Universalisation and Parochialisation: The Dynamic Exchange of Cultural Traditions in India

Walk into any Indian village during a festival, and you will notice something curious. The rituals feel deeply local, tied to a specific deity, a specific field, a specific story that the neighbouring village doesn’t quite share. Yet the festival itself, whether it’s Diwali or Navaratri, is also celebrated across the country in some recognisable form. This constant back and forth between the local and the pan-Indian is not accidental. Anthropologists studying Indian society found a name for this exchange: universalisation and parochialisation.

Where the idea began: great and little traditions 🔗

The starting point for this framework is the American anthropologist Robert Redfield. Working on peasant communities, Redfield distinguished between two layers of culture within any civilisation. One layer is formal, literate, and maintained by a small reflective elite. The other is oral, informal, and carried by the ordinary, unlettered majority. He called these the great tradition and the little tradition, and argued that neither survives in isolation. They are two halves of the same cultural system, constantly shaping each other.

From peasant studies to Indian civilisation 🔗

Redfield’s framework was built on fieldwork far from India, but his students and collaborators at the University of Chicago found it especially useful for understanding Indian society. Scholars had long noted that Indian civilisation carries a common Sanskritic thread that is legible across regions, alongside thousands of hyper-local customs, deities, and rituals that make sense only within a single village or caste group. Redfield’s categories gave researchers a vocabulary to describe how these two layers relate to each other rather than treating them as separate worlds.

Redfield also pointed to a group of people who make this relationship possible in the first place. He called them cultural specialists, priests, scholars, storytellers, and ritual performers who move between the village and the wider civilisational centre, carrying material in both directions. It is largely through these cultural specialists that the great and little traditions stay in constant conversation, rather than drifting apart into two unrelated cultural worlds. Marriott and Singer each picked up this thread when they moved from Redfield’s general theory to specific Indian field sites.

Marriott’s Kishangarhi study and the twin concepts 🔗

McKim Marriott, a student of Redfield, took this idea into the field. He carried out an intensive study of the socio-religious life of Kishangarhi, a village in Uttar Pradesh, and published his findings in the essay Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilisation. Marriott argued that an indigenous civilisation like India’s does not grow through one tradition simply overpowering the other. Instead, its great tradition itself emerges by carrying forward material that already exists at the local level, refining it into a more systematic and articulate form. Out of this observation, he proposed two complementary processes that describe the direction of cultural movement between the village and the wider civilisation: universalisation and parochialisation.

Universalisation: when the local becomes universal 🔗

Universalisation describes the upward journey of a cultural element. A rite, belief, or deity that begins as strictly local gets absorbed, standardised, and reinterpreted in terms of the wider Sanskritic belief system, until it becomes recognisable as part of the great tradition. The local version does not vanish; it gets folded into a bigger, more systematised story that carries authority across regions.

The village goddess who became Lakshmi 🔗

Marriott’s most cited illustration of this process comes from Kishangarhi’s own Diwali celebrations. Villagers worshipped a local goddess named Saurti during the festival, seeking wealth and prosperity for the household. Marriott observed that this local worship closely mirrors the pan-Indian reverence for the goddess Lakshmi, who also represents wealth and prosperity in the Sanskritic great tradition. The two figures share function, symbolism, and the timing of worship, suggesting that a local deity of this kind can be read as a village-level rendering of a much larger, universalised figure. What starts as one village’s private ritual becomes legible as a regional expression of a national tradition.

Parochialisation: when the universal becomes local 🔗

Parochialisation runs in the opposite direction. Here, an element from the great tradition, something classical, Sanskritic, and widely recognised, moves down into a village setting and gets reshaped to fit local resources, language, and imagination. Marriott described this as the genuinely creative work of small communities. Villagers do not simply copy the classical version; they rebuild it using local materials and local meanings, often without full awareness of the Sanskritic original.

Nine nights, one goddess, many local forms 🔗

Marriott’s example here is the festival of Navaratri, the nine-night worship of the goddess Durga that is central to the great tradition. In Kishangarhi, this festival reappears as Naurtha, where villagers fashion a mud image of a female deity and worship her over nine days. Even the name has been reshaped locally, drawn from the Sanskrit phrase nava-ratra, or nine nights, but altered into a form that fits village speech. The classical Durga has, in effect, been localised into Naurtha, a deity shaped from mud and memory rather than temple sculpture and scripture.

Singer’s Madras study: the city as a meeting point too 🔗

Marriott’s fieldwork was rural, but Milton Singer, another scholar working in the Redfield tradition, asked whether the same interaction holds true in a large city. He studied Madras, present-day Chennai, examining how Hindu tradition functioned within an urban, industrialising setting. His findings, published as The Great Tradition in a Metropolitan Center: Madras and later developed in his book When a Great Tradition Modernizes, showed that the great tradition survives and adapts inside a modern city rather than disappearing under the weight of industrial life.

Industrial leaders who stayed rooted 🔗

Singer interviewed Madras industrialists to understand how their careers and business practices had been shaped by their cultural background. He found that many of these leaders had moved successfully from small towns and agricultural backgrounds into modern industry and education without abandoning their traditional institutions, family rituals, caste networks, and religious practices that continued to function well inside a modern economic setting. Singer described how cultural performances, festivals, recitations, temple rituals, acted as the connecting media through which the great tradition kept renewing itself even in a rapidly modernising metropolitan center. He grouped these observations under a broader set of ideas, cultural performance, cultural media, and cultural specialists, that together explained how a tradition keeps travelling through a society even as that society industrialises. Cultures of this kind did not simply survive by resisting change; they proved genuinely adaptive to industrial life, much as village traditions had adapted to classical Sanskritic influence.

A two-way exchange that keeps civilisation moving 🔗

Taken together, Marriott’s village study and Singer’s urban study point to the same underlying pattern. Indian civilisation does not move in a single direction, from elite centers down to villages, or from folk practice up to classical scripture. It moves both ways at once, through constant, often unequal, negotiation between literate specialists and ordinary practitioners. Priests, scholars, and other cultural specialists based in urban or temple centers initiate changes to the great tradition. Once a particular center absorbs and legitimises a change, that shift gradually filters outward and influences the little traditions of the surrounding countryside. At the same time, local practices keep feeding new material upward, material that eventually gets systematised into the wider Sanskritic fold.

Marriott was careful to note that this process rarely involves one tradition simply erasing the other. Sanskritic influence tends to layer itself onto existing local practice through accretion rather than outright replacement, which is part of why village India can look simultaneously ancient and classical, local and pan-Indian, in the same festival. A local wedding song, a harvest rite, or a naming ceremony can absorb a Sanskritic verse or a classical deity’s name without giving up its older, regionally specific form underneath. This dynamic sits close to a related idea in Indian sociology, M. N. Srinivas’s concept of Sanskritisation, where lower castes adopt the customs and rituals of dominant groups to claim higher social status. Universalisation and parochialisation describe the cultural traffic that makes such mobility possible in the first place, since it is this constant upward and downward movement of symbols and practices that gives a caste group something to imitate and a village deity something to be absorbed into.

Why this framework still matters 🔗

Understanding universalisation and parochialisation helps explain why Indian festivals, deities, and rituals resist easy generalisation. Ask someone in one state what a festival means, and you might get an answer rooted in a hyper-local story about a village goddess or ancestor spirit. Ask someone in another state about the very same festival, and the answer might invoke a classical Sanskrit text. Both answers can be correct at once, because the tradition itself has been moving in both directions for centuries. Marriott’s twin concepts give students of Indian society a precise vocabulary for a pattern that is otherwise easy to notice but hard to name: unity built not through uniformity, but through constant translation between the local and the universal.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? Can you think of a festival or ritual from your own region that seems to sit somewhere between a purely local practice and a pan-Indian classical tradition? Does knowing about universalisation and parochialisation change how you would explain that festival to someone from outside your community?

References

1. https://hirr.hartfordinternational.edu/articles/4535/
2. https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/great-tradition
3. https://epgp.inflibnet.ac.in/epgpdata/uploads/epgp_content/s000001an/p001113/m013437/et/145758515713et.pdf
4. https://epgp.inflibnet.ac.in/epgpdata/uploads/epgp_content/S000001AN/P001113/M013458/ET/145759069534ET.pdf
5. https://casbs.stanford.edu/people/milton-singer