . S R I N I VA S I N B A R O D A

Zutsi, known as ‘bull-dog’ in the university because of his authoritarian style

of functioning as well as his facial look, used to complain, “These heads of
departments don’t care for the registrar; they get things done directly by VC
and PVC”.
In the second half of the first year of his tenure, Srinivas made his first
academic appointment. He recruited Y.V.S. Nath, an M.Sc. in anthropology
from Delhi University, simultaneously as Research Assistant and as student
for a Ph.D.2 It was usual for research assistants to teach, and Nath taught
us the paper on material culture in the second year. He did not bother to
change the two textbooks prescribed in the Bombay syllabus: Daryll Forde’s
Habitat, Economy and Society (1934) and an American book on primitive
technology – I do not remember the latter’s title or author’s name.
Almost all of Srinivas’s doctoral students in Baroda did their research by
the fieldwork method. He initiated even some of his B.A. and M.A. students
into fieldwork. He asked me to join him as his field assistant during his
two-month fieldwork in Kodagahalli village, later known by pseudonym
Rampura, in Mysore state (now in Karnataka) in the summer vacation of
1952. This was a great surprise for me because I had just completed the first
year of my B.A. programme and knew nothing of research. It gave me an
opportunity to know Srinivas intimately both as a fieldworker and person.
I lived with him in a small house in Rampura (see its description in Srinivas
1976: 50).3 I also lived in his home on Venkatakrishnaiah Road in Mysore
city whenever we went to Mysore.
It was a great experience to be with Srinivas in the field. He was a superb
fieldworker. We used to get up early in the morning and go out to parts of the
village, to its fields and to the neighbouring villages every day, to observe rit-
uals, ceremonies, dispute settlement processes, agricultural operations, and
so on and also to interview key individuals. Srinivas had a knack of ferreting
out information. It was a measure of the villagers’ confidence in him that
they did not mind his taking notes in their presence. Normally, however, he
wrote notes every night before going to bed. I read those notes the next day.
They were replete with minute details, interspersed with theoretical reflec-
tions. I also wrote my notes, based mainly on my visual observations and
sometimes on my conversations with Srinivas and a few villagers in English.
I did not know Kannada.
After I completed the second year of my B.A. programme, Srinivas encour-
aged me to carry out my own fieldwork in the Panchmahals district in Guja-
rat during the summer vacation. He obtained from the university a grant for
my work. I surveyed different parts of the district so that I could locate a
suitable village for intensive study later. He asked my friend Narayan Sheth,
who had joined the B.A. programme that year, to go along with me so that
he too could have some field experience. Similarly, he asked Shelat to go with
Nath, who had begun his fieldwork amongst the Bhils of Ratanmal on the
border between Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.

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 M . N . S R I N I VA S I N B A R O D A

After I joined the M.A. programme, Srinivas obtained a grant from Baroda
University to enable me to continue my work in the Panchmahals during
vacations. I studied a dispersed village for about six months. Srinivas asked
my friend Ramesh Shroff, one year junior to me in the M.A. class, to join
me in this fieldwork. Soon after I completed my M.A. examination, Srinivas
encouraged me to publish an article on the village in the Economic Weekly
(1955a) and a long paper on the region in the Journal of the Maharaja Saya-
jirao University of Baroda (1955b).

III
In the beginning of the academic year 1952–1953, soon after Nath’s appoint-
ment, Srinivas appointed I. P. Desai (fondly called IP) as Reader. He was
senior to Srinivas in age but contemporary amongst Ghurye’s students in
Bombay. Srinivas was conscious of the fact that IP was different from him in
academic approach as well as in political ideology. IP had done his Ph.D. dis-
sertation on the basis of published literature, not fieldwork, and was critical
of social anthropology and its emphasis on fieldwork. He was inclined more
towards sociology and its emphasis on survey method. Although they dif-
fered on methods of investigation, both had firm faith in empirical inquiry.
Ideologically, IP was a socialist, whereas Srinivas was a liberal. All the same,
they were good personal friends with a joking relationship. Srinivas invited
him to apply for the post. In the selection committee, Srinivas insisted on
his selection despite opposition from several other members, including the
vice chancellor. Srinivas has stated, “I knew that IP’s ideas of sociology were
different from mine in some ways, but I regarded it as a factor in his favour.
I wanted someone who would supplement my skills” (1981: 619, 1988: x).
Srinivas also valued the fact that IP belonged to Gujarat.
By the beginning of the second academic year, Srinivas and IP worked
together to formulate a new six-paper syllabus for the B.A. (honours) pro-
gramme. It manifested an excellent integration between what was known
at that time as ‘sociology’ and ‘social anthropology’ in the West. It thus
represented a balance between IP’s and Srinivas’s ideas and also carried for-
ward Ghurye’s vision of subsuming social anthropology under the rubric of
sociology in India. The same general approach was adopted in formulating
the M.A. syllabus.
Students majoring in other subjects could take two of the six papers of the
sociology major syllabus as minor papers, viz., Introduction to Sociology,
and Indian Social Institutions. Partly because of the novelty of the subject
and partly because of the high reputation of teachers, the new sociology
major as well as minor programmes became popular and attracted good
students. However, Srinivas followed the policy of keeping the B.A. class
small. It began with around ten students and increased to a maximum of
about thirty in about five years. He also introduced tutorials with lectures

30
 M . N . S R I N I VA S I N B A R O D A

as methods of teaching. The tutorials were part of an innovation introduced

by Baroda University at that time, and the small size of the sociology class
helped make them effective. A considerable number of B.A. students went
on to the M.A. programme in sociology or in other social sciences and then
to the academic profession.
During the first year of his tenure, Srinivas occupied a small office in the
main building of old Baroda College, designated as Faculty of Arts in the new
university. In the second year, however, he succeeded in pressuring the uni-
versity administration to allot to the department the entire Kitchen Block
of the vacant hostel complex of Baroda College and to get it altered to suit
the needs of the department, generating envy amongst the older and larger
departments. The dining hall became the classroom, and the cooking room
and the storerooms became teachers’ offices. It had even a little space where
students could meet informally. The Kitchen Block gave to the department a
visual identity which many other departments lacked.

IV
When I came to the M.A. class, I faced the same syllabus problem that I had
faced in the B.A. programme. Although Srinivas and IP had framed the new
M.A. syllabus in the third year, it came into effect only in the fourth year, and
therefore I had to study according to the old Bombay syllabus. It consisted
of only four of the eight-paper M.A. programme, forcing me to choose the
remaining four papers of some other subject.4 The four sociology papers
were general sociology, Indian sociology, social psychology, and social biol-
ogy. By this time Shelat left the department to study social work, and I was
the only student left for the four-paper M.A. programme. My friend Ramesh
Shroff joined the M.A. class in the second year. However, a few students
majoring in other subjects with six papers had taken general sociology and
Indian sociology as subsidiary papers. All of them were bright students. One
of them later did a Ph.D. in sociology,5 and another used sociology in doing
his Ph.D. in Sanskrit.6
Srinivas made two changes in the readings for general sociology: the
addition of Radcliffe-Brown’s Structure and Function in Primitive Society
(1952a) and Lowie’s History of Ethnological Theory (1937). That old Amer-
ican textbook, Sociology, by MacIver and Page (1948) – Ghurye’s as well as
IP’s favourite – was retained. Although Srinivas bluntly expressed his view
that it was out of date, it was retained because a balance had to be main-
tained between sociology and social anthropology and between Srinivas’s
and IP’s ideas. There was no change in the readings for Indian sociology.
In the third year of his tenure, Srinivas went to Manchester as a Simon
Fellow. Therefore, it was my misfortune that I could not benefit from his
teaching the M.A. In his absence IP clubbed the teaching of the two papers
of general sociology and Indian sociology in one year. He held only two

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sessions of teaching, one for general sociology and the other for Indian soci-
ology. He gave an idea of the topics and the readings, and then said, “Study
on your own. Come to me if you have any difficulty”. Nath taught social
biology, and L. J. Bhatt of the Psychology Department taught social psychol-
ogy. Both were uninspiring teachers. I could learn only the rudiments of
physical anthropology and social psychology.
Whereas Nath was promoted as lecturer, Savitri Sahani, a student of
both Irawati Karve and IP in the M.A. programme in Poona University,
was appointed as tutor in the third year. The department functioned with
just four teachers (Srinivas, IP, Nath, and Sahani) till 1957. The shortage
of teachers did not allow the department to organise the teaching of the
second-year students necessarily after that of the first year ones, both at the
M.A. and B.A. levels. Often a paper was taught to students of the two classes
together. The logical sequence of teaching began only in 1958, when three
lecturers were added, namely, K. Raman Unni, an M.A. from Poona Uni-
versity; Tarun Sheth, an M.A. from Baroda; and I. These appointments also
enabled the department to introduce the teaching of introductory sociology
to students of the first year of the newly devised three-year B.A. programme
in 1958. This class used to have as many as more than a hundred students.
All three of the newly appointed lecturers were asked to teach them, which
was an extremely difficult but challenging task. Because there were no intro-
ductory textbooks integrating sociology and social anthropology, Srinivas
and IP asked Tarun Sheth and me to write special introductory essays and
distribute mimeographed copies amongst students. I regret I did not preserve
these essays. All in all, by 1958, the department had the complete range of
teaching programmes from the first of year of the B.A. to the Ph.D.

V
Although Srinivas was slow and cautious in introducing the new B.A. and
M.A. programmes, he was quick in recruiting students for the Ph.D. In the
first year itself he recruited five students: Nath, H. R. Trivedi, P. T. Thomas,
Sugata Dasgupta, and C. Gopalan (the latter three from the Department of
Social Work). Six students were enrolled later: Narayan Sheth, V. H. Joshi,
R. D. Parikh, Ramesh Shroff, Gnanambal, and I. As many as eight students
completed their doctoral work under Srinivas’s supervision during his eight-
year stay in Baroda.7 Six of the doctoral works were published, and each was
well received. All his doctoral students, even those who did not complete
their doctoral work, became leading academics.
Srinivas’s doctoral students worked on a variety of topics. Some of them
worked on what might be called traditional topics: Nath, Thomas, and
Gnanambal on tribes; and Trivedi and Shroff on castes. Some others worked
on new topics: Joshi, originally a student of economics, worked on rela-
tions between economic development and social change; Sheth on social

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framework of a large engineering factory; Parikh on relations between the

press and society; and I on sociological history of a village. Srinivas thus
tried to strengthen research in traditional areas as well as open up new areas
of research.
Srinivas gave highest importance to field research, both by students and
teachers of the department. He was liberal in sanctioning leave for field-
work. He used to say that every department should have N+1 staff strength
so that at least one member of the staff could go on duty leave for research.
He purchased equipment such as cameras, pots and pans, and large steel
trunks for use in the field, and pressured the university administration to
make special rules for accounting of field expenses, helped in all these mat-
ters by Vice Chancellor Hansa Mehta and Pro Vice Chancellor Wadia. He
thus brought about synergy between research and teaching in a university
that had inherited a culture of teaching without research – a shift for which
he had to fight several battles in the forums in the university.
During Srinivas’s tenure two large research projects were undertaken in
the department. First, he helped IP to obtain a large grant from the Rocke-
feller Foundation to undertake a multidimensional study of Mahuva, a small
town in Saurashtra. The chief of the foundation’s office in New Delhi, Roger
Evans, was so impressed with the project proposal that he sent Chadbourn
Gilpatrick of his office to visit the department to discuss its dimensions with
Srinivas and IP (Srinivas had already established friendly relations with both
of them). IP followed Srinivas’s usual strategy to use the teachers’ research
projects to initiate B.A. and M.A. students to fieldwork. The second project,
to study a caste of genealogists as well as a village in Gujarat, was financed
by the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago under its pro-
gramme on comparative study of civilizations, directed by Robert Redfield
and Milton Singer. Srinivas was the project director, I the principal inves-
tigator, and Ramesh Shroff a research assistant. Both the projects yielded
significant results soon after they were launched.
Srinivas launched a weekly seminar programme immediately after joining
the university. It was the first such programme in the university and became
popular both within and outside it. A large number of students, teachers,
and visiting scholars from India and abroad presented seminars, which were
always well attended. Each of them was a lively occasion for debate and dis-
cussion. As a result, the department came to be widely known as a centre for
serious intellectual activity. Even when I was a B.A. student, Srinivas allowed
me to attend these seminars and encouraged me to present seminars on
two books. The seminars were for me a great learning experience and gave
me an opportunity to witness many intellectual debates and to meet face-
to-face many distinguished scholars from the beginning. The department
attracted a steady stream of visitors from India and abroad: D. N. Majum-
dar, A. Aiyappan, Irawati Karve, A. R. Desai, Sachin Chaudhuri, William
F. Ogburn, Kathleen Gough, Adrian Mayer, F. G. Bailey, McKim Marriott,

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David F. Pocock, James Silverberg, R. L. Rooksby, and many others. Most of

them met teachers and students and conducted lectures and seminars.

VI
Srinivas’s book Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India
(1952a) was published in the second half of the first year of his stay in
Baroda. It was an instant success. His first paper on Rampura village was
published in the Economic Weekly almost simultaneously (1951). He per-
suaded many scholars in India and abroad to publish papers on their village
studies in the same journal. He edited a collection of these papers as India’s
Villages (l955a), which was also an instant success. He edited Radcliffe-
Brown’s Method in Social Anthropology (1959) and co-authored Caste: A
Trend Report and Bibliography in 1959. He wrote as many as about 30 papers
during his stay in Baroda. Some of them were seminal: ‘The Social System
of a Mysore Village’ (1955b), ‘Varna and Caste’ (1954), ‘A Note on San-
skritisation and Westernisation’ (1956a), ‘The Dominant Caste in Rampura’
(1959a), and ‘Caste in Modem India’ (all reprinted in his Collected Essays,
2002, and in 2009). After Srinivas left Baroda, he used to say that his stay
in Baroda was the most productive period of his life. In Delhi he was far too
much occupied with administration and committees.
After the publication of the Coorg book, Srinivas was described as a
structural-functionalist. This label stuck with him for a long time. It became
a part of textbooks so that students use it even now all over the country.
Recently, Dipankar Gupta (2005: 2) has said that at the Department of Soci-
ology in the Delhi School of Economics during the heyday of Srinivas, “the
ruling theory of the day was that of functionalism”. However, this label is
used without reading all of Srinivas’s writings and examining them critically.
Surely, the Coorg book was written under the influence of Radcliffe-
Brown’s ideas of structure and function. I saw this influence during the first
two years or so of Srinivas’s stay in Baroda – in seminars and other discus-
sions. But he soon changed and began to talk and write about social change.
The first publication showing change of thought came as early as in 1955.
The Indian Conference of Social Work had organised a national seminar on
‘Casteism and Removal of Untouchability’ in Delhi in 1955. Srinivas was
made its director and I. P. Desai secretary general. A number of important
national leaders such as S. Radhakrishnan, Jagjivan Ram, and Govind Bal-
labh Pant attended it. Srinivas presented a paper, ‘Castes: Can They Exist in
India of Tomorrow?’ (1955b). It dealt with not only change from the past
to the present but also with its direction in the future. Many writings on
social change, including at least two books, Caste in Modern India (1962)
and Social Change in Modern India (1966), followed. He also encouraged
many of his students to work on problems of social change. For example, as
mentioned earlier, in Baroda itself, Narayan Sheth studied a large modern

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factory, Joshi studied the impact of economic development on social change,

Parikh studied the press, and I studied sociological history. Srinivas also
became member of many government committees dealing with problems of
change. Despite all this, it is amazing that he was labelled as a functionalist
all his life. Of course, his ideas on social change were different from those
of many others, particularly the Marxists, but to say that he was always a
functionalist and did not think or write on social change is absurd.
In fact, Srinivas’s acquaintance with ideas of change and history can be
traced back to his stay in Oxford. As Radcliffe-Brown retired during the
last year of Srinivas’s studentship, Evans-Pritchard became his supervisor.
Srinivas knew well the significance of this change. Evans-Pritchard was not a
structural-functionalist but considered social anthropology a historical dis-
cipline if not an art. Srinivas experienced a problem when his dissertation
was to be sent to Oxford University Press for publication. Evans-Pritchard
asked him to revise it according to his ideas, but Srinivas said he was so
exhausted writing the dissertation that he had no energy to revise it. Evans-
Pritchard then approved it for publishing it as it was.

VII
Srinivas made a deep impact on the university community in Baroda. He
proposed to establish a National Institute of Social Sciences in Baroda, sup-
ported by a few friends in the university such as the economist Iqbal Gulati
and the political scientist Rajni Kothari. If I am not mistaken, Srinivas wrote
an anonymous note in the Economic Weekly, making a general plea for such
an institute in the country, without mentioning Baroda. Petty politics of
some colleagues killed the proposal. Srinivas became a member of the first
editorial board of the Baroda university journal, which made a mark for its
excellence. Many will be surprised to know that he was for a few years the
faculty adviser to the university students’ union, where he had to deal with
a firebrand student leader like Chiman Patel, who later became the chief
minister of Gujarat. Srinivas became popular in the region around Baroda,
getting invitations to give lectures not only in the city of Ahmedabad but
also in small towns like Dabhoi and Nadiad.
The department became a beehive of activity and acquired reputation as
a centre of excellence in teaching and research within a few years of its exis-
tence. Recognition followed. In the sixth year of its existence the University
Grants Commission (UGC) gave it generous grants for additional teach-
ing posts, research fellowships, B.A. and M.A. scholarships, funds for field
research, and a fairly large building. Srinivas supervised the designing of the
building but left the department before its construction was complete. It was
both handsome and efficient.
Srinivas was a most eligible bachelor on the campus. Rumours floated
freely about several women teachers, particularly from South India, trying

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to woo him. It was, however, a pleasant surprise when he married Rukmini

(Rukka to friends), a geography lecturer from Madras. The wedding took
place in the south, but the newly married couple was given a grand welcome
in Baroda. Their first daughter Lakshmi was born in the last year of his
stay in Baroda. When Srinivas left Baroda to join Delhi University in 1959, I
vividly remember my friend Ramesh Shroff and I bidding them farewell at
the Baroda railway station, with little Lakshmi in Rukka’s hands, on a cold
early morning in February.
Srinivas lived in a university flat only for a year or so in the beginning.
Later he preferred to live in a rented flat or bungalow. This enabled him to
establish deep friendships with several persons outside the university com-
munity, the kind of friendships, he told me, he could not establish later in
Delhi. These friendships attracted him to visit Baroda almost every year
from Delhi as well as Bangalore.
Srinivas has said that one of the reasons for his wanting to appoint IP was
that “I did not see myself as staying for a long time in Baroda, and I did not
want to leave a vacuum behind me after my departure” (1981). Baroda was
perceived to be a provincial place. Srinivas found that “the attitude of most
people in the University [of Baroda] was that of college teachers. Lecturing
was duty while research was almost an extra-curricular activity” (1983).
Srinivas would have liked to be in a university located in a metropolis. He
has said, “I knew that I needed a big metropolitan place in which to work”
(in Fuller 1999). Ideally, he would have liked to be in Bombay. Indeed, he
had applied for a lectureship in Bombay before going to Oxford but was
rejected. After he came to Baroda, he has said, “I thought of Bombay but my
relations with Ghurye had deteriorated so much that Ghurye wouldn’t have
me” (in Fuller 1999).
Despite all this, Srinivas stayed in Baroda for nearly eight years and was
obviously satisfied with his multifarious achievements. He has said, “I had
built up the Baroda department from scratch and was not entirely happy
having to leave it. . . . Looking back, I think of my Baroda days with sat-
isfaction and nostalgia” (1996: 622, 624). Nevertheless, he had unpleasant
experiences after 1957 or so. After Vice Chancellor Hansa Mehta and Pro
Vice Chancellor A. R. Wadia left the university, Srinivas found it increas-
ingly difficult to deal with the succeeding vice chancellors and pro vice
chancellors. They did not have Mehta’s and Wadia’s wide vision. Moreover,
although IP continued to be a good friend in personal relations, he created
many difficulties in departmental matters. His conduct, particularly in the
process of appointment of teachers and in the election of members of the
board of studies, shocked not only Srinivas but also many colleagues both
within and outside the department. Dr. V.K.R.V. Rao’s invitation to Srinivas
to join Delhi University, conveyed dramatically at the Guntakal railway sta-
tion during his journey from Mysore to Baroda in June 1958, came at the
right moment. He accepted it immediately.

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Srinivas bequeathed to Baroda University a fine department of sociology

and to the profession of sociology and social anthropology a fairly large
number of scholars who made a mark in the profession. Soon after he left
the department, his colleagues, students, and friends collected a substantial
amount of donations from Baroda and elsewhere for instituting scholarships
to perpetuate his memory.
Although the department he built up in Baroda declined gradually, par-
ticularly after IP, his successor, as professor and head of the department, left
it in 1968, the department he built up in Delhi University continues to be
a premier centre of teaching and research in the country. In public memory
Srinivas is therefore identified less with his work in Baroda than that in
Delhi. However, in my view, the former was significant in several respects.
He himself has said, “I learnt the lessons of department building there, les-
sons which were to prove useful to me later” (1996: 622). He carried for-
ward in Delhi the vision he began to implement in Baroda. He perfected in
Delhi almost all the academic experiments he made in Baroda: integrating
social anthropology and sociology under the rubric of sociology, thus carry-
ing forward Ghurye’s vision of comparative sociology at the national level;8
emphasis on fieldwork as a strategy to develop the discipline; importance
of tutorials in the teaching of the subject; using the weekly seminars as an
instrument to encourage continuous debate and discussion; and encouraging
synergy between research and teaching. He also used in Delhi the valuable
administrative experience he gained in Baroda.

Notes
* Reprinted from M. N. Srinivas: The Man and His Work, eds., P. K. Misra, K. K.
Basa, H. K. Bhat. Bhopal: Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, 2007,
pp. 41–61. This is a revised and expanded version of my lecture delivered at the
inaugural function of the National Seminar, ‘Professor M. N. Srinivas: The Man
and His Work’, organised by the Anthropological Association at Mysore in Octo-
ber 2004. Srinivas wrote a paper, ‘My Baroda Days’ (1981) and mentioned briefly
his Baroda experiences in several places elsewhere (1973a, 1983, 1995b, 1997, 1999,
and in Fuller 1999). I am narrating here my own reminiscences. I thank Baburao
Baviskar, Dhirubhai Sheth, and Narayan Sheth for comments on the draft of the
paper.
1 This discussion impressed me so much that a few years later I collected a consid-
erable amount of historical data on female infanticide amongst the Rajputs and
Kanbi-Patidars of Gujarat. I could not, however, write on it. Eventually, I handed
the data over to L. S. Vishwanath, my Ph.D. student at the Department of Sociol-
ogy in Delhi University, for use in writing his dissertation on the subject. His work
resulted in several papers and a book.
2 Because Nath belonged to Mysore, Srinivas knew him personally. He did field-
work amongst the Bhils of Ratanmal on the border between Gujarat and Madhya
Pradesh. His dissertation was published as a book, which was well received. How-
ever, he did not remain in the university for long. He worked for a while at the
Ahmedabad Textile Industries Research Association (ATIRA) and ended up as an

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executive at the Binny Mills in Bangalore. He gradually reduced his contact with
Srinivas and his colleagues in Baroda.
3 The Southern Regional Centre of the Anthropological Survey of India, Mysore
has made a documentary film on present-day (i.e., 2004) Rampura. Although a
number of changes have taken place in the village, the house in which Srinivas and
I lived is still intact.
4 I chose ancient Indian history and culture, and archaeology.
5 This is Urmila Patel, wife of Chiman Patel, the former chief minister of Gujarat.
After being a college teacher and principal, she joined active politics and became
a minister in the union cabinet.
6 This is S. G. Kantawala, a distinguished scholar of the Puranas.
7 A few students of Srinivas’s, who had not submitted their dissertations before he
left Baroda, submitted them under IP’s supervision.
8 The full significance of this vision for both sociology and social anthropology still
remains to be grasped.

38
 3
M. N. SRINIVAS, MAX WEBER,
AND FUNCTIONALISM *

Recently, two leading sociologists have commented on M. N. Srinivas’s

engagement – rather lack of it – with Max Weber. In his M. N. Srinivas
Memorial Lecture, ‘The Sociology of Hinduism: Reading “Backwards” from
Srinivas to Weber’, published in Sociological Bulletin (53 [1], May August
2006: 215–236), T. N. Madan states, “The only reference to Weber in Srini-
vas’s writings that I know of is the argument about the lack of appropriate
ideological resonance in Hinduism for the endogenous development of capi-
talism. It is a very short comment (in a co-authored encyclopaedia article;
Srinivas and Shah 1968: 364)’. Secondly, in his introduction to Anti-Utopia:
Essential Writings of André Béteille, Dipankar Gupta has made a few obser-
vations about the ‘heydays’ of Srinivas at the Department of Sociology in
the Delhi School of Economics in the 1960s. He observes that Srinivas had
hardly any engagement with Weber, and also that “the ruling theory of the
day was that of functionalism “ (2005: 1–2). Lack of engagement with Weber
is linked here with dominance of functionalism. I write this note to present
certain facts to set the record right.

I
In 1956, Milton Singer published a paper ‘Cultural Values in India’s Eco-
nomic Development’1 in the well-known journal Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science. He raised a number of issues on
the subject, in the course of which he referred to Weber’s ideas on the rela-
tion between asceticism and economic activity, developed in his book, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). In 1958, another well-
known journal, Economic Development and Cultural Change, published, in
response to Singer’s paper, the discussion ‘India’s Cultural Values and Eco-
nomic Development’ among four scholars: John Goheen, M. N. Srinivas,
D. G. Karve, and Milton Singer.2 It began with Goheen’s note focusing on,
as he stated, “the relevance of the Weberian thesis to the Indian situation”
(1958a: 9). Srinivas (1958) wrote a long note on Goheen’s note, dealing
with three questions: (1) the tradition of practical values in India, (2) why

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this tradition has not been successful in improving the conditions of life of
the people, and (3) the diversity of Hindu philosophical values, both old
and new. Throughout the note he cited his field experiences in rural India in
general and Rampura village in Karnataka in particular. Srinivas’s note was
followed by Karve’s comments (1958), Goheen’s note (1958b) on Srinivas’s
note, and Singer’s postscript (1958). This discussion was published in the
same year the English translation of Weber’s German book on the religion
of India was published (1958), but none of the four scholars referred to it.
Apparently, the discussion was planned, and the participants wrote their
notes before the book was available to them. Notably, this happened when
Srinivas was at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.
In 1959, if not earlier, Srinivas closely interacted with Reinhard Bendix,
author of the well-known intellectual biography of Weber (1959). Bendix
acknowledged Srinivas’s “detailed criticisms and suggestions” on the chap-
ter ‘Society and Religion in India’ in this book (ibid.: iii). Bendix also came
to the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, as a visiting professor
in 1959–1960 at Srinivas’s invitation.
In 1970, Srinivas participated in a conference on ‘Occupational Cultures
in Changing South Asia’ at the University of Chicago. He did not contrib-
ute a paper but was a discussant for three papers. Milton Singer edited the
proceedings and published the book in 1973. It includes two chapters by
Srinivas. Chapter XII comments on Hanna Papanek’s paper ‘Pakistan’s New
Industrialists and Businessmen’ and Richard Fox’s paper ‘Pariah Capital-
ism and Traditional Indian Merchants: Past and Present’ (Srinivas 1973b:
275–278). Chapter XIII comments on Singer’s paper ‘Industrial Leadership,
the Hindu Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (Srinivas 1973c: 279–286).
Srinivas discusses Weber’s ideas in both the chapters, but the latter is a
lengthy critique of Weber’s ideas on Hinduism. He first questions Weber’s
identification of the ideas of samsāra, karma, and the ritualism of caste as
constituting the ‘dogmatic foundation’ of Hinduism and his ‘ethnocentric’
assumption that every religion has, or ought to have, a ‘dogmatic founda-
tion’. He shows how Weber, in his construction of Hindu ethic, missed the
acephalous nature of Hinduism, the changes occurring in it continually for
centuries, and the diversities of caste and sect. Srinivas comments, “The
charge of oversimplification must be laid at Weber’s door” (ibid: 279). He
then discusses the problem of relations between modernisation and tradi-
tional culture and concurs with Singer’s conclusion that “traditional institu-
tions are compatible with modern industrial organizations” (ibid.).
Madan’s main argument in the Srinivas memorial lecture is that unlike
Weber, Srinivas was concerned more with behaviour than with belief. Srinivas’s
chapter XIII in Singer’s book, however, is different. He discusses here issues
with reference to: (1) philosophical and theological ideas in Sanskritic tradi-
tion, such as advaita, āshramas, bhakti, janmas, leelā, pralaya, purushārthas,
and vratas, besides samsāra and karma, previously mentioned, and kāyakave

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kailāsa (literally, ‘work is heaven’), a Lingayat idea in Kannada; (2) scriptures

such as the Bhagavad Gita and the purānas; and (3) ancient and medieval
philosophers and theologians such as Shankara, Ramanuja, and Madhva
and modem social reformers such as Aurobindo, Gandhi, Raja Ram Mohan
Roy, and Tilak. The chapter ends with a sharp comment on Weber:

The tendency to revive Weber may lead to a restatement of the view

that Asians cannot modernize without throwing all their traditional
culture out. It may also be used to ‘flatter the ethnocentric conceits
of Europeans and Americans’. It may serve to keep people in dif-
ferent parts of the world apart when the need is for them to come
together in a collective under-taking for the abolishing of poverty
and ignorance wherever found.
(ibid.: 286)

II
I have read and heard ad nauseam that Srinivas was a structural-functionalist.
It is true that Srinivas wrote his D.Phil. thesis on the Coorgs at Oxford
University under the influence of structural-functionalism of A. R. Radcliffe-
Brown in the late 1940s. However, many commentators do not know that
on Radcliffe-Brown’s retirement, E. E. Evans-Pritchard became Srinivas’s
supervisor. Evans-Pritchard differed from Radcliffe-Brown on many issues,
including functionalism. However, he did not ask Srinivas to change his the-
sis according to his ideas. Only at the stage of its publication by Clarendon
Press did Evans-Pritchard suggest to Srinivas that he might like to change it.
Srinivas showed his unwillingness, and the thesis was published as it was,
written under Radcliffe-Brown’s supervision.3
The fact that the Coorg book (1952) was functionalist did not make it less
of a classic. One of the reasons for its acclamation was that functionalism
was a major advance on the earlier pseudo-historical theories of evolution-
ism and diffusionism, both of which had influenced the study of Indian
society and culture. Many commentators have failed to appreciate – some do
not even know – the fact that Srinivas wrote his Oxford thesis on the basis of
data collected for his earlier Ph.D. thesis (consisting about 800 pages, bound
in two volumes) at Bombay University under G. S. Ghurye’s supervision. He
applied the functionalist approach to the same data, and that made the Oxford
thesis different. Incidentally, failure to grasp the importance of functionalist
critique of pseudo-history is not uncommon in Indian sociology.
Srinivas’s functionalism was short-lived. Change began to take place in
Oxford itself. Despite the Coorg book being structural-functionalist, Evans-
Pritchard sponsored Srinivas’s appointment as Lecturer at Oxford. Srinivas
thus became part of development of new ideas in social anthropology at
Oxford under Evans-Pritchard’s leadership. When he left Oxford and came

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to the University of Baroda as its first professor and head of the department
of sociology in 1951, he immediately prescribed Evans-Pritchard’s little
book Social Anthropology (1951) as a textbook for B.A. students and also
asked them to read Evans-Pritchard’s Frazer lecture ‘Divine Kingship of the
Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan’ (1948). I was one of these students.4
This does not mean that Srinivas gave up structural-functionalism alto-
gether in Baroda. In fact, its strong influence was visible in the classrooms,
in seminars, and in personal conversations for two years or so after he came
to Baroda. However, change came soon thereafter. He began to talk and
write about social change. The first publication indicating this transforma-
tion came in 1955. The Indian Conference of Social Work had organised
a national seminar on ‘Casteism and Removal of Untouchability’ in Delhi
in 1955; Srinivas was its director and his colleague I. P. Desai its secretary
general. A number of distinguished academics as well as public men, includ-
ing S. Radhakrishnan, Jagjivan Ram, and Govind Ballabh Pant, attended
the seminar. Srinivas presented a paper, ‘Castes: Can They Exist in India of
Tomorrow?’5 It was published in the report on the seminar (1955b) as well
as in Economic Weekly (1955b). Srinivas published several other papers on
social change during his stay in Baroda, the most notable being ‘Sanskritisa-
tion and Westernisation’ (1956b) and ‘Caste in Modern India’ (1957).
The shift away from functionalism was visible also in the research work
of Srinivas’s doctoral students in Baroda. Although some of them worked
in the traditional fields of caste, tribe, and religion, some others worked in
new fields. Srinivas planned to open up for sociological research social sec-
tors signifying changing India. Thus, N. R. Sheth worked on heavy industry,
R. D. Parikh on the print media, V. H. Joshi on economic development and
social change in a rural area, and I on historical sociology.6 The syllabi for
the B.A. and M.A. programmes also began to include topics and books on
social change. A concern for ideas of Weber and other thinkers also began.
As mentioned earlier, Srinivas contributed a note to the Weber-centred dis-
cussion in ‘Economic Development and Cultural Change’ in 1958 and also
perhaps began his interaction with Reinhard Bendix soon thereafter. He
also participated in the debates and discussions on these thinkers amongst
a remarkable group of social scientists in Baroda at that time: his depart-
mental colleague I. P. Desai, political scientist Rajni Kothari, economist
Iqbal S. Gulati, historian Satish Chandra Misra, archaeologist B. Subbarao,
and several others.

III
The main point is that when Srinivas came from Baroda to Delhi University
in 1959, his intellectual baggage did not consist only, not even dominantly,
of structural-functionalism. The latter was of course a part of it but one of
many parts, including Weber.

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In Delhi, Srinivas continued his work on the study of social change. He

published two seminal books on the subject during the 1960s: Caste in Mod-
ern India and Other Essays (1962) and Social Change in Modern India
(1966). As regards many papers on the subject, I would draw attention only
to the titles of papers in his bibliography in Shah, Baviskar and Ramaswamy
(1996: 219–226).
Srinivas carried forward in Delhi University a broad vision of comparative
sociology, which included sociology as well as social anthropology and the best
of what they offered. Its first telling testimony was the syllabus he prepared for
the M.A. programme as soon as he joined the university. As far as I know, he
prepared it single-handed.7 It was not restricted to structural-functionalism.
Other theories and approaches, including the Weberian one, were also rep-
resented in it adequately. When I joined the department in October 1961, I
recall, I first taught Max Gluckman’s The Judicial Process among the Barotse
of Northern Rhodesia (1955) under the paper, ‘Fieldwork Monographs’. This
was not a functionalist work, and Gluckman was known to have been influ-
enced by Marxism. I then taught Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (1930) and a few of the essays in the collection, From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology (1947), as part of the paper ‘Sociology of Religion’ and
consulted Bendix’s biography of Weber (1959). Srinivas’s two essays on Weber
mentioned earlier (1958, 1973b) and Bendix’s book were recommended to stu-
dents for reading, and at least the brighter students read them. I for one never
felt that the ruling theory in the department was functionalism.
The doctoral students in the department during the 1960s worked on a
variety of topics, and hardly any of them was under the spell of functional-
ism. I invite attention to the list of topics of Ph.D. theses given in the Hand-
book of Information of the department. To name a few, André Béteille wrote
on caste, class, and power; R. Jayaraman, on plantation labour in Sri Lanka;
Karuna Chanana, on women undergraduate students; E. A. Ramaswamy, on
conflict amongst trade unions and between them and factory owners; Bavis-
kar, on cooperatives and politics; and Anand Chakravarti, on contradiction
and change in a village.
Thus, structural-functionalism was not the ruling paradigm in Srinivas’s
personal research and writing, in his students’ research, and in the teaching
programmes in Baroda and Delhi. Of course, he had his own preferences,
but he did not impose them on others. Surely, he did not agree with Webe-
rian approach, but that did not prevent him from including Weber’s books
in teaching programmes and from allowing freedom to others to pursue
Weber’s thought in their work.
After Srinivas left Delhi and went to Bangalore in 1972, his mind worked
in many different directions. If he could write the paper ‘On Living in a
Revolution’ (1986), later publish a book with the same title (1992), and write
another paper, ‘An Obituary on Caste as a System’ (2003), surely he was far
away from structural-functionalism then.

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 S R I N I VA S , M A X W E B E R , A N D F U N C T I O N A L I S M

Notes
* This chapter was originally published in Sociological Bulletin, vol. 56, no. 1.
© 2007 Indian Sociological Society. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the per-
mission of the copyright holders and the publishers, Sage Publications India Pvt.
Ltd, New Delhi. I thank B. S. Baviskar, P. C. Joshi, Tulsi Patel, E. A. Ramaswamy,
and N. R. Sheth for their comments on the draft of this note.
1 It seems Singer was provoked to write this paper on reading certain observations
on India made by Eleanor Roosevelt in her book India and the Awakening East
(1953). He devoted more than a page in the beginning of the paper on discussing
her observations.
2 Goheen was professor of philosophy at Stanford University, and Karve, Deputy
Governor of the Reserve Bank of India.
3 To understand the relation amongst Srinivas, Radcliffe-Brown, and Evans-Pritchard,
see Srinivas’s several autobiographical pieces in his anthology (2002: 656–658,
675–679, 700–705, 711–712; reprinted in 2009).
4 For a more comprehensive account of Srinivas’s life and work in Baroda, see Shah
(2007a) and Chapter 2 in this book.
5 Interestingly, one of Srinivas’s last few papers was titled ‘An Obituary on Caste as
a System’ (delivered as a lecture in Bangalore, Delhi, and Kolkata under different
titles and published posthumously in 2003).
6 All these theses were published: Sheth (1968), Parikh (1965), Joshi (1966), and
Shah (2002a).
7 Srinivas joined the department of sociology as professor in February 1959 and
was the only member of the department at least till the end of June – three more
members seem to have joined only in the beginning of July. Srinivas drafted the
M.A. syllabus, piloted it through the authorities of the university, and received its
final approval in April; its teaching began in the middle of July.

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 4
SANSKRITISATION REVISITED *

It is well-known that one of the basic contributions of M. N. Srinivas to

the study of Indian society and culture is his concept and analysis of San-
skritisation. He used the concept first in his doctoral dissertation on Coorg
religion submitted to Oxford University in 1947 and published in 1952. As
Srinivas himself noted later (1967, reprinted in Srinivas 2002 and 2009), the
eminent linguist and historian Suniti Kumar Chatterjee (1950) also used the
term almost at the same time as Srinivas used it but without the two schol-
ars knowing about one another’s work. This was similar to the well-known
phenomenon in the physical sciences of a simultaneous discovery made by
two or more scientists without knowing one another’s work.
Srinivas’s concept has had a long career, culminating in its inclusion
in the Oxford English Dictionary (1971). This has happened because not
only Srinivas but also many other scholars have written extensively about
it. These scholars belong to a variety of disciplines: anthropology, sociol-
ogy, history, political science, linguistics, Sanskrit, Indology, and others. One
may agree or disagree with the concept, one may misunderstand it, or one may
interpret it differently, but one uses it all the same. The frequently used term
de-Sanskritisation also presumes Sanskritisation. The concept continues to
be used extensively even now and will, I am sure, continue to be used as
long as scholars are interested in understanding Indian culture and society
in space and time.

The word Sanskritisation

As soon as we use the term Sanskritisation, Sanskrit comes to mind. Indeed
several linguists such as Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, V. Raghavan and J. F.
Staal have commented on this aspect of the concept. Sanskritisation and
de-Sanskritisation of languages have taken place throughout Indian his-
tory. In modern India, however, there has been widespread Sanskritisation
of all regional languages, including tribal languages, except perhaps Tamil.
Use of standardised language in education, administration, print and elec-
tronic media, and other sectors of society, along with migrations from rural,

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including tribal, areas to urban centres, have played a major role in Sanskri-
tisation of regional languages. Rural, tribal, and caste dialects have been on
the way to extinction, if they have not already become so. Hindi, after its
recognition as an official language of India, has become highly Sanskritic.
There are now innumerable Sanskrit tongue-twisters, often obscure, in
bureaucratic parlance. Sanskrit words are also being used increasingly as
personal names in modem times all over India, including tribal areas, except
again perhaps in Tamil Nadu.
Sanskritisation is much more than a matter of language, however. Because
it is based on Srinivas’s concept of Sanskritic Hinduism, it is, of course,
concerned in a major way with religion. However, it is also concerned with
many other aspects of society and culture. Srinivas has described its features
in great detail in many of his writings. I will not, therefore, repeat them here.
Basically, these features are part of what is called great traditional, classical,
or higher Hinduism elaborated in classical Sanskrit texts.
Sanskritisation is a hybrid word. Srinivas himself stated that it was “an
ugly term” (1956a: 73, 1956b, 2002: 202) and “I myself do not like that
word. It is extremely awkward” (1956a: 90).1 A question is often asked,
particularly in discussions of the concept in regional languages: “Is this word
based on Sanskrit (name of the language) or sanskriti (meaning culture,
civilization)?” Both Srinivas and Chatterjee based it on the former rather
than the latter. For both of them, the concept was inextricably linked to the
religious and cultural complex found in classical Sanskrit literature. In any
case, however, in scientific discourse the substantive content of a term is far
more important than its etymology.

Evolution of the concept

To understand the basic nature of Sanskritisation, it is necessary to keep in mind
Srinivas’s original description and analysis of Sanskritic versus non-Sanskritic
culture in his Coorg book. Its foundation is laid in the initial two chapters on
‘The Ritual Idiom of Coorgs’. We find here a detailed analysis of items of cul-
ture concerning time, space, directions, shaving, bathing, dress, lamps, stoves,
rice, milk, coins, salutations, music, food, ritual purity and impurity, mourning,
funerals, betel leaves, areca nuts, and so on. Srinivas uses three rules formulated
by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, his teacher at Oxford, to decipher ritual idiom and
thus understand the language of Coorg rituals.2 He then uses this understand-
ing in the rest of the book to describe and analyze the nature of Hindu gods,
goddesses, and other sacred objects and personages; the rituals of their wor-
ship; the myths concerning them; the rites of passage; and the festivals, social
customs, and so on. It is in this context that he puts forward his concepts of
Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic Hinduism and of Sanskritisation.
Although Srinivas made a considerable number of general observations
on Indian society and culture in the Coorg book, the main focus of the book

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remained on Coorg society. In the years following its writing, he carried out
intensive fieldwork in the village of Rampura (pseudonym) and its neigh-
bourhood in the former Mysore state (now in Karnataka state) and also
read modern anthropological and sociological literature that was beginning
to appear. Armed with this new knowledge, he presented his thoughts on
Sanskritisation more comprehensively for the first time in ‘A Note on San-
skritisation and Westernization’, which he wrote for a seminar organised by
Milton Singer at Pune in July 1954. Srinivas could not attend the seminar
but sent the paper for publication in Far Eastern Quarterly.
In the meantime, he presented the same paper at the all-India confer-
ence of anthropologists and sociologists held at Madras (now Chennai) in
November 1955. While presenting the paper he spoke at some length to
introduce it. The paper, the speech, and the discussion were published in
the report of the conference in October 1956 (see Srinivas 1956a). In the
paper he expressed his awareness of “the complexity of the concept and its
looseness” (ibid: 75; 1956b, 2002: 202), and in the speech he expressed his
dissatisfaction with the word Sanskritisation (1956a: 90). Several leading
participants in the conference, such as V. Raghavan, Irawati Karve, N. K.
Bose, P. N. Prabhu, and N. Dutta-Majumder, criticised the paper sharply.
Srinivas’s replies were equally sharp:

I am afraid that in spite of the criticisms against the term Sansktiti-

zation, I shall continue to use it because there is nothing in any-
thing that has been said by anyone, including the president [Irawati
Karve], that has convinced me that I should discard it.
(ibid.: 113)

Taking advantage of the discussion at the conference, Srinivas added a

long note at the end of the paper on the eve of its publication in Far Eastern
Quarterly (1956b, reprinted in Srinivas 2002: 200–220). He stated here that
the concept was not “perfect” (2002: 219). However, he continued to use it,
re-examining it continuously in view of new data and new ideas because, as
he stated, “Perfectionism is often a camouflage for sterility” (2002: 219). In
all of his work, he believed, like E.E. Evans-Pritchard, his other teacher and
later colleague at Oxford, in the heuristic value of an idea rather than in its
truth value (see Fuller 1999, reprinted in Srinivas 2002: 702).
It is often said that the term Sanskritisation is only another word for
Brahminisation. However, Srinivas clarified in all his writings on the subject,
beginning with the Coorg book, that the Brahmans are not always the source
or agency of Sanskritisation. Often the non-Brahman castes play this role.
In fact, the source of Sanskritisation for a low non-Brahman caste can be
another non-Brahman caste just above it in hierarchy. It is also significant that
many sanyãsis and sadhus are highly Sanskritised in their behaviour without
being Brahmans, and they are an important agent of Sanskritisation. Even

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an Untouchable can be highly Sanskritised. The reason is that the source of

Sanskritisation may not be any caste at all; it can even be impersonal.

Sanskritisation and caste: culture and structure

Incomplete reading of Srinivas’s writings has often led to an impression that
Sanskritisation is essentially a process of emulation of the culture of upper
castes by lower castes for upward mobility in the ritual hierarchy of castes.
Many textbooks of sociology and social anthropology describe it this way.
Surely, this process of emulation exists and is important. Srinivas himself has
analyzed it at great length to such an extent that some of his statements have
contributed to this limited interpretation of the concept. However, it would
be a mistake to view it as confined to and limited by the caste order. In fact,
it is much wider and quite profound in application. Even in his Coorg book,
he often states that Sanskritisation of tribal and other outlying groups leads
to their inclusion in Hindu society. In a subsequent paper he states:

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 coun-
tries such as Ceylon, Indonesia, and Tibet.
(1967, reprinted in 2002: 221)

In this context, it is necessary to keep in view what I said earlier about

Srinivas’s analysis of the ritual idiom of Coorgs and how he used this
analysis in understanding their pantheon, rituals, myths, theological ideas
and values, festivals, customs and ceremonies, all leading to postulation of
the concepts of Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic Hinduism. In other words,
we have to think of the general nature of Hinduism, only a part of which
is linked with the caste order. That is why Srinivas clarified, “To describe
the social changes occurring in modern India in terms of Sanskritization
and westernization is to describe it primarily in cultural, not structural,
terms” (1956a: 90, 1956b, reprinted in 2002: 212; emphasis added). Fur-
thermore, “Sanskritization is a profound and many-sided cultural process,
only a part of which has structural relevance” (1967, reprinted in 2002:
222; emphasis added). In other words, its link with the caste order is only
a part of the whole. Srinivas stated, “Sanskritization . . . means also the
spread of certain values which are not directly connected with the caste
system” (l956a: 93).
One of the major changes in the caste system in modern India is a gradual
decline in concern for the ritual hierarchy of castes. This change is accom-
panied by a gradual disassociation of Sanskritisation from caste.3 It does
not mean, however, that this disassociation is complete or that the process

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of Sanskritisation itself is on the decline. On the contrary, it is becoming

increasingly important although in different ways.

New agents of Sanskritisation

For quite some time, non-caste and even anti-caste Sanskritic structures and
institutions have been multiplying, and each of them has been diversifying
its activities and promoting itself in many novel ways. Sects are one such
structure and that too representing a higher level of Sanskritic culture. Older
sects such as those founded by Shankaracharya, Ramanujacharya, Mad-
hvacharya, Vallabhacharya, Chaitanya, Basavanna, and Ramananda, and
relatively recent sects such as Swaminarayana, have been growing in terms
of followers, wealth, temples, monasteries, and diversification of activities.
Simultaneously, there is growing evidence from various parts of the country
that many new sects, usually small and localised, have been emerging all
over the country. A view prevalent for a long time that sects are castes in the
making, if they have already not become so, has come in the way of recognis-
ing them as one of the important non-caste structures and of understanding
their role not just in religion but also in economy, polity, and society at large.
Intensive investigations in every part of the country are required to get a
comprehensive view of the sectarian situation.
Another Sanskritising agency is a large number of god-men (babas,
bapus , gurus , swãmis , ãchãryas and mahãrajs) and god-women (mas ,
mãis, and matas) that have emerged in recent times. Some of them operate
almost all over the country and in many countries abroad, such as Satya
Sai Baba, Asharam Bapu, Morari Bapu, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and Mata
Amritanandmayi, to name only a few. Every one of them has one or more
ãshrams and a large number of followers, including the rich, the high, and
the mighty. Each gives discourses to large congregations and on television.
There are also many lesser god-men and god-women whose operations
are confined to small and local groups. It is difficult to say how many of
these god-men and god-women will become founders of new sects. When
such men and women pass away, their followers try to perpetuate their
legacy by forming new sectarian organisations, with varying success. The
Swadhyaya movement founded by Pandurang Athavale Shastri in western
India a few decades ago is an interesting example. After his death, it is
facing serious problems of perpetuating its original aims. Tensions and
conflicts have emerged amongst vested interests, and many followers have
deserted it.
Temples have always been a powerful agent of Sanskritisation. In modern
India, on the one hand, there is a phenomenal increase in pilgrim traffic
to large temples such as those in Tirupati, Madurai, Mathura, Kashi, Jag-
annath Puri, Nathadwara, Badrinath, Kedarnath, and Vaishnodevi. Conse-
quently these temples have a lot of wealth. On the other hand, new temples,

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small and large, are multiplying in every village, town, and metropolis. It is
remarkable how a little sacred spot made of a rough-hewn stone, sometimes
just a heap of such stones, grows into a full-fledged temple in a short time
everywhere in the country, not just in villages but even in large cities, and
every stage in its growth is marked by a higher level of Sanskritisation. All
sects, temples, and monasteries have important social, economic, and politi-
cal ramifications which need to be probed. There should be a national survey
of temples, and sociologists and social anthropologists should work out the
density of temples and of the temple-going populations in every part of the
country.
Religious books, periodicals, and newspapers have become powerful agents
of Sanskritisation amongst all castes, including the Dalits and the Adivasis.
Every regional-language newspaper issues a supplement on religion at least
once a week. The religious periodicals are so popular that the print-run of
some of them is in the tens of thousands, and their subscription rates are low.
Similarly, religious books, again very cheap, sell in large numbers. Religious
films, exclusively religious channels, religious programmes of other channels
on radio and television, and religious videos and audios also spread Sanskri-
tisation in a big way.
Migration of Sanskritic culture, not only amongst Indians but also amongst
non-Indians in many countries abroad, is becoming increasingly important.
Leaders of sects and other god-men and god-women regularly go abroad to
preach Hinduism, organise groups of followers, and build temples. There
is also an increasing interest worldwide in Ãyurvéda, yoga, Jyotish Shãstra,
Vãstu Shãstra, and classical music, dance, and drama – all of which promote
Sanskritisation in one way or other. The kind of Hinduism that is spreading
abroad is highly Sanskritic, usually packaged in attractive capsules. This
demand for Hinduism abroad has implications and complications for Hin-
duism at home.
One may wonder how Sanskritisation can grow in modem India when
it is also getting increasingly Westernised – some may prefer to say de-
Sanskritised. Srinivas has discussed this issue at length in many of his
writings, and I would not like to cover the same ground here. I may state
only briefly that there is a dialectical relation between the two processes
involving a selective attitude towards the past. Although some elements
of the past are renewed, some others are rejected. This selective attitude
does not reduce the importance of Sanskritisation. I may mention here
one typical illustration of the power of Sanskritic ideas. Nowadays mod-
ernised women do not observe during the period of menstruation the
traditional rules of purity and pollution. Nevertheless, they are highly
conscious of the same rules while worshipping gods in temples and homes
and while performing crucial rites of passage. They control the menstrual
period with the help of certain drugs made available by modern science
and technology.

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Sanskritisation amongst the Dalits and Adivasis

I will now discuss the complicated issue of Sanskritisation amongst the
Dalits and the Adivasis. As regards the Dalits, first of all I would like to
reiterate two well-known points. One, although the Dalits are not included
in the traditional four varna model, they have always been an integral part
of the Hindu social order. And two, in every region of the country, the Dalits
are divided into castes (jatis) with considerable specialisation of occupation
and arranged in a hierarchy of their own. This hierarchy replicates to a large
extent the hierarchy of the non-Dalit castes. For example, in Gujarat the
Dalits have a caste called Garoda (guru), which claims to be Brahman. Its
members wear the sacred thread, bear Brahmanic surnames such as Trivedi
and Vyas, and work as priests to other Dalit castes. They used to learn to
read the Hindu sacred texts even in the past and are well educated now.
There is also a caste of bards called Turis, who enjoy, like other bardic castes,
a certain sacred status amongst the Dalits. The caste of Bhangis (scavengers)
is the lowest. The middle rungs are occupied by Vankars (weavers), Chamars
(leatherworkers), and Senwas (menial workers, rope makers, and messen-
gers). In traditional society, the process of Sanskritisation operated amongst
the Dalits through this caste order; that is, a lower Dalit caste emulated the
culture of the higher Dalit castes. This happened, of course, in addition to
emulation of the culture of non-Dalit castes (see Shah 1987, 2002a; Chap-
ters 2 and 9 in Shah 2010).
In modern times, certain new developments are pushing this traditional
process further. First, the anti-untouchability laws have enabled, at least
legally, the Dalits to enter temples. This has facilitated their participation in
the Sanskritic culture of temples. Second, many older sects are now admit-
ting the Dalits as lay members, and new sects, like the Satnami sect in Chhat-
tisgarh, are also emerging amongst the Dalits. Third, in several parts of the
country, the Dalits are claiming descent from ancient figures like Valmiki and
Eklavya and are emulating the Sanskritic way of life. Fourth, with education,
new occupations, and migration to urban centres, the Dalits are increasingly
being influenced by Sanskritic Hinduism spread by the modern media. All in
all, these Sanskritising forces are enabling at least the upper castes amongst
the Dalits to get integrated into the wider social system, thus opening further
avenues of Sanskritisation for them. The lower Dalit castes, particularly the
scavengers, will take more time to get integrated.
As regards Sanskritisation amongst the so-called tribal groups, I would
like to tread cautiously because of my limited field experience amongst them
as well as inadequate reading of the literature on them. To begin with, I
would like to make a few general points. First, we need to change the general
approach that has reigned supreme for a long time in studying the tribals.
The use of the word tribe in the Indian context is itself problematic (see Shah
2003; Chapter 10, in Shah 2010). It is well-known that the terms tribe and

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aborigine are of Western origin, introduced by the colonial rulers in the late
18th and early 19th centuries. The present Indian terms janajati and adivasi
are translations of English words. In early times, there was no indigenous
generic term for all these groups. Usually each such group was referred to by
its individual name. It is ironic that the scholars who accept these facts con-
sider these groups as discrete, different, and isolated from the rest of Hindu
society. Most of the ethnographic information about them became available
only with the establishment of colonial rule, and ever since we have had it,
we have found them already infused with Hinduism in various degrees. This
was a result of centuries of Sanskritisation, however slow it might have been.
Those sections of tribals who lived in close proximity to Hindus – as indeed
many of them did – achieved a higher degree of Sanskritisation and the oth-
ers a lesser degree. Even those who lived in so-called inaccessible areas in
hills and forests were influenced by some degree of Sanskritisation at least.
It is hardly necessary to point out that inaccessibility is a relative matter, and
we have to ask: inaccessible for whom? It is unfortunate that even in recent
times a few scholars are valorising an anthropologist like Verrier Elwin, who
advocated an isolationist policy for the tribals.
Another major obstacle in a proper understanding of the tribal situation
is the monographic approach in studying the tribals. All perceptive students
of tribes have pointed out the interrelations amongst two or more tribes and
between them and the castes living in an area. However, the general image
of tribal society portrayed in anthropological literature shows every tribe as
isolated, not only from the Hindu society but also from other tribes. As far
as my knowledge goes, in every region, even in the North-East, there is con-
siderable intermingling amongst several tribal groups, and the interrelations
amongst them exhibit many of the features of inter-caste relations. However,
this aspect of their lives is rarely projected in the general literature on the
tribals. The artificial distinction between sociology and social anthropology
has also contributed in no small measure to this approach.
A third problem is the lack of recognition, let alone appreciation, of a kind
of symbiosis that existed between the tribes and Hindu castes in the past.
Such symbiosis existed especially between tribal chiefs and many Hindu
kings and between tribal people and many popular Hindu temples. This
symbiosis often led to hypergamous relations between the tribal chiefs and
the ruling castes, eventually leading the tribes to claim Rajput or Kshatriya
status. All in all, there is under-reporting of the impact of forces of Sanskri-
tisation amongst the tribal people in the past.
During the period of British rule and after independence, the process of
Sanskritisation has advanced further amongst the tribal groups due to a
variety of forces: education, modern communications, new occupations,
migration to towns as well as to high caste villages, and above all, the influ-
ence of religious personages such as bhagats and of their movements for
religious change. In recent years, two significant developments have taken

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place in tribal areas. First, a number of sadhus and sants are now giving
discourses on Sanskritic themes and in Sanskritised language in these areas.
Secondly, while mainstream Hindu sects are spreading in these areas, new
sects are emerging amongst the tribal groups themselves. We may recall here
Surajit Sinha’s (1966) paper on the influence of the Chaitanya sect amongst
the Bhumij of Jharkhand and, even more important, his reference to S. C.
Roy’s (1912) brief mention earlier of the same sect amongst the neighbour-
ing Mundas of Ranchi. In an exploratory study, R. B. Lal (1977) reported the
presence of seven sectarian movements amongst the tribals of south Gujarat.
Recently, in another exploratory study, Lancy Lobo (1992) has reported
the presence of nine sectarian groups amongst practically the same tribals.
Historian David Hardiman (2003) has written on the emergence of a sect
amongst the Bhils on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border during the early 20th
century. Similarly, R. K. Sinha and William Ekka (2003) have shown how
the Pranami sect with its main centre at Jamnagar in Saurashtra has spread
amongst the Patelia on the border between Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
Sects have thus become an increasingly significant influence on the tribals,
and as I stated earlier, sects represent a higher level of Sanskritic culture. It
is, therefore, necessary to study carefully the increasing pace of Sanskritisa-
tion amongst the so-called tribals and its implications for Indian society as
a whole.

Conclusion
In recent years, a few scholars, particularly historians of the subaltern school,
have argued that Sanskritisation is a kind of conversion. It is true that certain
politically motivated fundamentalist Hindu organisations in recent times
have been organising certain activities amongst the Dalits and the Adivasis
which could be construed as attempts at conversion. However, to call tra-
ditional Sanskritisation as conversion would be a misunderstanding of its
nature. To understand its nature one has to observe the process of adoption
of the items of Sanskritic culture by a group in minute detail. The general
impression that an entire caste or tribe as a collectivity gets Sanskritised all
at one go is false. In reality, it is a long-drawn process in which the individual
members of a caste or tribe adopt one item of culture after another from
a respectable source or agent – a neighbour, a relative, a guru, a temple, a
monastery, a religious discourse, a book, and so on. When this incremental
process reaches a critical stage, the caste, or tribe, or a section of it claims
a higher status as a collectivity. The Sanskritised section might even form
a new caste or sub-caste. This stage is usually marked by a dramatic event
announcing the ‘arrival’. Even for a sadhu or sant to give a discourse on a
Sanskritic theme, or for a fundamentalist organisation to attempt conver-
sion, in a tribe or caste, would require a certain level of Sanskritisation already
achieved by that group after a long process of Sanskritisation.

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In the changing social scenario, the process of Sanskritisation is thus get-

ting increasingly delinked from castes, including the so-called untouchable
castes, and from the so-called tribes. The upper castes are no longer the
sole, or even the main, agents of Sanskritisation for the lower castes, and a
number of non-caste structures and institutions, many of them impersonal,
have become powerful agents of this process, so much so that there is greater
Sanskritisation of society as a whole. Sociologists and social anthropologists
need to study the process in diverse changing contexts and think of its impli-
cations for the future of Indian society and culture.

Notes
* This essay is a revised version of my paper presented at the national seminar ‘Pro-
fessor M. N. Srinivas: The Man and His Work’ organised by the Anthropological
Association of Mysore on 16–18 November 2004. I thank the participants at the
seminar and Owen M. Lynch and McKim Marriott for their comments. Published
in Sociological Bulletin, 2005, 54 (2) 1–12. Reprinted in P. K. Misra, K. K. Basa,
and H. K. Bhat (eds.), M. N. Srinivas: The Man and His Work (Jaipur: Rawat,
2007). This chapter has previously appeared in my volume The Structure of Indian
Society. London: Routledge India. 2010.
1 While citing Srinivas’s papers and Fuller’s interview with him, reprinted in Srini-
vas’s Collected Essays (2002, 2009), I have mentioned, for the reader’s convenience,
the original date of publication as well as the date of publication and pages in the
collection.
2 These three rules are quoted in Srinivas (1952a: 72). Milton Singer (1996) has shown
how these rules were essentially structuralist and antedated Claud Levi-Strauss’s
structuralism and how Srinivas was a pioneer in applying them in analyzing rituals –
and that too in a complex civilization such as India and not in a simple primitive
society.
3 The concern for secular hierarchy, however, continues to be strong if it has not
become stronger. Moreover, there is an increasing emphasis on the principle vari-
ously called division, difference, segmentation, and repulsion, which competes
with the principle of hierarchy. It is becoming increasingly clear that the overriding
emphasis that some scholars placed on ritual hierarchy as the defining principle of
caste was not applicable even in traditional Indian society (see Shah 1982; Chapter 8
in Shah 2010; Shah and Desai 1988).

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 5
AN INTERVIEW WITH
M. N. SRINIVAS *

I interviewed Srinivas at length in several sessions in Delhi

during August–November 1998 and finalised the script in
August 1999 with his approval.

AMS: What was the status of anthropology and sociology in India in 1951,
when you returned from Oxford to take up the professorship of sociology
at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda?
MNS: Nationalist Indians were suspicious of anthropology, for during the
pre-Independence years anthropologists were either curious British offi-
cials, missionaries, or more rarely, foreign academics. They were unanimous
that the tribal population of India needed to be protected from the more
advanced people from the plains. The establishment view was that tribal life
and culture had to be insulated from the caste system and Hindus (but not
from Christian missionaries). Nationalists saw in this only a confirmation
of their deep suspicion that the British were determined to continue their
rule by dividing the people in every possible way, and anthropologists were
suspected of wanting to keep the tribals isolated to pursue their ‘blessed
science’.
In contrast, the low status of sociology was a reflection of British aca-
demic prejudice against the subject. It regarded sociology as ‘foreign’ (read
‘European’) and mixed up with socialism. Sociology became popular in Brit-
ish universities only in the 1950s. Oxbridge-trained Indians wielded much
influence in India during the colonial years, and they were anti-sociology.
But after Independence the exigencies of planned development in a vast,
complex, and diverse country such as India led sociology’s becoming popu-
lar in the 1950s and 1960s. Both sociology and social anthropology are now
seen as essential to understanding Indian society and culture, particularly as
they are undergoing rapid change, but neither enjoys the status of econom-
ics, which is seen as indispensable to good governance.

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AMS: How did you feel moving from Oxford to Baroda?

MNS: First of all, I had no idea of the kind of situation that I would be facing
when I moved from one of the oldest universities in Western Europe to the
university in Baroda, which had been started only two years earlier. The con-
trast between Oxford and Baroda could not have been greater. During the
first year of my stay in Baroda, I went around in a kind of daze, wondering
what I had let myself in for. Sometimes I got the impression that the people
around me were playing at setting up a university. I felt nostalgic for Oxford,
where academic conventions were several centuries old. But deep down in
me, I knew that I had to make a go of my job as I wanted to stay in India.

AMS: What ideas did you follow in devising teaching programmes at the
new departments of sociology you started at Baroda and Delhi Universities?
MNS: I gave much thought to devising syllabuses for students at different lev-
els, since I had my own ideas regarding the kind of sociology that needed to
be developed in India. I wanted a judicious mix of Durkheimian sociology
and British social anthropology at the B.A. and M.A. levels, with insistence on
experience of intensive fieldwork at the Ph.D. Max Weber was also included
as essential reading, and I wanted students at the master’s level to read criti-
cally at least two classics such as Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life (1912) and Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capi-
talism (1930). I also included fieldwork monographs such as Evans-Pritchard’s
The Nuer (1940), Whyte’s Street Corner Society (1943), and Ray Smith’s The
Negro Family in British Guiana (1956). In selecting these monographs I had
also another aim: to get my students acquainted with different cultures. I had
also compulsory courses on general sociology and Indian social institutions.
In Delhi, in contrast to the economics faculty, which worked on planning,
international trade, and mathematical models of growth and was generally
theoretically oriented, sociology concentrated on village, caste, kinship, reli-
gion, etc. Gradually, we established a reputation for doing serious empirical
work, and such theory as we had grew out of the material rather than being
imposed on it. All in all, we tried to develop a sociology which included a
large component of social anthropology. I myself preferred to treat the two
disciplines as one, since, particularly in the Indian context, I regarded it is as
artificial if not meaningless to draw a clear line between the two.

AMS: During your first few years in Baroda, you were very much under the
influence of structural-functionalism. What led you to come out of it and
turn to the study of social change?
MNS: I don’t like being labelled, but I suppose that my students in Baroda
could not help seeing me as a structural-functionalist. It is true that

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I became a convert to structural-functionalism under the influence of

Radcliffe-Brown in 1945–1946, but by the time I left Oxford in June
1951, my outlook had changed significantly. I considered genuine his-
torical evidence, where available, essential to the understanding of the
functioning of a society, and I had also ceased to believe that social anthro-
pology was a ‘natural science of society’ and that there were ‘sociological
laws’ comparable to laws in physics. My adversaries insisted on calling
me a structural-functionalist because they thought that it condemned me
to a static view of society. It also carried with it the innuendo that I was a
reactionary in my social and political views. The fact that I wrote a book
entitled Social Change in Modern India (1966) did not earn me a reprieve.
Marxism was the dominant ideology amongst the middle-class elite in
post-Independence India, and anyone who did not subscribe to Marxism
was regarded as a reactionary. It was particularly so in economics and his-
tory and less so in political science and sociology. Structural-functionalism,
in the hands of Marxists and other ‘progressives’ became a useful weapon
for denigrating me and my work.

AMS: You have stated that Radcliffe-Brown’s ideas launched you on a

new path in anthropology in the late 1940s. How far are his ideas relevant
today?
MNS: Radcliffe-Brown made important contributions to the study of kin-
ship and religion. My analysis of Coorg ritual owes a lot to him and to his
analysis of the meaning of ritual acts in The Andaman Islanders (1922).
‘Social structure’ was a basic idea of Radcliffe-Brown’s, and it proved to
be very useful in the analysis of lineage systems in Africa. Evans-Pritchard
acknowledged his indebtedness to Radcliffe-Brown in the preface to The
Nuer (1940). According to Meyer Fortes, E-P was looking for a suitable
term to describe the Nuer system, and when he described his data to R-B at
a meeting in London in 1930, R-B said, “They are lineages” and proceeded
to give a lecture on lineages!
I find the concept of social structure essential to thinking about societies
and the behaviour of human beings in societies. I do not know if this sounds
strange to the present generation of anthropologists. First, culture seems
to have been preeminent in American anthropology, and social structure
accorded at best a secondary place. I may be wrong, but that is my impres-
sion. Second, with structuralism becoming dominant in anthropology since
the 1970s, social structure has been pushed into the background, while cul-
ture occupies centre stage. And anthropology has become formless, with
everything coming to be included in culture. This may be welcomed as the
expansion of the frontiers of anthropology, but the cost has been very high:
It seems to be in danger of losing its identity.

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AMS: Your book Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952a)
has been described as a classic. What, in your view, are its contributions?
MNS: A few years after the book was published, Meyer Fortes (1955) wrote
about it as follows:

Even more impressive is Professor Srinivas’s recent book. . . . Here

Radcliffe-Brown’s methods and theories are ably applied to the
religious system of a complex Oriental society. Professor Srinivas
shows that there is as close an interlocking of religious institutions
with the family and kinship system, the laws of inheritance and
succession, and the principles determining the status of persons
among the Coorgs as among the Australians and the Andamanese.
He shows how the study of “higher” religions can be set free from
the crippling trammels of theology, metaphysics and philology and
brought within reach of social science.

It is only fair to add that Fortes was one of my teachers in Oxford.

Using Radcliffe-Brown’s idea of ‘ritual idiom’, I analyzed the complex and
pervasive ideas of pollution and purity underlying Coorg and, indeed, all Hindu
religious and social life. I also analyzed the Coorg ritual complex of mangala,
which was a 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 Danger (1966). The
ideas of Sanskritisation and Westernisation 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.
The Coorg study was the first to be written from a structural-functional
point of view, and it was sharply focussed, only data relevant to the theme
being presented. As such, it marked a new trend in anthropological mono-
graphs on India. Earlier monographs were general and descriptive and lacked
focus. On the negative side, the Coorg book was deterministic and, as Max
Gluckman pointed out to me, ignored crosscutting relationships. I must also
add that my colleague and friend I. P. Desai told me that I had ‘atoned’ for
the Coorg book when I wrote The Remembered Village (1976). I think what
he meant was that I had cast a baleful influence on Indian sociology as a
result of the ideas I had used in the book and the manner in which I had writ-
ten it. I. P., I may add, was a rationalist and Marxist and was anti-religion.

AMS: Do you think that the ideas which came from you in the 1950s –
‘Sanskritisation’ ‘Westernisation’, ‘dominant caste’, and ‘vote bank’, continue
to be useful for understanding India today?
MNS: I think they continue to be useful, but then I am a partisan! As a
result of the array of forces released by India’s Independence, vast numbers

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of disadvantaged groups have secured access to education, the professions,

white-collar jobs, and other economic opportunities. India’s middle classes
are currently estimated at about 200 million, and their material success is usu-
ally followed by attempts to achieve higher social status. A great bourgeois
revolution is on in India. The lifestyles of millions are changing although in
seemingly contrary directions – Sanskritisation and Westernisation. Urban
residence, education, good income, consumerism, and some changes in life-
style are essential for claiming middle-class status. (These changes I subsume
under Westernisation.) Once middle-class status is gained, those who have
arrived try hard to maintain it and also to move up. This involves coping with
new concerns and anxieties by visiting temples, going on pilgrimages, seek-
ing out miracle-performing holy men, and consulting astrologers. Life-cycle
rituals become more elaborate, and vegetarianism, yoga, and meditation
become part of a Sanskritised lifestyle. At the same time, birthdays and wed-
ding anniversaries are celebrated in Western style, with parties, alcohol, cake
cutting, and so on. On the secular front, getting children admitted to good
schools, seeking admission to professional courses of study, and conspicu-
ous consumerism become important goals. The ‘dominant castes’ have been
amongst the biggest beneficiaries of Independence, and they dominate politi-
cal, economic, and cultural life in the country. They act as models for the
castes below them but resent being emulated.
The coming years will see an enormous increase in the conflict between
the dominant castes and the Dalits (former Untouchables) everywhere. What
is most interesting is that Sanskritisation has assumed an entirely new mean-
ing with Dalits and other ‘low-status’ castes. It has become a symbol of
revolt and an assertion of their equality with the high castes. It fuels the
wrath of the latter, leading to clashes between the two.
‘Vote bank’ is now perhaps the most used term in Indian political discourse.
The term is also used in the regional languages without being translated.

AMS: How far is your distinction between the ‘field view’ and the ‘book
view’ justified when ‘books’ are a part of the life of the people?
MNS: Until the beginning of the 20th century, only a tiny percentage of the
population, and mostly men at that, were literate. Given this situation, how
could books be a part of the life of the people? This is an easy way of coun-
tering your question, but I will not take it, for ‘books’ reached the people
indirectly through a variety of interpreters. These books were the two epics,
Ramayana and Mahabharata, the purānas, ancient Indian folktales, and the
almanac (panchānga). They usually reached them in the local languages,
either translated from the original Sanskrit or as creative works. Chanting
the epics was an art, and the man who chanted usually also provided a com-
mentary. The epics were also a major source for the development of local
song, dance, and drama.

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Philosophical and ethical ideas which form part of the great tradition of
Hinduism reached the people through the epics, lives of saints, and ancient
tales, but these are different from the normative ideas in the Vedas and
Dharmashāstras (law books). In places where there was a raja or other
enforcing authority, the norms got enforced, though even there customary
rules were respected. But the raja’s writ ran only in the capital and its periph-
ery, while in rural areas the council of the dominant caste or councils of
individual castes enforced local codes. The lack of roads and the fact that
monsoon rains cut villages off from urban centres for long periods of time
forced the former to fend for themselves. It should not be forgotten that the
ancient lawmaker Manu recognised the importance of customary rules. All
this resulted in tremendous cultural diversity not only between regions but
also between castes and ethnic groups. Thus, most non-Brahmin castes prac-
tised widow marriage, polyandry was the rule in some areas, and matriliny
was widespread in the west coast of South India. Hypergamy was practised
in parts of western India and Bengal, while a hypergamous idiom combined
with village exogamy characterised large areas of northern India. Cross-
cousin and cross-uncle–niece marriages were widely practised in peninsular
India.
Books are indeed a part of the life of the people, and that is one of the
reasons India is a civilization. But it is important to distinguish between nor-
mative and non-normative literature and to recognise the role of the agents
and institutions which transmitted the books in translation to large masses
of people who were unable to read and write.

AMS: You were a pioneer in village studies in the 1950s. Why did you con-
sider them so important?
MNS: My own village study was carried out as a result of a point made
by Radcliffe-Brown in a lecture – that in the sacred literature of India, the
Brahmin was portrayed as pure and learned, while in the proverbs he was
ridiculed for his avarice, gluttony, etc. It was a pity, he said, that there were
no studies by trained anthropologists of day-to-day interaction between dif-
ferent castes in a local community. R-B’s remarks set me thinking about
doing a field study of a multi-caste village, concentrating on day-to-day rela-
tions between members of diverse castes living there. For various reasons,
my Coorg study had been based on short trips to field sites to collect infor-
mation from knowledgeable Coorgs and not on participant observation,
and I wanted to have experience of participant observation.
I spent ten months in Rampura village in 1948, and it proved to be a
great learning experience. One particular lesson that was forced on me was
the gulf between the view of Indian society gathered from the sacred books
and that obtained directly by living in a small community. The disjunction
between the ‘field view’ and the ‘book view’ of Indian society thus became

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a central element in my thinking. 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 impor-
tance of dominant, landed castes became clear to me, and I saw Indian his-
tory very differently from popular views about it. The importance of the
idea of a ‘field view’ obtained recognition in studies of Indian society, but the
publication of Homo Hierarchicus by Louis Dumont (1970) brought back
the ‘book view’ with a bang, and the ‘field’ is now regarded by many as only
a reflection of the ‘book’.
Anthropological studies of villages provided a hitherto unopened window
for understanding Indian society, culture, and civilization. The fact that con-
siderable differences existed between even neighbouring villages forced one
to realise the need for field studies of as many villages as possible. My critics
were very cynical about village studies and asked, “What, one more village
study?” while economists and statisticians asked, “How can you generalise
from studying one village?” The assumption behind such questions was that
the aim of all scholarly study should be to produce generalisations which can
then be turned into policy capsules for implementation by those in power.
The village studies were carried out when Indian society was poised for pro-
found change, and this greatly enhanced their value. They also marked the
enlargement of the scope of social anthropology to include the study of peas-
ants and of cultural and social change. Since peasants, though living in seem-
ingly isolated communities, were influenced by the encompassing civilization,
studying them provided a rich entry point to the study of that civilization.
In 1955 I was able to edit India’s Villages, a collection of field accounts
of villages by anthropologists which had been published earlier in The Eco-
nomic Weekly of Bombay. To my surprise, the modest collection was widely
welcomed and marked an important step forward in wiping out the nega-
tive image of anthropology and sociology in the country. About the same
time, another important collection of village studies, Village India, edited by
McKim Marriott (1955), was also published.

AMS: Would you now recommend another round of village studies?

MNS: I would indeed, but I doubt very much whether they would be carried
out. In some ways, India’s villages continue to be laboratories for anthro-
pologists to test their hunches. In other words, village studies carried out in
the 1950s and 1960s are not only important in themselves but indispensable
for understanding the trends of social change. Further, because anthropolo-
gists only write up a small amount of the data collected by them, there is an
urgent need to create an institution for storing their data and making them
accessible to scholars. There is not enough awareness in India of the impor-
tance of the data collected by anthropologists and of the need to store them
safely and make them accessible to scholars.

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AMS: You are regarded as a staunch advocate of the method of ‘participant

observation’. Would you advocate using it for studying aspects of urban
and industrial society? And would it be of any use in shedding light on so
complex a society as India?
MNS: Participant observation has been used with conspicuous success by
Indian anthropologists in the study not only of tribes and villages but also of
aspects of urban and industrial society. My students have carried out insight-
ful studies of factories, trade unions, cooperatives, hospitals, and entrepreneurs.
Regarding the second part of the question, I would say that well-trained
anthropologists using participant observation are uniquely qualified to
obtain ideas and insights into Indian culture. Speaking of my own fieldwork,
apart from the ideas and insights it gave me, it has endowed me with a con-
tinuous resource for increasing my understanding of so bafflingly complex a
phenomenon as Indian civilization. It is difficult to explain this to those who
have no experience of participant observation, but it remains a fact.
Although participant observation is ideally suited for studying people liv-
ing in local settings, honest investigators follow the links of the people they
are studying to the outside world. Thus while concentrating on a village or
even a section of a village such as landless labourers, they trace their marital
links, accompany them on pilgrimages, and find out about their political
preferences. And if they are studying software engineers in Bangalore, they
try to trace their links to Boston and the Silicon Valley, California.
I would like to add that if a few micro studies are undertaken as part
of a macro study, both are likely to be more productive. While the macro
study provides the perspective, the micro study provides insights, and each
enriches the other.

AMS: Would you say that the basic contribution of fieldwork experience is
in transforming the approach and outlook of the fieldworker?
MNS: Experience of intensive fieldwork does result in changing the approach
and outlook of the fieldworker, but I would not regard that as its main con-
tribution. Doing intensive fieldwork is expensive in terms of money and
time and other resources, and since the funds usually come from a public
source, the anthropologist has an obligation to collect reliable information
on the theme he or she selects and to write a book or report on it. This is
the return that the funding agencies and the profession expect from him or
her. What the fieldwork experience does to the anthropologist is certainly
important but secondary.
Intensive fieldwork enables anthropologists, if they are imaginative, to
place themselves in the position of the people they are studying and look at
the world as they do. The knowledge and insights which fieldworkers obtain
are only partly intellectual and partly also emotional. The latter element is
extremely important in grasping the inner world of the indigenes. This is

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particularly difficult in areas such as morals, religion, and worldview. Fur-

ther, in the past two or three decades anthropologists have begun to study
the emotions experienced by the people as they consider them an important
part of the data; emotions have been ignored, by and large, in traditional
structural-functional studies.
Ideally, experience of intensive fieldwork ought to enable anthropologists
to view cultures and societies holistically, and I regard the ability, which with
experience becomes a habit, to view particular institutions in the context of
the total culture as distinctive of anthropologists.

AMS: Why did the study of the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, and women
not receive special attention from anthropologists during the 1950s and 1960s?
MNS: Anthropologists in the pre-Independence years were preoccupied with
the study of tribes, though G. S. Ghurye in Bombay regarded the whole of
Indian culture and society as his academic territory. From the 1950s onward
the emphasis shifted to the study of villages and castes. Scheduled castes
and tribes and women were indeed studied but usually as part of the com-
munities in which they lived. It was only during the 1970s that scheduled
castes and women began to make their presence felt on the national scene.
A section of the Mahars of Maharashtra, calling themselves the Dalit Pan-
thers (modelling themselves on the Black Panthers of California), started a
violent movement for asserting their rights. They came into conflict with
the higher castes and the police, and this attracted wide attention. A few
scheduled caste writers wrote tracts and stories describing their experiences
and struggles. They created a new genre of literature which was emulated
in Karnataka and a few other regions. An aggressive movement came into
existence with Dalits (scheduled castes) assuming a national identity.
The feminist movement also took wing in the 1970s, and women began
to organise themselves to demand equal rights with men in every area of life.
The movement has gone through various phases, and the latest is a demand
for reservation of one-third of the seats in all legislatures from the central
parliament downwards.
Anthropologists, like other social scientists, respond to the forces around
them, with the result that the problems tackled vary with each new gen-
eration. In a few areas, however, anthropologists have led the other social
scientists, for instance, in studying castes. Those who wrote about castes in
the 1950s and 1960s were regarded as reactionary, for the leftist intellectuals
who wielded much influence in political and cultural circles were convinced
that caste was being replaced by class in India. It was only in the late 1980s
that they became supporters of quotas for backward castes, calling it a ‘secu-
lar revolution’. Anthropologists also studied such enduring themes as kin-
ship and religion, and these were also unfashionable. Progress was perceived
as moving away from everything traditional.

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AMS: India’s villages have changed radically during the past four or five
decades. Has this not rendered the village studies of the 1950s and 1960s
irrelevant to understanding rural society today?
MNS: Villages have indeed changed radically since the 1950s, but I don’t
think that this has rendered the earlier studies irrelevant. On the contrary,
they are useful as a sort of benchmark (although not quantitatively) for
understanding the extent to which change has occurred. It is well-known
that the quantum of change is not uniform and that by and large, the more
prosperous areas have changed more radically. In the more backward areas,
for instance, annual grain payments to artisan and servicing castes are likely
to be continuing, while in the more prosperous ones, they are likely to have
been replaced by cash wages and the same with other institutions such as
bonded labour, begar (forced labour), employment of child labour, etc. Tak-
ing a few linked criteria, the degree of change that has occurred in a region
could be estimated. Of course, this would have to be done with much cau-
tion, and I would prefer to see it done for a small, well-studied region before
attempting it on a wider scale.

AMS: All your fieldwork has been carried out in India, but as a teacher you
always advocated ‘comparative sociology’. How do you reconcile the two?
MNS: I see no contradiction. My serious fieldwork experience ended in
1952, when I paid a second visit to my field village of Rampura in South
India. The funding situation for fieldwork was pitiful before the 1950s, and
only employees of the Anthropological Survey of India had access to some
funding. Sometimes a provincial or princely state government supported
field research in its area, but that was unusual. C. von Furer-Haimendorf,
for instance, was able to get funds for his research because he was the tribal
adviser to the government of Hyderabad under the Nizam besides being a
professor of anthropology and social work. He was also very close to the
British officials in the government. Verrier Elwin’s work was supported by
Merton College, Oxford, the Dorabji Tata Trust, and a few British patrons
till he became Deputy Director of the Anthropological Survey of India in
the 1950s.
You will be surprised to learn that I did my 1940–1942 fieldwork in Coorg
on a fellowship of 75 rupees a month, and when I wrote up my field notes,
I was research assistant to Ghurye (1942–1944) on a monthly salary of 125
rupees. The duties of a research assistant were quite heavy, and I resigned
my job in May 1944 in order to devote all my time to completing my dis-
sertation. Funding did improve substantially after 1968 or so, but even now
it is almost impossible to obtain funds for field research outside India. In the
absence of funds, the only way to be comparative is through studying the
literature about other countries. Of course, this is nowhere near as good as
personal experience of fieldwork, but it is better than nothing. Finally, I have

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lived abroad in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Sin-
gapore for fairly long periods, and this has added to my experience of other
cultures. Here again, living in another culture is no substitute for field study.
I do think that anthropology has to be comparative, but there are differ-
ences amongst anthropologists about how best to compare. Is it by compar-
ing within a ‘culture area’ or by contrasting two totally different cultures as
Louis Dumont did in Homo Hierarchicus (1970)? In a sense, however, all
anthropological writing is comparative, for while writing, one is implicitly
comparing it with the culture one has grown up in. Comparison seems to be
implicit in all anthropological writing.

AMS: Anthropology is regarded as the study of ‘the other’. Is this view justi-
fied when a large number of anthropologists are now engaged in the study
of their own societies?
MNS: The view that anthropology is the study of ‘the other’ is even now
very widely held in the West. And the study of ‘the other’ is thought to be
essential to the understanding of one’s own society and culture and even-
tually of oneself. Edmund Leach has argued that the study of one’s own
society is extremely difficult, one’s membership of it producing prejudices
which prevent a proper understanding of it. Such prejudices are, he implies,
absent in studying alien societies. It is a matter of common knowledge that
anthropology is a by-product of European colonial experience and asso-
ciated missionary enterprise. Travellers, administrators, and missionaries
wrote up accounts of the lives of the exotic peoples they had encountered
for the benefit of the stay-at-homes. The next phase was the effort to sys-
tematise the available information by armchair anthropologists in Europe
and the United States under the prevailing paradigms, first progress and then
evolution. Out of the pioneering efforts of E. B. Tylor, Sir James Frazer, and
Robertson Smith in England and Lewis H. Morgan in the United States grew
the discipline of cultural and social anthropology. The circumstances of the
origin of anthropology understandably gave rise to the view that the disci-
pline concerned itself with the study of ‘the other’, of exotic, non-Western
peoples, by Caucasian anthropologists. However, after the end of World War
One, a few students from non-Western countries began studying anthropol-
ogy in European universities and then returned to teach and do research
in their own countries. Thus G. S. Ghurye and K. P. Chattopadhyaya stud-
ied anthropology in Cambridge under W.H.R. Rivers and returned to India
in the 1920s to teach at Bombay and Calcutta Universities, respectively.
Ghurye in particular laid the foundations of anthropology and sociology in
India by encouraging his students to study every aspect and section of Indian
society and culture. Although an armchair scholar himself, he encouraged
his students to do fieldwork in tribal, rural, and urban India. With his train-
ing in Sanskrit before moving into anthropology, it was only natural for

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him to encourage research into ancient India. Besides Ghurye, Radhakamal

Mukherjee and D. N. Majumdar in Lucknow and N. K. Bose in Bengal all
promoted research into Indian culture.
Since the 1950s the number of anthropologists and sociologists in India
has increased substantially, and they are engaged in the study of all aspects
of their ancient but changing society and culture. The situation is similar in
the other countries of South Asia and in parts of East and South-East Asia.
Differences of language, dialect, religion, sect, caste, class, and ethnicity
confront Indian anthropologists at every point so that they can find ‘the
other’ in an adjacent village, tribe, or backyard slum. But the Indian ‘other’
is different from the ‘other’ of the European or American anthropologist. It
is ‘the other’ within an encompassing unity that exists even though it is not
easily perceivable. The situation could be summed up saying that ‘the other’
represents only a difference of degree and not of kind, which is what it is
when a European studies a tribe in Africa, India, or the Pacific islands. The
‘other’ which Indian anthropologists study is, then, qualitatively different
from the classical ‘other’. Indeed, there is a need for extending the anthropo-
logical method to the study of one’s own family and even one’s own life. It
is not difficult to conceive of one’s own life as an ethnographic field, though
its exploration calls for extraordinary skill, sensitivity, and detachment.

AMS: You have reacted strongly against demands from politicians and admin-
istrators that anthropologists carry out research bearing directly on problems
of development and directed social change. Why?
MNS: I have written repeatedly on how anthropologists are enabled by their
training and experience to look at a society as a whole made up of inter-
dependent parts. The discovery of linkages between institutions and ideas
is not at all easy in modern, extremely complex, diverse, and highly dif-
ferentiated societies. Perceiving the linkages of an idea or institution and
locating it in the context of the total society is an essential part of analysis
and understanding.
While anthropologists are trained to analyze and understand the behav-
iour of human beings in society, their understanding does not necessarily
enable them to intervene to be ‘social engineers’. Further, there may also be
differences of opinion about what is desirable social change and how best to
promote it. This task is best left to the elected representatives of the people in
a democracy. Briefly, anthropologists may contribute to the understanding of
the situation and may be able to make clear the choices available to admin-
istrators. Intervention is an entirely different matter. In developing countries,
administrators and politicians are known to make demands on social sci-
entists to produce ‘tangible solutions’ for highly complicated problems in
absurdly short periods of time. Getting involved in research into such prob-
lems is likely to bring disrepute to the researcher and his or her discipline.

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AMS: How do you assess the status of sociology and social anthropol-
ogy in India today? To what extent is the study of India central to their
development?
MNS: Compared with the period before Independence, sociology and social
anthropology have made much progress in the country. They are taught in
many universities, and in a few they attract able students. Several Indian
sociologists have achieved an international reputation, and they write in
national newspapers on matters of public concern. The Indian Sociological
Society has a membership of nearly 2,000, and during the past 15 years the
Sociological Bulletin, the official publication of the society, has achieved a
high intellectual standard. Contributions to Indian Sociology is also a first-
rate journal.
But unfortunately that is not the whole story. In many universities and
colleges in the country, large numbers of undergraduates choose sociol-
ogy because it is regarded as a ‘soft’ option. Students are able to do well
in examinations by reading cram books written by mediocre teachers.
Anyone who looks at the undergraduate scene in sociology cannot help
feeling depressed. As regards the second part of your question, anthropol-
ogy and sociology cannot afford to ignore India and China, that is, if we
take the long view. Apart from their size and population, they encompass
enormous cultural and social diversity, and they are emerging as world
powers. Speaking of India specifically, democracy has struck roots in the
country, and the recent attempts to deepen it by decentralisation (through
Panchayati Raj) and providing reservation for women and the weaker
sections of the population in local self-government are a phenomenon of
great importance not only to all developing countries but to the world as
a whole.

AMS: Critics have praised you for your simple and jargon-free style. Any
comments?
MNS: There are areas of sociology and social anthropology which are tech-
nical and of interest only to specialists. But there are many areas which are
of interest to other social scientists and even to laypersons. And I think one
has a duty to try and reach them as increased sociological knowledge among
the people is a good thing. This is particularly true of developing countries,
where sociologists and anthropologists are engaged in studying their own
societies, which are changing fast.
Of course, writing clearly and simply does not come easily. I do at least
three or four drafts before I send a piece for publication. Further, when I try
to write simply and directly, I am forced to think clearly. Using jargon, in
my opinion, is largely the result of laziness – of a refusal to think through
difficulties and lacunae in one’s argument. That jargon is very popular is
evidence of existence of much loose thinking in the profession.

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AMS: Is your interest in the study of religion in any way connected with your
personal experience of religion?
MNS: If you are referring to my Coorg book, the answer is no. The Coorgs
had a rich religious life, and I was forced to take note of it; that is all. It is the
job of the ethnographer to work along the grain of the culture he or she stud-
ies. In fact, most Indians, including those in the cities, live in an atmosphere
of pervasive religiosity. This raises the question whether social scientists who
are rationalists and atheists can make meaningful contributions to the study
of religion. One is forced say yes, for both Max Weber and Emile Durkheim
were rationalists, and their studies greatly enhanced the sociological under-
standing of religion.
But if religion is looked at from the point of view of the believers, they
are convinced that there exists a superior power underlying the universe and
that they can appeal to him or her (or it) in times of trouble. I am putting
it crudely and simplistically, but it will do for my purposes. An approach
which regards belief in such a power as absurd and irrational is clearly
ignoring what the believers regard as the most important thing in religion.
This is likely to prevent the anthropologist from empathising with believers
and sharing their emotions, indeed, their total experience. In other words,
sociologists study only limited aspects of religion, and there is nothing wrong
with it as long as they understand their limitations.

Note
* Reprinted from Current Anthropology, 41 (4), August–October, pp. 629–636.

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 6
IN MEMORY OF M. N. SRINIVAS *

Professor Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas, one of the founders of modern

sociology and social anthropology in India, was born on 16 November 1916
in the city of Mysore, then capital of the princely state of Mysore. He passed
away on 30 November 1999 in Bangalore after brief hospitalisation due to
acute pneumonia.
Those who want to follow Srinivas’s life, work, and thought are fortunate
that he has left several autobiographical accounts: four articles, including
‘Itineraries of an Indian Social Anthropologist’ (1973a), ‘My Baroda Days’
(1981), ‘Sociology in Delhi’ (1995a), and ‘Reminiscences of a Bangalorean’
(1995b), three of which have been reprinted in his book, Indian Society
through Personal Writings (1996) and several interviews, including one
given to Chris Fuller (1999) and another to me (Chapter 5 in this book). In
the last few years Srinivas had been writing his autobiography. The world
will look forward eagerly to its publication, unfinished though it may be.
I have also written a biographical essay on Srinivas, along with an almost
complete bibliography of his works (1996; Chapter 1 in this book).
My association with Srinivas began on 15 June 1951, when I joined as a
student in the B.A. class at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He
had just arrived from Oxford to join the university as the first professor and
head of its new Department of Sociology. I was one of two students for the
‘subsidiary’ course on social anthropology. (A full-fledged honours course
in sociology was not available at the time.) In May–June 1952 I had the
unique opportunity of working with him for two months as a field assistant
in Rampura, the village celebrated in many of his writings. I then became his
student for M.A. and Ph.D. and later his colleague at Baroda in 1958. He
moved to Delhi to establish the Department of Sociology at the University
of Delhi in 1959, and I followed him in 1961. Even after he moved to Ban-
galore in 1972, we remained in constant touch up until a few days before
he passed away. During this long association we worked together on many
projects. We also knew each other’s families intimately. Of the many facets
of his personality I knew, I shall write here mainly about his contributions
to sociology and social anthropology.

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Srinivas established and strengthened several academic institutions. The

first of these was the Department of Sociology at Baroda University, which
he established in 1951. Srinivas did his best to put down roots in Baroda.
He devised new syllabi, and several students enrolled not only at B.A. and
M.A. levels but also for Ph.D.s. He recruited a good faculty, established rap-
port with academics in Gujarat, and earned a reputation in research both in
India and internationally. As many as eight students successfully completed
Ph.D. dissertations under his supervision, five of which were published as
books, all well received. The University Grants Commission commended the
work of the department and provided liberal grants for faculty recruitment,
research fellowships, and a separate building for the department. Srinivas
struck up several friendships in Baroda. In a curriculum vitae he also men-
tioned Gujarat as one of his areas of research interest. The high point of his
stint at Baroda was reached when he and some of his close friends in other
social science departments at the university mooted the idea of establishing
an all-India institute of social sciences at Baroda. However, he ran into dif-
ficulties, not getting sufficient support from his colleagues. On the whole, he
was unable to fulfil his ambition of playing a larger role at the all-India level.
He therefore seized the opportunity to move to Delhi in 1959 when he was
approached by Dr. V.K.R.V. Rao, then vice chancellor of Delhi University.
Srinivas perceived with sadness the decline of the department at Baroda after
his departure.
Srinivas founded the Department of Sociology at Delhi University in 1959
and nurtured it for twelve years. From its inception, it has provided quality
instruction in sociology and social anthropology at the M.A. level through a
carefully selected faculty. It has attracted a growing number of students from
all over India and also a few from other countries. Srinivas gave particular
attention to Ph.D. students, establishing through them a strong fieldwork
tradition. Through his efforts, attractive scholarships and fellowships were
instituted for them. He worked deftly to increase the size of the faculty as
well as the number of secretarial positions and was instrumental in insti-
tuting the North-Eastern Hill Areas Programme, the Pakistan Area Stud-
ies Programme, and the B.A. (Honours) Programme. Every member of the
department was actively involved in research and publishing. The weekly
departmental seminars became a lively institution, enthusiastically attended
by members of the department as well as by scholars from other institutions
in Delhi. The department became a regular port of call for visitors from all
over the world.
The crowning achievement of the department was its recognition as a
Centre of Advanced Study by the University Grants Commission in 1968.
This yielded generous grants for scholarships, fellowships, faculty positions,
secretarial staff, visiting professorships, as well as a separate building for
the department. It was the only Centre of Advanced Study in Sociology in
the country at the time and helped place sociology on par with economics

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at the Delhi School of Economics. This became a symbol of recognition of

Srinivas’s untiring efforts to create a world-class centre of sociological and
social anthropological learning not only for India but for the whole of Asia.
His was indeed an untiring effort, requiring a great deal of sustained organ-
isational and administrative work at the cost of personal research and writ-
ing. He accepted the membership of several committees and cultivated the
acquaintance of many bureaucrats both within and outside the university to
develop the department. During this phase, his detractors, including some
beneficiaries of his labours, said of him that Srinivas had become an admin-
istrator. He felt that this was both unkind and unfair. Srinivas remained
proud of the department after he left it because it continued and enriched
his legacy.
When V.K.R.V. Rao established the Institute for Social and Economic
Change in Bangalore in 1972, he invited Srinivas to be its joint director. Rao
frequently emphasised the fact that the word ‘social’ preceded the word ‘eco-
nomic’ in the name of the institute, implying thereby Srinivas’s important
role in building up the institute. Srinivas on his part wished to create an out-
standing centre for sociological and social anthropological learning in South
India, having already established one in the North. Things however did not
work out in the way they had intended. Tensions developed between the two
stalwarts, and some amount of bitterness surrounded Srinivas’s departure
from the institute. However, the two made peace in due course, and Srinivas
was made first a member of the institute’s board of governors and then its
chair. When the National Institute of Advanced Studies was set up on the
campus of the famous Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, Srinivas was
invited to be its J.R.D. Tata visiting professor, an opportunity he cherished
because it gave him ample facilities for his work and scope for interaction
with some of the finest minds in the physical sciences. He held this position
until the time of his passing away.
Although sociology and social/cultural anthropology have by long tra-
dition remained more or less separate in the West, it is well-known by
now that the two are largely integrated under the rubric of sociology in
India. Srinivas studied both during his B.A. at Mysore. When he moved to
Bombay for his M.A. and Ph.D., he found in G. S. Ghurye a teacher who
integrated sociology and social anthropology (as well as Indology) under
the rubric of sociology. At Oxford he worked with eminent social anthro-
pologists A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, but at the end
of his training there, he was appointed lecturer in Indian sociology. So,
when he was appointed the first professor and head of the Department of
Sociology at Baroda and then the first professor and head of the Depart-
ment of Sociology at Delhi, he carried forward the tradition of integrat-
ing sociology and social anthropology. The first two faculty appointments
he made in Baroda were those of I. P. Desai from the sociology stream
and Y.V.S. Nath from the anthropology stream. Similarly, the first four

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faculty appointments he made in Delhi included two from the anthropol-

ogy stream – André Béteille and Gauranga Chattopadhyay – and two from
sociology – M.S.A. Rao and Savitri Sahani. He later inducted three more
from the anthropology stream – J.P.S. Uberoi, R. D. Sanwal, and S. D.
Badgaiyan – giving all of them designations in sociology. This was differ-
ent from the staff structure in some other departments of sociology which
included anthropology positions.
Srinivas worked towards an organic integration of sociology and social
anthropology, not merely their juxtaposition. This was clear, first of all, in
the syllabi he formulated for B.A. and M.A. courses both at Baroda and at
Delhi. The B.A. (honours) course in general sociology at Baroda included
Kingsley Davis’s Human Society (1951) along with E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s
Social Anthropology (1950) and Raymond Firth’s Human Types (1950). He
also introduced a course in the sociology of kinship, the basic text for which
was A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s ‘Introduction’ to African Systems of Kinship
and Marriage (Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950). Similarly, he introduced
a course in fieldwork monographs in the M.A. syllabus at Baroda. One
of the monographs included was E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940).
In Baroda he was constrained by university regulations to retain the Bom-
bay University syllabus for a few years, but in Delhi he was given full free-
dom. He could therefore perfect the experiment he had started in Baroda.
The M.A. syllabus here epitomised the integration of sociology and social
anthropology. The course in sociological theory included the study of soci-
ologists as well as social anthropologists, including Durkheim, Max Weber,
Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Parsons, Merton, Bottomore, and others.
The sociology of India course included texts on caste as well as tribe. A
course each was devoted for kinship, religion, economy, polity, industry, and
social stratification as well as fieldwork monographs. Every course included
texts dealing with a wide variety of societies and cultures, traditional as well
as modern, studied by sociologists as well as social anthropologists. Care
was also taken to include at least one text on India in every course. This was
comparative sociology at its best.
Srinivas believed in teaching comparative sociology not for arriving at
general sociological laws but for opening up students’ minds to a variety of
societies and cultures, including the cultural diversity within India. Accord-
ing to him, there is a special reason for teaching comparative sociology to
Indian students. Coming as they do mainly from urban, upper-caste, upper-
class backgrounds, exposure to social and cultural diversities around the
world and in India would help blunt, if not remove, their ethnocentrism
and create empathy for other cultures. Most of us do research on India for a
variety of reasons, but as Srinivas used to say, our minds should be exposed
to other societies and cultures so that we see our own society in a more
objective light. Similarly, we should be sensitive to the enormous diversities
within India.

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Srinivas believed in close contact between student and teacher. When he

introduced the tutorial system at M.A. level in the Department of Sociology
at Delhi in 1959, it was considered a novelty in the university; to this day
the department continues to take tutorials seriously. Similarly, he expected
Ph.D. students to have constant interaction with their supervisors. Srinivas
gave of his best to his students. He read every word of each dissertation draft
submitted to him and was meticulous in his remarks, commenting not only
on ideas but also on matters of language.
Although Srinivas followed his own agenda of research and writing,
focussed mainly on religion, caste and village, he had a broad agenda of
research for his students. In the days when he was being attacked for being a
functionalist, he encouraged me to study historical records. He also encour-
aged N. R. Sheth in Baroda to work on social organisation of industry, and
E.A. Ramaswamy and B. S. Baviskar in Delhi to work on industrial labour
and sugar cooperatives, respectively. Another of his students in Baroda, R.
D. Parikh, worked on the press and society in Gujarat. He himself directed
a project on the Okhla Industrial Estate near Delhi in the early 1960s. He
thus opened up many new areas of research. On account of all these studies
Srinivas helped develop insights into the industrial world, and his friends
persuaded him to put them to some use. He was for many years a member
of the board of directors of a large engineering company in Baroda.
Whether it was the traditional subjects of tribe, caste, and village, or the
new subjects of industry, urban community and the hospital, Srinivas’s pre-
ferred method of investigation was fieldwork or participant observation. He
wrote and talked about it with passion. Although he advocated its scientific
value, in the sense that every field study brought to light systematically col-
lected new data and tested existing general ideas, he also pointed out its
human value, that is, what it did for the individual fieldworker. While I was
conducting my first fieldwork in the Panchmahals district in Gujarat during
April–May 1953, he sent me a postcard from Mysore:

I hope you will try to see the universe in the way your villagers do.
To do this you must not only collect the usual data, but try to go
beyond it – it requires an exercise of imaginative sympathy. And you
should come out – or try to – of this when writing up. This part of
fieldwork is like a novelist’s experience.

He constantly endeavoured to refine his ideas about the nature and impor-
tance of fieldwork. During his last trip to Delhi in September 1999, he nego-
tiated with Oxford University Press to bring out a second edition of our
book The Fieldworker and the Field (Srinivas, Shah and Ramaswamy 1979),
for which he planned to write an introduction.
Srinivas was not only an advocate of fieldwork, but he was himself was
a master craftsman. I had the opportunity of observing him at work in

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Rampura, when I stayed with him as his assistant during his last field trip
for two months from mid-April to mid-June of 1952. We rose quite early each
morning, and having quickly completed our morning chores, we set out to
visit the parts of the village and its fields. He talked with all kinds of people,
men and women of all castes, classes, and age groups. Despite his being a
bachelor, the villagers did not mind his talking even to young women. He
had a knack of establishing an instant rapport with people and ferreting out
information from them. He would observe intensely all kinds of events in the
village such as weddings, religious rituals, festivals, harvests, and disputes.
Sometimes we went on long trips outside the village. We once visited his
ancestral village, Arakere. Usually at the end of the day, but sometimes also
at lunch break, he would make notes in a diary. Occasionally he took down
notes on the spot while observing an event such as a wedding. He had gained
the confidence of the villagers to such an extent that they did not consider it
an intrusion if he took notes in the midst of an event. I would read his notes
the next day. They were a meticulous record of events, conversations, and
observations, interspersed occasionally with theoretical reflections. I also
drew genealogical charts for him. These notes and other field materials such
as maps, censuses, genealogical charts, and photographs are Srinivas’s pre-
cious legacy and should be preserved. As far as I know, only the processed
notes were destroyed in the fire at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, in 1970. His handwritten diaries must have
survived.
A few years before his death, Srinivas and I discussed the idea of preserv-
ing field notes and other ethnographic materials. We felt that whatever the
future held for the fieldwork tradition – we have witnessed a decline in
recent years – the records of its practise in the country over the last fifty
years or so should be preserved for posterity. He discussed a plan to organise
a workshop on this subject with a friend at the Indian Institute of Technol-
ogy, Kharagpur, and asked me to write a note for it. On my part, I persuaded
my colleagues at the Department of Sociology at Delhi University to submit
a proposal to create an archival unit in the five-year plan (1995–1999) of
the Centre of Advanced Study. The idea was to create this unit either in
the department itself or in the Ratan Tata Library of the Delhi School of
Economics. The Visiting Committee of the University Grants Commission
ignored this proposal completely. I hope the idea will be picked up again in
the national interest, and a beginning could be made with preserving Srini-
vas’s field materials.
Although an enthusiastic advocate of the fieldwork method, Srinivas was
not dogmatic about it. He was fully aware of its shortcomings. In a clas-
sic paper, ‘A Joint Family Dispute in a Mysore Village’, published in 1952
(1952b), he showed vividly how field notes were like historical documents
requiring interpolations of ideas and insights to interconnect them and make
sense of them. He had himself used historical documents in his papers on

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other disputes in Rampura (see his book Indian Society through Personal
Writings, 1996) and had also used modern historical works in writing his
book Social Change in Modern India (1966). He always encouraged me in
my work on historical sociology. He encouraged R. D. Parikh to work on
newspapers in Gujarat and Veena Das to work on caste puranas and other
such texts.
The greatest contribution of Srinivas’s lifelong research, writing and teach-
ing, has been to project what he called the ‘field view’ over the ‘book view’
of Indian society and culture. To the younger generation of sociologists and
social anthropologists, this may seem a trite point. But to appreciate it one
has to go back to the literature of the 1940s and 1950s on Indian society
and culture, from which students acquired only a book view of their society.
Thus, what they read about the caste system focussed on the varna view
of it. Even now textbooks in social studies at the school level impart only
this view, and students carry it with them to college and university. Many
of us have experienced over the years that even though we teach our B.A.
and M.A. students that varna and jati are different, answers to questions on
caste in their examinations focus only on varna. Similarly, our consciousness
about religion, family, marriage, and many other aspects of life has been
shaped by the ancient texts. Srinivas tried to change this by elaborating the
field view of society. He often referred to it as the worm’s eye view as against
the bird’s eye view of economists and planners. Thus, he aroused the con-
sciousness of the elite and the middle classes about the culture of the masses
to a greater extent than many leftists. This does not however mean that he
was ignorant of the active role of texts, particularly vernacular versions, in
people’s lives or was averse to their study. He narrated the Kaveri myth in
his Coorg book (I 952b) and explained its role in Coorg life.
Srinivas refused to espouse the cause of any theory or ‘ism’, except that
he called himself an empiricist. Towards the end of his life, he had begun
to envisage the possibility of the study of even the self vis-a-vis the other as
an ethnographic field. Although he would not call himself a structuralist,
he believed that the potential of the idea of social structure had not been
explored to the fullest extent. He vehemently opposed his being branded
as a functionalist, often saying that this label was used by his detractors,
particularly the leftists, to denigrate his work. It is true that he was under
the influence of Radcliffe-Brown’s functionalism when he wrote his book on
Coorg but he soon corrected himself under Evans-Pritchard’s influence. A
hangover of functionalism was discernible in him during the first few years
of his stay in Baroda. However, this soon disappeared and the understanding
of change became his passion. As early as 1955, he was so enthusiastic about
my taking up a study of change through historical records that I have never
been able to accept this allegation of his being a functionalist. Each time we
met he inquired about my forthcoming book on the history of a village in
Gujarat. He even announced it in his interview with Chris Fuller (1999). I

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had just photocopied its penultimate draft to send to him for his comments
when he passed away. I feel deeply disappointed that he did not have the
satisfaction of seeing it in print and that I did not have the opportunity of
benefiting from his comments.
Although Srinivas was not a structural-functionalist as such, he saw a cer-
tain heuristic value in the way these concepts enabled students to see social
institutions in relation to one another as well as to isolate the more enduring
elements from ephemeral ones in the ongoing social scene. This is precisely
why his work on Coorg is of such great value, coming at a time when ele-
ments of Indian culture were often seen in isolation from one another.
One of Srinivas’s abiding concerns in scholarship was the problem of
Indian unity. This was the unifying idea behind his twin concepts of San-
skritisation and the dominant caste. Emulation of the culture of upper castes
by lower castes – the better-known meaning of Sanskritisation – formed only
one aspect of it. The other and equally important aspect was the spread of
Sanskritic culture throughout the length and breadth of India. Thus, Srinivas
said frequently that Hinduism spread without an explicit ideology of pros-
elytisation. Dominant castes played this role everywhere. He said once in a
conversation, “After all, societies don’t work like machines. Every society
needs a dominant group to keep its unity”. He was, however, perceptive
enough to see the divisive and disruptive role of caste in modern India.
Srinivas was always ready to modify his views if convincing empirical
evidence and logical arguments were made available to him. I experienced
this early in my relationship with him. In his first article on Rampura, ‘Social
Structure of a Mysore Village’ (1951), also the inaugural article of the series
on village studies in The Economic Weekly that resulted in his edited vol-
ume India’s Villages (1955), the introductory paragraph quoted Sir Charles
Metcalfe’s well-known description of the Indian village community as an
unchanging, self-sufficient republic. In my historical study of a Gujarat village
I found that this was a false description. I discussed the point with Srinivas,
and we decided to jointly write a paper on ‘The Myth of Self-Sufficiency of
the Indian Village’ (1960). Nevertheless, he did not agree with Dumont and
Pocock that the village was not a social reality but only an architectural unit.
He elaborated his view in his paper ‘Indian Village: Myth and Reality’ (1975).
The corpus of Srinivas’s writings is large and cannot all be reviewed here.
He wrote not only for hard-core academics but also for intelligent laypeople.
Even when he wrote for the former, he avoided jargon. In my interview
with him he told me, “Using jargon, in my opinion, is largely the result of
laziness – of a refusal to think through difficulties and lacunae in one’s argu-
ment. That jargon is very popular is evidence of the existence of much loose
thinking in the profession” (2002; Chapter 5 in this book).
Although Srinivas set high standards of scholarship for himself as well as
for others, he was aware of his limitations. He mentioned frequently how
he had to prepare several drafts before he finalised a paper or book. He also

76
 I N M E M O R Y O F M . N . S R I N I VA S

usually gave his penultimate drafts to a close friend or colleague for their
comments. I had the privilege of reading several of his drafts. Srinivas contin-
uously refined his ideas and concepts. However, he was impatient with bright
scholars who did not publish in the name of perfection. I often recall the last
sentence in his seminal paper ‘A Note on Sanskritisation and Westernisation’
in Far Eastern Quarterly (1956a): “Perfectionism is often a camouflage for
sterility”. (He dropped this sentence in later versions of the paper.)
Srinivas played an important role in putting the professional association
of sociologists, the Indian Sociological Society, on a sound footing. For a
long time after its inception in 1951, the Society was considered an associa-
tion of what was known as the ‘Bombay group’, led by G. S. Ghurye, Srini-
vas’s teacher. As long as Srinivas was in Baroda, he was identified with this
group, despite his strained relations with Ghurye. The ‘Lucknow group’, led
by students of Radhakamal Mukerjee, D. P. Mukerji, and D. N. Mazumdar,
set up an association named the All-India Sociological Conference. When
Srinivas migrated to Delhi, he rapidly established friendly relations with pro-
fessional leaders in the North, thus earning the confidence of both groups.
This culminated in the merger of the All-India Sociological Conference
into the Indian Sociological Society in 1967, with Srinivas as its president
under the new dispensation. Apart from strengthening the Society and its
journal, the Sociological Bulletin, with a number of initiatives, he helped
create an environment of friendship and cooperation in the profession.
Srinivas was an active member of several institutions: the University Grants
Commission, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Economic and
Political Weekly, as well as many committees and commissions of the govern-
ment. He was selective in accepting membership, but once he had accepted,
he worked diligently and was known to be an excellent committee man. It
was a pleasure to observe him at work in committees, blending seriousness
with witticisms and getting things done.
Srinivas received many coveted honours – prizes, medals, awards, fellow-
ships, visiting professorships, and honorary degrees – at regional, national, as
well as international levels in recognition of his work. I recall that day in 1952
in Rampura, when he told me during lunch, “Arvind, I want to achieve some-
thing in life”. He did indeed achieve much. But much more important was his
deep humanity. He wore his achievements lightly, saying frequently that soci-
ology and social anthropology taught humility. Srinivas had a gift with people
of all kinds. His sociology and social anthropology also exuded this flavour.

Note
* Reprinted from Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 34, no. 1 © 2000 Institute
of Economic Growth, New Delhi. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permis-
sion of the copyright holder and the publisher, Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd,
New Delhi.

77
 APPENDIX
An outline of M. N. Srinivas’s biography

Full name: Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas.

Born: 16 November 1916, in Mysore city in the former princely state of
Mysore (now in Karnataka state) in South India.

Passed the Secondary School Leaving Certificate Examination conducted by

the University of Mysore in 1931.
Studied for the B.A. at Maharaja’s College, Mysore. Passed the B.A. (Hon-
ours) Examination in 1936, with social philosophy as the honours subject,
which included papers in sociology, ethics, political thought, history of ethics,
comparative religion, Indian social institutions, Indian ethics, and political
theory. The “minor” subjects included social anthropology, social psychol-
ogy, comparative politics, and Indian economics.
Studied for the M.A. in sociology at the Department of Sociology, Uni-
versity of Bombay. Wrote a dissertation on ‘Marriage and Family among the
Kannada Castes in Mysore State’, under the supervision of G. S. Ghurye, in
1938. It was published as a book, Marriage and Family in Mysore (Bombay:
New Book Co., 1942), which received favourable reviews.
Was awarded a research fellowship by the Department of Sociology, Uni-
versity of Bombay, in June 1940 to carry out a field study of the Coorgs of
South India for the doctoral degree. He submitted his thesis ‘The Coorgs: A
Socio-Ethnic Study’ in 1944.
Was appointed as a research assistant to G. S. Ghurye from June 1942 to
May 1944.
Went to Oxford in May 1945 to work for a doctorate in social anthropol-
ogy. Received a Carnegie research grant for two years. Worked for a thesis
on the Coorgs under the supervision of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown for one and
a half years and then for half a year under the supervision of E. E. Evans-
Pritchard. Was awarded the D.Phil. in July 1947.
Was appointed as lecturer in Indian sociology at Oxford University in July
1947. Spent the first year of his appointment in doing fieldwork in Rampura
(pseudonym) village in Mysore State. Then performed his duties as teacher
at Oxford till May 1951.

78
 APPENDIX

Joined the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda as professor and head

of a new Department of Sociology in June 1951.
Married Rukmini, a geographer, in November 1955. They have two daugh-
ters, Lakshmi and Tulasi. Rukmini has written her autobiography (2015).
Joined the University of Delhi as professor and head of the new Depart-
ment of Sociology in February 1959. The University Grants Commission
recognised the Department as a Centre of Advanced Study in Sociology in
July 1967.
Left the University of Delhi and joined the Institute for Social and Eco-
nomic Change in Bangalore as its joint director in May 1972. Resigned and
retired from the institute in January 1979.
Worked as J.R.D. Tata visiting professor at the National Institute of
Advanced Study, Bangalore, from 1979 till he passed away on Novem-
ber 30, 1999.

79
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84
 AUTHOR INDEX

Aiyappan, A. 33 Firth, Raymond 2, 7, 12, 17, 24, 28, 72

Forde, Daryll 29, 72
Badgaiyan, S.D. 72 Fortes, Meyer 24, 57, 58
Bailey, F.G. 33 Fox, Richard 40
Baviskar, B.S. 1, 25, 37, 43, 44, 73 Frazer, James 65
Bendix, Reinhard 40, 42, 43 Fuller, Chris 36, 37, 47, 54, 69, 75
Benedict, Ruth 13, 17, 28
Beteille, Andre 39, 43, 72 Geddes, Patrick 11
Bhagat, M.G. 14, 15, 25 Ghurye, G.S. 2, 7, 11–17, 24, 28, 30,
Bhagwati, N.H. 16 31, 36, 41, 63–66, 71, 77, 78
Bhatt, L.J. 32 Gilpatric, Chadbourn 33
Bose, N.K. 47, 66 Gluckman, Max 6, 24, 43, 58
Bottomore, T.B. 72 Gnanambal 32
Goheen, John 39, 40
Chakravarti, Anand 43 Goldenweiser, Alexander 17, 28
Chanana, Karuna 43 Gopalan, C. 17, 32
Chattopadhyaya, Gauranga 72 Gore, M.S. 21
Chattopadhyaya, K.P. 65 Gough, Kathleen 33
Chaudhuri, Sachin 33 Guha, B.S. 15, 16
Gulati, Iqbal S. 35, 42
Das, Veena 75 Gupta, Dipankar 34, 39
Dasgupta, Sugata 17, 32
Davis, Kingsley 72 Haimendorf, C.von Furer 64
Desai, A.R. 33 Hardiman, David 53
Desai, I.P. i, 17, 20, 30, 34, 42, 54, 58, 71
Desai, M.N. 14, 15, 25 Jayaraman, R. 43
Desai, Ramanlal Vasantlal 18 Joshi, P.C. 42, 44
Douglas, Mary 58 Joshi, V.H. 32, 35
Dumont, Louis 61, 65, 76
Durkheim, Emile 56, 68, 72 Kantawala, Suresh 38
Karve, D.G. 39, 40
Ekka, William 53 Karve, Irawati 32, 33, 47
Elwin, Verrier 17, 28, 52, 64 Kothari, Rajni 35, 42
Evans, Roger 33
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 2, 3, 14, 15, 17, Lal, R.B. 53
24, 25, 28, 35, 41, 42, 44, 47, 56, 57, Leach, Edmund 65
71, 72, 75, 78 Levi-Strauss, Claude 54

85
 AUTHOR INDEX

Lobo, Lancy vi, 53 Rao, V.K. R.V. 6, 20, 22, 23, 25, 36,
Lowie, R.H. 17, 28, 31 70, 71
Redfield, Robert 33
MacIver, R.M. 31 Rivers, W.H. R. 65
Madan, T.N. 39, 40 Rooksby, R.L. 34
Majumdar, D.N. 33, 66 Roosevelt, Eleanor 44
Majumder, N.Datta 47 Roy, S.C. 53
Marriott, McKim 33, 54, 61
Mayer, Adrian 33 Sahani, Savitri 32
Mehta, Hansa 16, 17, 20, 27, 33, 36 Sanwal, R.D. 72
Mehta, Jivaraj 27 Saxena, R.N. 21
Merton, Robert 3, 72 Shah, A.M. i, vi, 4, 25, 39, 43, 44, 51,
Metcalfe, Sir Charles 76 54, 73
Misra, Satish Chandra 42 Shelat, Indubhai 17, 26–29, 31
Morgan, Lewis H. 65 Sheth, Dhirubhai L. 37
Motwani, Kewal 16 Sheth, Narayan R. vi, 19, 32, 34, 37, 42,
Mukerjee, Radha Kamal 16, 77 44, 73
Mukerji, D.P. 16, 77 Sheth, Tarun 32
Shroff, Ramesh G. 19, 30–33, 36
Narayan, R.K. 11 Silverberg, James 34
Nath, Y.V. S. 17, 29, 30, 32, 37, 71 Singer, Milton 33, 39, 40, 44, 47, 54
Nilkanth, Vinodini 28 Singh, Sarup 23
Sinha, R.K. 53
Ogburn, William F. 33 Sinha, Surajit 53
Smith, Raymond 56
Page, C.H. 31 Smith, Robertson 65
Pandya, G.B. 26 Srinivas, Rukmini 19, 36, 79
Papanek, Hanna 40 Staal, J.F. 45
Parikh, R.D. 32, 33, 35, 42, 44, 73, 75 Subbarao, B. 42
Parsons, Talcot 72
Parthasarathy, V.S. 25 Tax, Sol 22
Patel, Tulsi i, vi, 44 Taylor, E.B. 65
Patel, Urmila 38 Thomas, P.T. 17, 32
Pocock, David F. 6, 34, 76 Trivedi, Harshad R. 17, 27, 32, 51
Prabhu, P.N. 47
Uberoi, J.P. S. 72
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 2–4, 13–15, 17, Unni, K.R. 32
25, 28, 31, 34, 35, 41, 44, 46, 57, 58,
60, 71, 72, 75, 78 Wadia, A.R. 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 20, 21,
Radhakrishnan, S. 13, 16, 27, 34, 42 27, 33, 36
Raghavan, V. 45, 47 Weber, Max i, v, 1, 39–43, 56, 68, 72
Ramaswamy, E.A. 1, 4, 25, 43, 44, 73 Wells, H.G. 26
Rao, M.S. A. 72 Whyte, William Foote 56

86
 SUBJECT INDEX
aborigine, aboriginal 1, 17, 28, 52
Adivasi 5, 50–53
Africa 6, 57, 66
Ahmedabad 35, 37
All India Sociological Conference 7,
23, 77
Anthropological Survey of India 15, 16,
38, 64
anthropology 2, 3, 14, 17, 19, 20, 25,
26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 45, 55, 57, 61,
64, 65, 67, 68, 72; American 57;
British 2, 4, 56; cultural 17, 26–28,
71; European 65; social 1–4, 10, 11,
13–15, 17–20, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30–32,
34, 35, 37, 38, 41–43, 48, 52, 55–57,
61, 65, 67, 69, 70–72, 77, 78
Aurobindo 41
backward classes 39, 63, 64
Bangalore 6, 8, 22, 36, 38, 43, 44, 62,
69, 71, 79
Baroda 1, 3, 7, 8, 16, 18–20, 23, 26,
27, 29–32, 34–38, 42–44, 56, 69,
70–73, 75, 77; City 16; College
31; Maharaja of 16, 27; Maharaja
Sayajirao University of 1, 4, 6, 8, 40,
55, 69, 79
Basavanna 49
Bhagwad Gita 41
Bhangi 51
Bhil 29, 37, 53
Bhumij 53
bird’s eye view 4, 75
Bombay 2, 6, 7, 15, 29, 30, 31, 36,
61, 63, 65, 71, 78; Group 7, 77;
University of 2, 3, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18,
27, 28, 41, 72, 78
87
book view 4, 24, 59, 61, 66, 75
Brahman, Brahmin 5, 7–9, 51, 60
Brahminisation, Brahminisation 5, 47
British University 55
Calcutta, University of 65
Cambridge, University of 65
capitalism 39, 40, 43, 56
caste 4, 5, 9, 11, 20, 24, 27, 32–34, 40,
42–44, 46–56, 59–61, 63, 64, 66,
72–76, 78; backward 63; dominant
5, 24, 34, 58–60, 76; in modern
India 3, 19, 34, 42, 43, 48, 76;
scheduled 63
casteism 34, 42
Centre for Advanced Study in
Behavioural Sciences, Stanford 22, 74
Centre of Advance Study in Sociology,
Delhi University 6, 21, 70, 74, 79
Ceylon 48
Chaitanya 49, 53
Chamar 51
Chenchu 13
Chicago, University of 33, 40
civilization 24, 33, 46, 54, 60–62
Contributions to Indian Sociology 67, 77
cooperative societies, study of 4
Coorg(s) 2–5, 11–14, 18, 24, 34, 41,
45–48, 57, 58, 60, 64, 68, 75, 76, 78
culture 2, 3, 5, 9, 13, 14, 17, 20, 24, 25,
27–29, 33, 38, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48–51,
53–58, 61–63, 65, 66, 68, 72, 75, 76
customary law 6
Dalit 50, 51, 53, 59, 63
Delhi 3, 6, 8, 15, 18–20, 22, 23, 25, 34,
36, 37, 43, 44, 55, 56, 69–73, 77;
 SUBJECT INDEX

University of 1, 4, 6, 19, 20, 23, 40, historical, historical sociology, historicism

69, 79 3, 14, 35, 37, 41, 42, 73–76
Delhi School of Economics 22, 34, 39, history 10, 14, 26, 31, 33, 35, 38,
71, 74 45, 57, 61, 75, 78; conjectural 2;
Department of Sociology: Baroda documented 2; pseudo 2, 41
University 1, 4, 6, 8, 20, 27, 37, 42, hypergamy, hypergamous 28, 52, 60
44, 70, 71, 79; Bombay University 2,
11, 78; Delhi University 7, 20, 23, 34, independence 52, 55, 57, 59, 63, 67; of
37, 39, 40, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 79 India 16; Indian 58
Dharmashastra 60 Indian Conference of Social Work 34, 42
diffusionism 41 Indian Council of Social Science
division, principle of i, 10, 54 Research 77
Dorabji Tata Trust 64 Indian Institute of Science 71
Indian Sociological Society i, 7, 23, 27,
economic development 32, 35, 39, 42 44, 67, 77
economics, economists 2, 6, 10, 12, 15, Indian village 3, 15, 76
21, 22, 26, 32, 34, 39, 55–57, 61, 70, Indology 4, 45, 71
71, 74, 75, 78 Indonesia 48
Eklavya 51 industry, industrialisation 42, 72, 73
empirical, empirical science, empiricism, Institute for Social and Economic
empiricist 4, 24, 30, 56, 75, 76 Change 6, 22, 71, 79
England 7, 15, 16, 65 Institute of Economic Growth 22, 77
ethnocentric, ethnocentrism 18, 40, 41, 72 Iyengar 9
ethnography, ethnographic,
ethnographical 2, 11, 13, 52, 66, 74, 75 Jagannath Puri 49
evolutionism 41 Jagjivan Ram 34, 42
jati 51, 61, 75
factory, study of 4, 19, 33, 35, 43
female infanticide 28, 37 Kashi 49
field research 12, 33, 35, 64 kinship 5, 20, 56–58, 63, 72
field view 4, 24, 59, 60, 61, 75 Kodagahalli 8, 29
fieldwork 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, 19, Kodagu 12
21, 24, 25, 29, 30, 33, 37, 43, 62, 64, Kshatriya 52
65, 73, 78; intensive 2, 4, 20, 47, 56, Kuruba 9
62, 63; tradition 70, 74
function, functionalism 1–3, 14, 20, 35, leftists 75
31, 34, 37, 39, 41–43, 56, 57, 75 London School of Economics 2, 6, 12
Lucknow 16, 66; Group 7, 77
Gandhi, Mahatma 41
Garoda 51 Madhva, Madhvacharya 41, 49
god-men, god-women 5, 49, 50 Madras 36, 47
great tradition 60 Mahabharata 59
Gujarat 27–30, 33, 35, 37, 38, 51, 53, Mahar 63
70, 73, 75, 76 Maharaja’s College, Mysore 78
Maharaja’s High School, Mysore 8
hierarchy 5, 47, 48, 51, 54; principle Manchester, University of 6, 31
of 4 Manu 60
Hinduism 4, 9, 39, 40, 46, 48, 50, 52, Marx, Marxism, Marxists 10, 35, 43,
60, 76; all-India 5; non-Sanskritic 46, 57, 58
48; Sanskritic 46, 51 Mata Amritanandmayi 49
Hindutva 5 Mathura 49
historian 3, 5, 13, 42, 45, 53 methodology 24

88
 SUBJECT INDEX

middle class 57, 59, 75 Sadhu 47, 53

modernisation 40 Sanskrit 45, 46, 59, 65
Munda 53 Sanskritisation 34, 42, 45, 46–54, 58,
Mysore 2, 6, 8, 9–11, 18–20, 24, 27, 59, 76, 77
34, 36–38, 54, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78; Sant 53
City 1, 8, 29, 69, 78; State 1, 8, 11, Sanyasi 47
15, 29, 47, 69, 78; University of Satya Sai Baba 49
10, 78 science, natural science, natural science
of society 3, 4, 10, 20, 22, 23, 31, 35,
Nathadwara 49 45, 50, 55, 57, 58, 70, 71
National Institute of Advanced Studies sect 5, 9, 40, 49, 50, 51, 53, 66
71, 79 Senwa 51
Navaho country 9 Shankara, Shankaracharya 9, 41, 49
North-Eastern Hill Areas 21, 70 social change 3, 19, 24, 32, 34, 35, 42,
Nuer, Nuerland 9, 56, 57, 72 43, 48, 57, 58, 61, 66, 75; study of 3,
43, 56
‘Other, The’ 65, 66 social structure 19, 21, 25, 57, 75
Oxford 1–6, 13–15, 24, 26–28, 35, 36, social work 10, 17, 18, 31, 32, 34, 42, 64
41, 45–47, 55–58, 64, 69, 71, 78; Sociological Bulletin 7, 23, 27, 39, 44,
University of 1, 3, 41, 45, 78 54, 67, 77
sociology 1–4, 6–8, 10, 11, 16–28,
Pakistan Area Studies 21, 70 30–32, 34, 37–40, 42–45, 48,
Pant, Govind Vallabh 34, 42 52, 55–57, 61, 65, 67, 69–75,
participant observation 2, 20, 60, 77–79; American 18, 31; British 55;
62, 73 comparative 43, 64; European 55,
Patel, Chimanbhai 35, 38 65; Indian 3, 4, 12, 15, 31, 32, 41,
Patel, Tulsi 44 58, 67, 71, 77, 78
Patel, Urmila 38 sociology and social anthropology 1–3,
Patidar 28, 37 15, 19, 24, 27, 31, 37, 38, 48, 52, 55,
patron-client relation 5 67, 69, 70, 77; integration of 17, 20,
political science, political scientist 5, 35, 32, 71, 72
42, 45, 57 Shrivaishnava 9
Poona, Pune 32, 47 structural-functional, structural-
press 18, 28, 33, 35, 41, 73 functionalism 19, 41–43, 56–58, 63
primitive society 26, 28, 31, 54 structuralism 54, 57
proselytization 5, 76 survey method 30
Purana 38, 41, 59, 75 Sussex, University of 6
purity/pollution 46, 50, 58 Swadhyaya movement 49
Swaminarayan 49
Raja Rammohan Roy 41
Rajput 37, 52 textual study 4
Ramananda 49 Tibet 48
Ramanuja, Ramanujacharya 9, 41, 49 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 41
Ramayana 59 Tirupati 49
Rampura 3, 4, 6, 8, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, Toda 13
29, 34, 34, 40, 47, 60, 64, 69, 74–78 town 4, 33, 35, 50, 52
religion 2, 4, 5, 10, 13, 17, 18, 20, 24, trade union 4, 43, 62
34, 40, 42, 43, 46, 49, 50, 56–58, 63, tribe, tribal, Scheduled Tribe 5, 6, 27,
66, 68, 72, 73, 75, 78 32, 42, 45, 46, 48, 51–55, 62–66,
ritual, ritual idiom 4, 5, 11, 29, 46, 48, 72, 73
57–59, 74 Trobriand Island 9
Rockefeller Foundation 33 Turi Barot 51

89
 SUBJECT INDEX

U.G.C., University Grants Commission Vankar 51

6, 19, 35, 70, 74, 77, 79 varna 34, 51, 61, 75
untouchable, untouchability 34, 42, 48, Vedas 60
51, 54, 59 village studies 3, 4, 19, 34, 60, 61, 64, 76
urban centre 46, 51, 60 vote bank 6, 58, 59
urban society 4, 62
Westernization 19, 47, 48
Vallabhacharya 49 women, study of 63
Valmiki 51 worm’s eye view 4, 75

90