Social Change By M.n. Srinivas

[Stayce Cawthorn]

Srinivasearned his doctorate in sociology from the University of Bombay (later renamed as University of Mumbai) and went to All Souls College, University of Oxford for his fellowship. Although, he had already written a book on family and marriage in Mysore, his training there played a significant role in the development of his ideas. Srinivas taught in various institutions of repute like University of Delhi, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore and National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.[6]

In a Frontline obituary, Parvathi Menon described him as India's most distinguished sociologist and social anthropologist.[6]His contribution to the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology and to public life in India was unique. It was his capacity to break out of the strong mould in which (the mostly North American university oriented) area studies had been shaped after the end of the Second World War on the one hand, and to experiment with the disciplinary grounding of social anthropology and sociology on the other, which marked his originality as a social scientist.[citation needed]

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

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

By inclination, he was not given to utopian constructions: his ideas about justice, equality and eradication of poverty were rooted in his experiences on the ground. His integrity in the face of demands that his sociology should take into account the new and radical aspirations was one of the most moving aspects of his writing. By the use of terms such as Sanskritisation, "dominant caste", "vertical (inter-caste) and horizontal (intra-caste) solidarities", Srinivas sought to capture the fluid and dynamic essence of caste as a social institution.[7]

As part of his methodological practice, Srinivas strongly advocated ethnographic research based on Participant observation,[8] but his concept of fieldwork was tied to the notion of locally bounded sites. Thus some of his best papers, such as the paper on dominant caste and one on a joint family dispute, were largely inspired from his direct participation (and as a participant observer) in rural life in south India. He wrote several papers on the themes of national integration, issues of gender, new technologies, etc. It is really surprising as to why he did not theorise on the methodological implications of writing on these issues which go beyond the village and its institutions. His methodology and findings have been used and emulated by successive researchers who have studied caste in India.

He received many honours from the University of Bombay, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Government of France; in 1977, he has received the Padma Bhushan[9] from the President of India; and he was the honorary foreign member of three academies: the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[10] and the American Philosophical Society.[11] National Translation Mission of the Ministry of Human Resource Development of Government of India has selected his works, Social Change in Modern India and Caste in Modern India for translation into Indian languages. The latter one has already been published in Maithili language.

The scholars using the attributional approach stress the attributes of a caste. However, each of them lays emphasis on one or other of these attributes and how they affect interaction. In the case of Srinivas' writing in the 1950s, we find that he chooses to study the structure of relations arising between castes on the basis of these attributes. Thus he introduces a dynamic aspect of caste identity very forcefully. Before the concept of Sanskritization Srinivas put forth the concept of Brahminization where the lower caste adopted the practices of the Brahmins to improve their social status. During his study of north India Srinivas observed that the lower castes adopted the practices of the upper castes and not only Brahmins and so he called the concept as Sanskritization.

This aspect becomes clearer in Srinivas's work on positional mobility known as 'Sanskritization'. Sanskritization is a process whereby a caste attempts to raise its rank within the caste hierarchy by adopting the practice, the attributes of the caste or castes above them, in the rank order. This is to say the 'low' attributes are gradually dropped and the 'high' attributes of the castes above them are imitated. This involves adoption of vegetarianism, clean occupations and so on. Closely connected is the concept of dominant caste. The dominant caste in a village is conspicuous by its:

This book studies caste and community dynamics in India and offers a critical view of social mobility from below. Building on the theories of the eminent sociologist M N Srinivas, the essays in this volume reformulate the debate on caste as they document the changing inter-caste dynamics and caste-based violence in contemporary India.

The volume showcases the new language of change in caste relations, articulated mostly from the perspective of the marginalised as experiences, differences, contestations, assertions and as citizenship rights. It focusses on the clash between traditional structures of inequality and the ideals of equality and justice in a liberal, democratic India. It also highlights the persistence of caste and endogamy and the interlocking nature of caste, gender and disability, struggles of ethnic groups and informal workers in the market economy, discrimination in the labour market and the dissolution of dissent in the public sphere.

With contributions from leading scholars of social change and development in India and abroad, this volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of sociology, social anthropology, minority and subaltern studies, and development studies.

Sobin George is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Study of Social Change and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. He is the author of the book Caste Embeddedness of Rural Public Health Services and Work and Health in Informal Economy. He has also published several research articles in national and international journals.

Manohar Yadav is a Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. He has published extensively on issues concerning subaltern and marginalised sections of the society in India. He is an active member of Dalit movements in Karnataka

Anand Inbanathan was an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. He has been engaged in research on decentralization and local government and has also worked on health and development as well as on migration. He is the author of the book Migration and Adaptation: Tamils in Delhi.

David Gellner was Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography from 2009-2012 and again from 2016-2018. His doctoral research (1982-4) was on the Vajrayana Buddhism of the Newars and on Newar social organization, in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. He has carried out fieldwork in Nepal on many subsequent occasions, broadening his interests to include politics and ethnicity, healers, mediums, and popular approaches to misfortune, religious change, activism of all sorts, democratization, elections, borderlands, Dalits, and class formation.

For two other research projects in which he was involved, please see Democratic Cultures (PI Lucia Michelutti, UCL) and Alchemists of the Revolution (PI Craig Jeffrey, Geography, Oxford). A major output of the Democratic Cultures project was a co-authored paper on the political history of Gorakhpur and the background to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, 'Politics in Gorakhpur since the 1920s: The Making of a Safe "Hindu" Constituency'.

For a lecture that he gave at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen, on June 10, 2010, on 'Building Theravada Networks in Nepal and Beyond', please click here. To listen to a seminar on 'Can there be an anthropology of Hinduism?', given on 5 December 2014, please click here, and for a video of a lecture, 'Lumley's Children? The Nepali Community in Britain', given as part of Oxford University's Alumni Weekend in September 2014, please click here. For a lecture, 'Visions of Modernity: How Activists Restructured Nepali Society' given on 16/2/17 in Konstanz, Germany, as the keynote address at a conference on 'Activism, Anthropologically Speaking', click here (and scroll down). Watch an interview with Dalit Lives Matter Nepal.

Four recent edited books are (1) on borderlands in Northern South Asia, (2) on Religion, Secularism, and Ethnicity in Contemporary Nepal, (3) on Nepali diaspora populations around the world, and (4) on research among Nepalis in the UK and Belgium. Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia is available for free open access download.

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