Breaking down the question
This question asks you to compare and contrast the ways two towering figures of Indian sociology understood caste. It is not enough to describe caste in general; the examiner wants the distinctive analytical lens each scholar brought — Srinivas with his field-based, structural-functional reading, and Beteille with his layered analysis of caste, class and power.
The operative word is perspectives. You must foreground methodology and conceptual apparatus: what each thinker chose to see, the concepts they coined, and the empirical settings from which their ideas grew. A strong answer treats the two as complementary rather than opposed, showing how Beteille built upon and moved beyond the ground Srinivas had cleared.
How to approach it
Begin by locating both scholars within the shift from textual, Indological accounts of caste to empirical, fieldwork-based sociology. Then devote a compact section to each. For Srinivas, foreground Sanskritisation, the dominant caste and his structural-functional view drawn from the Rampura and Coorg studies — caste as a dynamic, mobile reality rather than a frozen hierarchy. Our notes on the features of the caste system set out this framework.
For Beteille, move to his Sripuram study in Tanjore, where he separated caste, class and power as distinct dimensions of stratification and introduced the distinction between harmonic and disharmonic systems. Close by drawing the comparison explicitly: Srinivas the ethnographer of the caste order from within, Beteille the analyst who prised apart its overlapping axes of inequality under the pressure of modern change.
Model answer
The empirical study of caste in India owes much to M.N. Srinivas and Andre Beteille, who between them turned the subject away from the sacred texts of the Indologists and towards the observed life of villages. Yet each looked through a different lens, and the contrast between them illuminates the discipline itself.
Srinivas approached caste through intensive fieldwork, most famously in the Mysore village of Rampura and among the Coorgs. His structural-functional training led him to see caste not as a rigid, changeless order but as a living system capable of mobility. His concept of Sanskritisation captured the process by which a lower caste could raise its position by adopting the customs, ritual and lifestyle of a higher, twice-born caste. His idea of the dominant caste explained how economic strength, numerical preponderance and ritual standing combined to give certain castes local authority. For Srinivas, caste was a functioning, integrative institution, and the sociologist's task was to describe its actual working through the field-view rather than the book-view.
Beteille, writing a generation later, brought a sharper analytical apparatus to the same terrain. In his celebrated study of the Tanjore village of Sripuram, he argued that stratification in India could not be reduced to caste alone. He distinguished three separate dimensions — caste, class and power — and showed that they no longer coincided neatly. Where once ritual rank, landed wealth and political authority had reinforced one another in a harmonic system, modern forces of land reform, electoral politics and the market were pulling them apart into a disharmonic one. A Brahmin might retain ritual precedence yet lose economic dominance; a lower caste might gain political power through the ballot.
The two perspectives are best read as successive stages of a single enquiry. Srinivas established that caste was empirical, dynamic and locally organised; Beteille disaggregated that reality, insisting that inequality in India runs along several partly independent lines. Srinivas emphasised cohesion and cultural mobility; Beteille emphasised the growing tension between the several hierarchies as India modernised. Together they moved Indian sociology from a static, textual image of caste to a supple, evidence-based understanding of a stratification order in transition.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner is checking whether a candidate can distinguish two scholarly perspectives with precision rather than blur them into a generic account of caste. Weak answers narrate what caste is and mention Sanskritisation in passing, without conveying the analytical difference between the two thinkers.
High-scoring scripts pin each scholar to their key concepts and field sites — Srinivas to Sanskritisation, dominant caste and the structural-functional field-view; Beteille to the caste-class-power triad and the harmonic-disharmonic distinction from Sripuram. The best answers close by relating the two, showing Beteille as extending and complicating the empirical ground Srinivas opened, which signals genuine command of the intellectual lineage.