Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas is the pivotal figure in Indian sociology's turn away from texts and towards observed social life. Trained in both Indian and British traditions, he insisted that Indian society had to be understood through fieldwork rather than through scripture, and in doing so produced a vocabulary — sanskritisation, dominant caste, the field-view — that still organises the way caste, village and change are discussed.
His achievement was double. Substantively, he showed that the caste system was not the frozen hierarchy of the classical texts but a competitive, mobile and locally variable arrangement. Methodologically, he made the intensive village study the standard apprenticeship of the Indian sociologist, and built the institutions through which that training was passed on.
Life and intellectual formation
Srinivas was born in Mysore in 1916 into a Kannada-speaking Brahmin family, and his early ethnographic sensibility owed much to a childhood spent in a town where caste ranking was visible in everyday conduct. He took his MA at Bombay under G. S. Ghurye, the founder of Indian sociology's Indological wing, and his first monograph, on marriage and family in Mysore, bears that stamp. He then went to Oxford, where he worked with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and E. E. Evans-Pritchard and absorbed British structural functionalism — the study of society as a working system of interdependent institutions, observed at first hand.
The synthesis of Ghurye's Indian grounding with Oxford's method defined his career. He founded the sociology department at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, moved in 1959 to build the sociology wing of the Delhi School of Economics — which became the country's most influential training ground — and later joined the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore. His students and colleagues, including André Béteille and a generation of village ethnographers, carried his approach across India.
Fieldwork and the field-view of society
Srinivas's most consequential argument was epistemological. Indology and orientalist scholarship, he held, produced a book-view of India: society as described in the Vedas, the Dharmashastras and the Manusmriti — the varna scheme of four ordered categories, ritual purity as a fixed ladder, hierarchy as doctrine. Fieldwork produced a field-view: society as people actually lived it, in which the operative unit was not varna but the local jati, ranking was disputed rather than agreed, and mobility was common.
The two views diverge sharply. In the book-view, position is scripturally fixed and Brahmins are unambiguously supreme. In the field-view, the ranking of middle castes is genuinely uncertain, caste groups actively press claims to higher status, and secular power frequently outweighs ritual standing. Srinivas did not discard the texts — he read them as one source among several — but he denied them the authority to describe living society.
The Remembered Village (1976) is the emblem of this commitment. Based on his 1948 fieldwork in Rampura, near Mysore, it was written after his field notes were destroyed in a fire at Stanford in 1970 and reconstructed largely from memory. The result is an unusually personal, reflexive ethnography that anticipated later debates about the observer's presence in the account.
Sanskritisation
Srinivas introduced the idea in Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952), initially calling it Brahminisation, then broadening it. Studying the Coorgs, he found lower castes and tribal groups adopting Brahminical ritual, diet, dress, deities and idiom in order to claim higher standing.
Sanskritisation is the process by which a low caste, tribe or other group changes its customs, ritual, ideology and way of life in the direction of a higher, usually twice-born caste. Its features are worth stating precisely:
- It is a form of positional change within the hierarchy, not structural change of the hierarchy itself — one group rises, but the ladder remains.
- The reference model need not be Brahminical; Srinivas allowed for Kshatriya, Vaishya and Jat models, so the process is plural.
- It typically follows the acquisition of economic or political power rather than causing it — a group that gains land or office then seeks ritual validation for its new position.
- Claims must be socially accepted to succeed, and are often contested; the gap between claim and recognition may take a generation to close.
- It spreads not only upwards but outwards, as Sanskritic ideas and rituals reach tribal and peripheral groups.
Dominant caste
The companion concept, developed in his Rampura writings, corrects the assumption that ritual rank determines local power. A dominant caste is one that combines several attributes: numerical strength, ownership of substantial arable land, a relatively high but not necessarily top ritual position, political influence, and increasingly education and government employment. Where these coincide, a caste commands the village — its dominance felt in dispute settlement, patronage, labour arrangements and everyday deference.
The concept explains cases the book-view cannot: Okkaligas in Karnataka, Reddis and Kammas in Andhra, Jats in western Uttar Pradesh, Marathas in Maharashtra, Patidars in Gujarat, Nairs in Kerala — none of them Brahmin, all of them dominant. It also grounds the study of Indian democracy, since Srinivas's related notion of the vote bank, coined in the 1950s, describes how a dominant caste's clientele is mobilised at elections.
Westernisation and secularisation
In Social Change in Modern India (1966) Srinivas placed sanskritisation beside two further processes. Westernisation refers to the changes in Indian society and culture produced by more than a century of British rule — in technology, institutions, dress, food, and above all in the values of humanitarianism, rationalism and equality carried by English education. He distinguished primary westernisation, affecting the small elite in direct contact with the British, from secondary westernisation, its wider diffusion; and he noted that westernisation of a locally dominant group often accelerated sanskritisation among those below it.
Secularisation, for Srinivas, meant that behaviour once governed by ritual considerations increasingly came to be governed by rational and utilitarian ones: the shrinking of pollution rules under the conditions of buses, factories and canteens, the reinterpretation of ritual as hygiene, the loosening of the religious frame around everyday activity. He was careful to note that secularisation coexisted with ritual intensification in other domains.
Criticisms
Srinivas has attracted sustained and useful criticism. Marxist scholars, including A. R. Desai, argue that his concepts describe cultural imitation while leaving the material structure of exploitation untouched — sanskritisation is mobility without emancipation. Others note his relative inattention to class, agrarian relations and the state. B. R. Ambedkar's position implies a deeper objection: sanskritisation legitimises the hierarchy it navigates, so the Dalit answer to caste is repudiation rather than emulation.
The concept has also been faulted for imprecision and Brahmin-centrism, for ignoring counter-processes of de-sanskritisation and the borrowing of tribal and folk practice by higher castes, and for underplaying Islamic and Christian influence — which is why Yogendra Singh and others proposed Islamicisation as a parallel process. His village studies were criticised, notably by Louis Dumont, for treating the village as a bounded isolate; and The Remembered Village drew methodological doubts about ethnography reconstructed from memory.
Legacy
Despite these objections, no vocabulary has proved more durable. Sanskritisation and dominant caste remain standard analytical tools for reading caste mobility, agrarian dominance and electoral behaviour; the field-view established empirical research as the discipline's norm in India; and the institutions Srinivas built shaped its professional life. Later work — Béteille on the disjunction of ritual, economic and political rank, Rudolph and Rudolph on caste associations, the whole literature on Other Backward Classes politics — proceeds from questions he framed.
For the UPSC answer
Srinivas is the most heavily examined thinker in Paper II, so keep his concepts ready in precise form rather than as slogans. Always define sanskritisation as positional and not structural change, then earn marks by adding the qualifications — plural reference models, power preceding ritual claim, contested acceptance — because most candidates stop at the definition. Pair concepts with named illustrations: Okkaligas, Jats, Marathas or Patidars for dominant caste, and the Coorgs for sanskritisation's origin. In questions on perspectives, position him squarely as the structural functionalist and field-view alternative to Ghurye's Indology and Desai's Marxism, using the book-view versus field-view contrast as your organising axis. Close critically — Ambedkar's rejection of emulation and the Marxist charge of cultural mobility without material change — so the answer reads as evaluation, not summary.
References & further reading
- Srinivas, M. N. (1952). Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Srinivas, M. N. (1962). Caste in Modern India and Other Essays. Bombay: Asia Publishing House.
- Srinivas, M. N. (1966). Social Change in Modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Srinivas, M. N. (1976). The Remembered Village. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Srinivas, M. N. (1987). The Dominant Caste and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Srinivas, M. N. (1996). Village, Caste, Gender and Method: Essays in Indian Social Anthropology. Delhi: Oxford University Press.