Colonial Ethnography After the 1960s: The Analytical and Evaluative Phases of Indian Anthropology

Walk into any Indian sociology or anthropology classroom today, and you’ll find M N Srinivas, Iravati Karve, and Louis Dumont on the reading list almost as often as the classical village monographs of the 1950s. That is not an accident. After 1960, the discipline in India stopped simply describing villages and started asking harder questions about why caste, kinship, and hierarchy worked the way they did. This shift, often called the analytical and evaluative phase, reshaped how ethnography was written, who got studied, and eventually, who got to write about whom.

Why anthropology suddenly needed more hands 🔗

The late 1950s and 1960s were a turning point for the discipline in India, and the reasons were practical as much as intellectual. A newly independent state was drawing up five-year plans, and planners needed reliable, ground-level data on rural life before they could design land reforms, agricultural programmes, or rural education schemes. Village-level fieldwork gave them exactly that. As the discipline’s own historians have noted, by the 1950s enough groundwork had been laid to attempt estimating rural India’s national income and planning nationwide development studies using sociological data.

At the same time, the census organisation of independent India needed trained social scientists to make sense of the country’s staggering social diversity. Universities responded by opening new teaching positions in sociology and anthropology at a pace the discipline had never seen before. The village, already established as a manageable unit of study during the colonial period, became the default entry point for this expanded research effort. It offered what one generation of scholars called an observation centre: a small, bounded setting where caste, religion, kinship, and the agrarian economy could all be watched at once.

From describing villages to analysing them 🔗

The single-village monograph had dominated Indian ethnography through the 1950s. Studies like S C Dube’s account of Shamirpet or the essays collected in Srinivas’s India’s Villages gave rich, detailed pictures of specific communities, but many of them stopped at description. They told you what a village looked like without necessarily explaining why its institutions held together, or how one village connected to the wider caste and economic system around it.

The post-1960s analytical phase pushed back against this. Scholars began asking more comparative and theoretical questions: What explains social mobility within caste? How does kinship structure economic relationships? Why does hierarchy persist even as villages modernise? Many of these later studies still lacked strong institutional backing or a shared conceptual vocabulary, which is part of why this period also produced a parallel movement toward indigenizing the concepts anthropologists used, building frameworks rooted in Indian social categories rather than imported Western ones.

Structural-functionalism comes to Indian ethnography 🔗

This is where three names dominate the syllabus: M N Srinivas, Iravati Karve, and F G Bailey. Each brought the structural-functional approach, developed by British social anthropologists like A R Radcliffe-Brown, into direct contact with Indian material, and each ended up complicating the neat imported theory with what they actually found in the field.

M N Srinivas and the Coorgs of South India 🔗

Srinivas trained under Radcliffe-Brown at Oxford, and his 1952 study of the Coorg community of South India, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India, is usually treated as the founding text of this phase. The book challenged the dominant colonial-era view of caste as fixed and unchanging, using structural-functional analysis to show how social change was constantly at work within what looked like a rigid caste order. Out of this fieldwork came Sanskritisation, the idea that lower castes could raise their social standing by adopting the customs and rituals of castes above them. It remains one of the most cited concepts in Indian sociology.

Iravati Karve and the kinship-caste connection 🔗

Karve, working at Deccan College in Pune, took a different route into the same problem. Her 1953 work, Kinship Organization in India, mapped marriage and kinship patterns across four linguistic-cultural zones of the country and argued that you cannot understand kinship in India without also understanding how linguistic region, caste, and family organisation interact with one another. In effect, she treated caste as an extended form of kinship, which meant that studying who married whom told you as much about social structure as studying ritual status did. It was a genuinely comparative, pan-Indian project at a time when most ethnography stayed within a single village.

F G Bailey and caste on the economic frontier 🔗

Bailey approached the same period from the angle of political and economic change. His 1957 study of Bisipara, a village in the Orissa highlands, published as Caste and the Economic Frontier, tracked what happened to caste hierarchy once a traditional agricultural economy started merging with commerce and state administration. Bailey argued that the political functions once carried by caste were gradually being taken over by the wider political authority of the Government of India. In other words, caste hierarchy was no longer a complete guide to who actually held economic and political power in the village.

Louis Dumont and the structuralist turn on caste 🔗

Where Srinivas, Karve, and Bailey stayed close to the functionalist tradition, the French anthropologist Louis Dumont took Indian ethnography somewhere quite different. His Homo Hierarchicus, first published in French in 1966 and translated into English in 1970, applied a structuralist and cognitive-historical method, borrowed partly from Claude Lévi-Strauss, to the caste system as a whole.

Dumont’s central claim was that caste was not primarily an economic or political system but an ideology, built around a single organising opposition between purity and pollution. Hierarchy, in his reading, meant that the pure encompasses and outranks the impure, and this principle held across region and class. Reviewers in Contributions to Indian Sociology’s symposium on the book engaged intensely with this claim, and it remains one of the most argued-over theories in the discipline: critics pointed out that it treated caste ideology as timeless and paid less attention to the lived, changing “field view” that scholars like Srinivas had spent a career documenting. Even so, Dumont’s framework gave Indian ethnography a genuinely new vocabulary for talking about hierarchy as an idea, not just a social fact.

Bringing women into the ethnographic frame 🔗

For much of this analytical phase, women appeared in ethnographies mainly as subjects of kinship and marriage data, rarely as the central focus of a study in their own right. That began to change from the 1980s, as a group of scholars turned their fieldwork specifically toward women’s everyday lives, work, and health.

Patricia Caplan in Madras 🔗

Patricia Caplan’s 1985 study, Class and Gender in India, looked at women’s welfare organisations in Madras to understand how class formation among women actually worked in a South Indian city. Rather than treating women as a single category, Caplan showed how class position shaped what kind of organising was even available to different groups of women.

Susan Wadley in Karimpur 🔗

Susan Wadley’s Struggling with Destiny in Karimpur, 1925-1984, published in 1994, took an unusually long view. Building on fieldwork that stretched back to the 1920s, Wadley traced how agriculture, labour relations, education, and family life had changed in the north Indian village over sixty years, and showed that residents did not describe these changes with one voice. Their accounts varied sharply by gender, caste, and economic status, which made Karimpur a study of inequality as much as of change.

Susan Seymour in Bhubaneswar 🔗

Susan Seymour’s Women, Family, and Child Care in India: A World in Transition, published in 1999, followed families in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, over three decades. Her longitudinal study examined how expanding education and delayed marriage reshaped women’s roles within the family across generations. Together, these three studies marked a shift from women as a side note in kinship studies to women as the central lens through which social change itself was examined.

Subaltern studies and the post-colonial turn 🔗

The 1980s brought a more fundamental challenge to how Indian history and society had been written up until then. A group of historians, working initially under Ranajit Guha, launched what became known as Subaltern Studies, a project that set out to recover the perspectives of peasants, labourers, and other groups left out of both colonial and nationalist accounts of Indian history. Partha Chatterjee and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak became central figures in extending this project, with Spivak’s writing pushing the group toward questions of representation and voice: could the subaltern actually speak in the historical record, or was their experience always mediated by someone else’s account of it? A landmark moment came in 1988, when Guha and Spivak co-edited a reader that gave the collective wider international visibility.

For anthropology, Subaltern Studies mattered beyond its immediate subject matter. It encouraged a reflexive turn in ethnographic practice more broadly, pushing researchers to ask who gets to represent whom, and what gets lost when an outsider’s framework is imposed on someone else’s lived experience. That question, more than any single theory of caste or kinship, is what carried Indian ethnography from the analytical phase of the 1960s into the more self-critical, post-colonial anthropology that followed.

What do you think? Looking at Srinivas’s field view versus Dumont’s structuralist reading of caste, which approach do you find more convincing for understanding how hierarchy actually functions in everyday life? And do you think ethnography can ever fully escape the problem Subaltern Studies raised, of an outsider speaking for the people being studied?

References

1. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp4/chapter/village-studies-in-india/
2. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/83676/1/Unit-8.pdf
3. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/81504/2/Unit-8.pdf
4. https://www.epw.in/journal/2016/26-27/review-rural-affairs/f-g-baileys-bisipara-revisited.html
5. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/006996677100500102
6. https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/research/article/struggling-with-destiny-in-karimpur-1925-1984
7. https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/psychology/cultural-psychology/women-family-and-child-care-india-world-transition
8. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2020/02/17/subaltern-studies/