Westernisation is the term M. N. Srinivas used for the changes produced in Indian society and culture by roughly a century and a half of British rule — a process he described as taking in technology, institutions, ideology and values together. He introduced it in 1956 alongside sanskritisation and developed it in Social Change in Modern India (1966), and he was explicit that he meant it in an ethically neutral sense: the word records a direction of borrowing, not an improvement.
The concept was coined to solve a problem of description. Srinivas had shown that low castes rose in local standing by imitating the ritual practices of higher castes; but the twentieth-century village was also acquiring railways, printing, courts, dispensaries, schools, cash cropping and the vocabulary of rights. Neither process could be collapsed into the other, and neither was the same as the sociologist's abstraction called modernisation. Westernisation names the concrete cultural fact — that the model being copied was the British — while modernisation names an evaluative and universalising idea, that a society is becoming rational, mobile and secular. Srinivas preferred the narrower and more honest term.
Levels and layers of the process
Srinivas distinguished primary and secondary westernisation. Primary westernisation refers to the groups that came into direct contact with the British and absorbed their manners, dress, language, education and administrative habits — the small stratum of clerks, lawyers, teachers, army officers and princes. Secondary westernisation refers to the effects that then spread outward through Indian society by imitation and institutional compulsion, reaching people who never met an Englishman: the use of English legal categories in a village dispute, the tailored blouse, the tea shop, the wristwatch, the school certificate.
The process was therefore differential and uneven. Westernisation was concentrated in the upper strata, in cities and in coastal presidency towns; it was thinner inland and among the poor. Because it was a source of prestige, it also became a marker of stratification in its own right: English education and a government post could be converted into local standing quite independently of ritual rank, a point André Béteille documented in Sripuram, where the Brahmins' hold on the new professions initially reinforced an older hierarchy before class began to pull away from caste.
Westernisation and sanskritisation together
Srinivas's most cited observation is that the two processes are not opposites but often work in tandem. Where a dominant caste westernises, it tends to loosen its grip on the ritual idiom, and lower castes are then able to appropriate the practices — vegetarianism, the sacred thread, Sanskritic ritual, teetotalism — that were formerly denied them. In this way the westernisation of the upper strata enabled sanskritisation by those below. Colonial infrastructure worked in the same direction: railways and pilgrimage traffic, printed vernacular scripture, temple entry litigation and caste associations all made Sanskritic models more widely available than they had ever been.
The relationship also ran the other way. Western-educated Indians frequently justified reform in revivalist language, presenting the abolition of a practice as a return to a purer textual past. And the two processes could be held apart within one household — English at the office and Sanskritic orthodoxy at home — which is why Srinivas insisted that neither process implied the disappearance of the other.
The value core: humanitarianism and rationalism
Srinivas argued that the most consequential part of westernisation was not technology but a cluster of values, of which he singled out humanitarianism — a concern for the welfare of all human beings irrespective of caste, sex or age — and rationalism. These values informed nineteenth-century reform legislation and administrative practice: the ending of sati, the legalisation of widow remarriage, restrictions on child marriage, the beginnings of an ideology of equal citizenship. He also stressed the transformative effect of the state's formal equality before law, the census and the printed word — the last making scripture, and the criticism of scripture, available to anyone who could read.
Yogendra Singh later reworked this ground in Modernization of Indian Tradition, arguing for a distinction between change at the level of structure and change at the level of cultural tradition, and between a little tradition and a great tradition of modernisation. His point was that Indian modernity was not a simple substitution of Western content for Indian content but a selective, uneven and often contradictory recombination.
Criticisms
Three lines of criticism recur. The first is vagueness: if westernisation covers everything from the steam engine to humanitarian sentiment to trousers, it loses discriminating power, and Srinivas himself conceded the term was omnibus. The second is the conflation of Britishisation with modernity. What reached India was a particular, class-inflected and colonial variant of Western culture — the district officer's version — and to treat it as modernity in general obscures both the diversity of the West and the possibility of non-Western routes to modernity, as the Japanese case suggested even to contemporaries.
The third and sharpest criticism is that the concept is politically anodyne. By presenting colonial rule as a source of cultural diffusion, it says little about deindustrialisation, revenue extraction, famine, indenture or racial exclusion; the coloniser appears as a model rather than as a ruler. Marxist critics argued that the decisive colonial impact was the creation of new property relations and a dependent economy, not the spread of values. Historians such as Bernard Cohn added a further point: colonial knowledge itself — census categories, codified personal law, the fixing of caste in enumerated schedules — actively reshaped what it classified, so that westernisation was not diffusion into a passive society but the making of new social objects.
For the UPSC answer
Define westernisation in Srinivas's own terms — technology, institutions, ideology and values, ethically neutral — and immediately mark it off from modernisation, which is evaluative, and from sanskritisation, which is an internal reference group process. Use the primary/secondary distinction and the differential westernisation of the upper strata to show the concept has internal structure, and give the linkage argument as your key insight: westernisation of a dominant caste opens ritual space for sanskritisation below. Close with the critiques in ascending order of force — vagueness, the Britishisation-as-modernity slip, and the silence on colonial exploitation — and, if space allows, contrast Srinivas with Yogendra Singh's structure-and-tradition framework.
References & further reading
- Srinivas, M. N. (1956). A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization. The Far Eastern Quarterly, 15(4).
- Srinivas, M. N. (1962). Caste in Modern India and Other Essays. Asia Publishing House.
- Srinivas, M. N. (1966). Social Change in Modern India. University of California Press.
- Singh, Y. (1973). Modernization of Indian Tradition. Thomson Press.
- Béteille, A. (1965). Caste, Class and Power. University of California Press.
- Cohn, B. S. (1987). An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays. Oxford University Press.