Breaking down the question
The question asks you to elaborate — that is, to explain in detail and with illustration — the views advanced by M. N. Srinivas in his classic study Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952). The command word signals exposition rather than debate, though a mark of quality is a brief note on the study's wider significance.
The key terms are religion and society: Srinivas's central argument is that among the Coorgs the two are inseparable, religion serving as the language through which social relations are expressed and held together. You must show how he demonstrates this.
How to approach it
Open by placing the work in its intellectual setting — Srinivas's debt to Radcliffe-Brown and the structural-functional method. Then set out his substantive findings: the ritual idiom of Coorg life, the role of the okka, and the distinction between Sanskritic and local Hinduism. Close by noting the study's theoretical yield, above all the concept of Sanskritisation that grew from it.
Model answer
M. N. Srinivas, in Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India, applied the structural-functional approach he had absorbed from Radcliffe-Brown at Oxford to a small agrarian community of Coorg (Kodagu). His governing thesis is that among the Coorgs religion and society are not separate spheres but two aspects of a single order — religion supplies the idiom in which social groups understand and reproduce themselves.
Srinivas showed that the basic social unit, the okka or patrilineal joint household, was also a ritual unit. Ancestor worship, the veneration of the karona (ancestors) and observance of festivals bound the members of an okka together and marked its boundaries against others. Rites of birth, marriage and death did not merely accompany social life; they constituted the solidarity of the group. Ritual, in his phrase, expressed and reinforced the moral community.
He drew a now-famous distinction between two levels of Hinduism among the Coorgs. Sanskritic Hinduism — the pan-Indian religion of the great gods, Brahmanical texts and all-India festivals — coexisted with a local, non-Sanskritic religion of village deities, spirits and Coorg-specific observances. Movement between these levels, whereby lower groups adopted Sanskritic practices to raise their standing, later crystallised into his celebrated concept of Sanskritisation.
Methodologically the study was a landmark. It advanced the field view of Indian society against the older book view of the Indologists, insisting that religion be studied as it is practised in a living community rather than as it is prescribed in texts. Religion thus emerged as a functional mechanism of integration, giving the Coorgs a shared moral world and translating abstract social structure into observable rite.
The work has been criticised for its static, integrationist emphasis, which underplays conflict and change, and for generalising from a single small community. Even so, it remains a foundational text of Indian sociology. For the wider framework, see the note on structural functionalism and Srinivas.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners look for candidates who grasp the core claim — that religion is the idiom of Coorg social life — and can evidence it with the okka, ancestor worship and the Sanskritic versus non-Sanskritic distinction. Naming the structural-functional lineage from Radcliffe-Brown, and linking the study to the birth of Sanskritisation and the field view, lifts an answer. A short critical closing on its integrationist bias secures the top band.