M.N. Srinivas: Key Concepts in Indian Sociology and Social Anthropology

Most Indians have heard the term “Sanskritisation” without knowing where it came from or who coined it. The credit goes to Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas, a scholar who spent his career watching Indian society up close, in villages, courtrooms, and election booths, rather than relying only on ancient texts. His fieldwork gave Indian sociology and social anthropology some of its most enduring vocabulary: Sanskritisation, dominant caste, and Westernisation. Here is how a boy from Mysore built a discipline almost from scratch.

From Mysore to Oxford: an anthropologist in the making 🔗

Srinivas was born in Mysore in 1916. He completed his BA in Anthropology and Sociology and his MA in Sociology at Mysore University in 1936 and 1939. He then moved to Bombay to work under G.S. Ghurye, widely regarded as the founding figure of Indian sociology. Srinivas studied with Ghurye in Bombay before seeking admission for a D.Phil at Oxford in 1945, and it was Ghurye who sent him to study the Coorg community of Karnataka for his doctoral fieldwork. That research became the basis of his PhD from Bombay University, though Srinivas often found himself at odds with his mentor over both method and interpretation.

Oxford changed the direction of his career. There, he first studied under A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and then completed his doctorate under the supervision of E.E. Evans-Pritchard, two of the most influential figures in British social anthropology at the time. Their structural-functionalist approach, which looked at how social institutions work together to maintain a system, left a permanent mark on how Srinivas approached Indian society. He completed his D.Phil. in Social Anthropology in 1947, carrying home an entirely new toolkit for studying caste, kinship, and village life from the inside.

Building sociology as a discipline in India 🔗

Srinivas returned to India in 1951 and joined Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda as the first Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, a post he held until 1959. In February 1959, he moved to the University of Delhi to set up its Department of Sociology under Vice-Chancellor V.K.R.V. Rao, and he used the opportunity to recruit some of the sharpest young minds in the field, including M.S.A. Rao, Savitri Sahani, André Béteille, and Gouranga Chattopadhyay. Under his leadership, the department grew rapidly, and it was recognised as a Centre for Advanced Study in Sociology by the University Grants Commission, cementing Delhi’s place as a hub for Indian sociology.

Srinivas left Delhi in 1972 to become Joint Director at the newly created Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, an institution he had helped set up that year. He later served as a J.R.D. Tata Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies until his death in 1999. Across every posting, his priority stayed the same: train researchers to go into the field themselves instead of reading about India from a library chair.

Sanskritisation: explaining how caste mobility works 🔗

Srinivas’s best-known contribution is the concept of Sanskritisation, introduced in his 1952 book “Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India.” He initially called the process “Brahminisation,” but replaced it because the model being copied was not always Brahmin practice. By using terms such as Sanskritisation and dominant caste, Srinivas tried to capture the fluid, dynamic nature of caste as a living social institution rather than a fixed hierarchy frozen in scripture.

In simple terms, Sanskritisation describes how a caste or tribal group lower in the local hierarchy adopts the customs, rituals, diet, and lifestyle of a caste it sees as higher, in order to claim a better social position over time. This could mean giving up meat and alcohol, adopting new rituals, or changing dress and language to resemble the locally dominant group, whether that group was Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, or simply the most powerful caste in that particular region. The process did not dismantle the caste hierarchy; it let individual groups move up within it, which is exactly why Srinivas found it useful for showing that Indian society was never as static as colonial-era writing had assumed.

Making sense of India’s caste system 🔗

Varna and jati: using local categories 🔗

Srinivas was careful about the difference between varna, the broad four-fold classification described in classical texts, and jati, the thousands of localised caste and sub-caste groups that actually structure everyday life. He argued that researchers needed to use local terms and categories rather than imposing textbook varna labels, because varna categories often told you very little about how caste actually functioned in a specific village or region.

Horizontal and vertical solidarity 🔗

He also introduced the ideas of horizontal and vertical solidarity to describe two different kinds of caste bonds. He described “vertical (inter-caste) and horizontal (intra-caste) solidarities” as a way to capture how caste operates both within and across communities. Horizontal solidarity connects members of the same caste spread across many villages, while vertical solidarity ties different castes together within a single village through a shared, hierarchical local economy and social order.

Dominant caste and Westernisation 🔗

His fieldwork in Rampura, a village near Mysore, produced the concept of the dominant caste. According to Srinivas, a caste becomes locally dominant not necessarily because it sits at the top of the ritual hierarchy, but because it owns a sizeable share of cultivable land, has considerable numerical strength, and holds a reasonably high place in the local caste hierarchy. In Rampura, this role was played by the Okkaliga community, who held enough land and numbers to shape village life even without top ritual status.

Alongside dominant caste, Srinivas developed the idea of Westernisation, distinguishing between a group’s ritual status within the caste order and its secular status, built through Western-style education, salaried jobs, and political influence. A family could gain real power and prestige through Westernisation even while its ritual caste rank stayed unchanged, and Srinivas saw this gap between ritual and secular standing as one of the defining tensions of modern Indian society.

Fieldwork as a way of knowing: the village studies 🔗

Srinivas was convinced that village studies were essential to understanding the country, since so much of Indian life was still rural and locally organised. His most famous ethnography, “The Remembered Village,” grew out of fieldwork in Rampura in 1948, but the story of how the book came to be written is almost as well known as its content. In 1970, while Srinivas was a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, all three copies of his research notes were destroyed in an office fire, forcing him to reconstruct the village from memory and fragments over the next decade. The resulting book, published in 1976, is written almost entirely from recollection, which gives it an unusually personal and narrative quality for an academic ethnography, and adds a genuinely new methodological dimension to how fieldwork-based writing can be done.

Caste, kinship and the ballot box 🔗

Srinivas did not limit his fieldwork approach to villages and caste alone. He also helped shape political anthropology in India through “The Grassroots of Democracy: Field Studies of Indian Elections,” a project he conceived along with his colleague A.M. Shah. The book brings together nineteen essays based on fieldwork conducted by sociologists at the Delhi School of Economics, covering national elections across rural, tribal, and urban communities in ten Indian states. Rather than relying on opinion polls or voter surveys, the contributors went into constituencies to observe elections directly, showing how caste, kinship, religion, tribe, and clan loyalties shaped voting behaviour on the ground. The project demonstrated that Indian democracy could not be fully understood through statistics alone, it needed the same close, patient observation Srinivas had always insisted on.

A legacy that shaped a discipline 🔗

Srinivas was, above all, a builder of institutions and people. He mentored a generation of sociologists and anthropologists who went on to lead departments across the country, and he served on bodies such as the University Grants Commission, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, and the editorial circle of the Economic and Political Weekly, staying involved in the practical infrastructure of the discipline and not just its ideas. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1977, and those who knew him often spoke of his humility as much as his scholarship, noting that he was approachable and never arrogant despite his stature. Decades after his death in 1999, Sanskritisation, dominant caste, and Westernisation remain some of the most frequently used frameworks for understanding caste mobility, rural power structures, and social change in India.

What do you think? Do concepts like Sanskritisation and dominant caste still explain social mobility in urban India today, or do factors like income, English education, and digital access now matter more than caste-based emulation? And what does it say about a discipline when its most famous book was written almost entirely from memory after a fire?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/M-N-Srinivas
2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2277436X20968952?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.3
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._N._Srinivas
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_caste
5. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/09/05/book-review-the-remembered-village-srinivas/
6. https://theprint.in/theprint-profile/mn-srinivas-gave-india-a-new-way-to-see-caste-his-feet-were-firmly-on-the-ground/2380070/