Hinduism, Sanskritization and the Coorgs: Absorption and Social Mobility

Walk through almost any temple town in Karnataka or Tamil Nadu and you will notice something odd. A village goddess is addressed as a form of Devi. A local hero-stone gets folded into stories about Shiva or Vishnu. Communities that once stood entirely outside caste society now insist they always belonged to it. None of this is accidental. It is the process M.N. Srinivas mapped out in his classic ethnography of the Coorgs, or Kodavas, of Karnataka, and it remains one of the most useful tools for understanding how Hinduism actually spreads and changes.

Hinduism as a living tradition, not a fixed one 🔗

Srinivas’s central argument in Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India is simple but important: Hinduism is not a finished, unchanging system handed down intact from the Vedas. It is shaped by, and in turn shapes, the political and social currents of its time. Kings, migrations, trade routes, and caste politics all leave their mark on religious practice. This dynamic quality is what allows the religion to keep absorbing new communities, deities, and rituals across centuries rather than staying frozen in one form.

Sanskritic deities take on local faces 🔗

One visible sign of this fluidity is how gods travel. Pan-Indian deities associated with Sanskritic, textual Hinduism take on regional forms and names as they spread into new areas, while local deities are gradually given Sanskritic labels and folded into the wider pantheon. A local mother-goddess becomes an aspect of Durga; a hero-spirit worshipped by a farming community starts being addressed with Sanskrit epithets. Scholars studying this exchange between regional and pan-Indian religious traditions describe it as a two-way process of localisation and standardisation happening at once. Sanskritic rites spread outward, and at the same time, non-Sanskritic local rites get progressively sanskritized in form and vocabulary.

The Coorgs and the pull of a larger tradition 🔗

Srinivas illustrates this using the Coorgs’ own religious geography. The community reveres regional shrines and treats the Kaveri river with the same devotion that North Indian Hindus show the Ganga. This is not a casual comparison. The Kaveri rises at Talakaveri in the Brahmagiri hills of Coorg and is widely known as the Dakshina Ganga, or Ganga of the South, one of the sacred rivers of the subcontinent. By anchoring their local geography to a pan-Indian idea of sacred rivers, the Coorgs place themselves inside a much larger religious community rather than a purely local one.

This is exactly what Sanskritic Hinduism does for its followers, in Srinivas’s reading. It supplies a shared set of values, deities, pilgrimage sites, and stories that knit together groups who otherwise have very different local customs, languages, and histories. A Coorg farmer and a Gangetic plains Brahmin may have almost nothing else in common, but both can locate themselves within the same symbolic universe of sacred rivers, festivals, and epics.

Becoming a caste: the real marker of absorption 🔗

A key point in the chapter is often missed in casual retellings of Sanskritization: full absorption into the Hindu fold is not marked by belief alone. It is marked by a group becoming a caste. So long as a community sits outside the caste hierarchy, it remains an outsider to organised Hinduism in a structural sense, however much it worships Hindu gods. The moment it takes on a caste identity, with an assigned rank, marriage rules, and occupational associations, it has entered the system properly.

The Coorgs’ claim to Kshatriya status 🔗

The Coorgs offer a textbook example. Over generations, through their positions in the courts of local Rajas and their service in royal armies, the Coorgs built an identity as a martial community. This history, reinforced by myths tracing their descent from intermarriages among higher varnas, allowed them to claim Kshatriya, or warrior-caste, status, and today they are widely recognised as such within the regional caste hierarchy. Yet the claim is only partial. Classical Kshatriya ritual involves Vedic mantras recited by Brahmin priests at key life-cycle ceremonies. The Coorgs never adopted this at their naming ceremonies, and Brahmin priests do not traditionally officiate at their major rites. Srinivas uses this gap deliberately. It is why he favours the term Sanskritization over the older term Brahminization: upwardly mobile groups absorb the general direction of higher-caste life without necessarily taking on strict Vedic orthodoxy.

Sanskritization as an ongoing climb, not a one-time event 🔗

Becoming a caste is only the first step. Once a group has a recognised place in the hierarchy, it typically starts trying to move further up within that hierarchy, by adopting the customs of castes ranked above it. This is Sanskritization proper, and Srinivas treats it as continuous rather than a single historical event. A community that has entered the caste system at a modest rank keeps pushing upward across generations, borrowing rituals, dietary rules, and social markers from groups higher up the ladder.

What this borrowing actually looks like 🔗

In practice, this upward movement follows fairly predictable patterns. Groups seeking higher status commonly adopt vegetarianism, give up alcohol, take up the sacred thread, restrict remarriage for widows, and begin observing stricter rules of endogamy, all customs associated with higher, often twice-born, castes. As one university study of the process puts it, communities pursuing this route deliberately discard practices considered impure by Brahminical standards while adopting those seen as prestigious. None of this happens through official decree. It spreads through imitation, intermarriage aspirations, and the simple social pressure of wanting to be seen as respectable within a locally dominant framework of values.

Not a single, uniform current 🔗

It would be a mistake to read this as one tidy escalator running the same way across the whole country. Sanskritization draws its force from Sanskritic, Brahminical culture specifically, and that culture was never equally dominant everywhere. In large parts of northern India, particularly Punjab, it was the Islamic tradition that offered the reference point for cultural imitation rather than Brahminical Hinduism. Sociologist Yogendra Singh made a related criticism, arguing that the framework leans too heavily on Sanskritic culture and underplays the many non-Sanskritic threads that also shaped Indian social change. Srinivas’s model works best as a description of one major, recurring pattern within Hindu society, not as a universal law covering every community and region in the same way.

Even with that caveat, the cumulative effect described in the chapter is significant. Two processes run in parallel across Indian history: groups outside Hinduism keep being absorbed as new castes, and castes already inside the hierarchy keep trying to climb by sanskritizing further. Together, these two movements have acted as one of the strongest engines behind the spread of Sanskritic ritual and custom across the subcontinent, well beyond anything a central religious authority could have organised deliberately.

Why this 1952 study still matters 🔗

Srinivas conducted his Coorg fieldwork in the early 1940s, and the book emerged from his doctoral thesis at Oxford. What makes it endure is the method as much as the argument. Rather than reconstructing Hindu society from Sanskrit texts alone, as much earlier scholarship had done, he insisted on studying how religion was actually lived in villages, and this ground-up, fieldwork-based approach reshaped Indian sociology as a discipline. Concepts he introduced through this study, including Sanskritization and the closely related idea of the dominant caste, are still standard vocabulary in discussions of caste and mobility today. Recent scholarship continues to revisit his work, with sociologists examining how his ideas hold up against contemporary debates on caste dynamics, identity politics, and social justice in present-day India. A study built around one small community in the Western Ghats ended up giving Indian sociology a framework it still relies on more than seventy years later.

What do you think? Can you think of a community or caste group around you that has visibly sanskritized over the last generation or two, through changes in diet, ritual, or dress? And does Srinivas’s framework still hold up in an age of Westernization and urban migration, or has social mobility in India found other, newer routes?

References

1. https://www.lkouniv.ac.in/site/writereaddata/siteContent/202004241009363568deep_SDS_sanskritization_and_westernisation.pdf
2. https://wgbis.ces.iisc.ac.in/energy/water/paper/ETR129/sec7.html
3. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/83676/1/Unit-8.pdf
4. https://www.bbau.ac.in/dept/Sociology/TM/Sanskritization.pdf
5. https://theprint.in/theprint-profile/mn-srinivas-gave-india-a-new-way-to-see-caste-his-feet-were-firmly-on-the-ground/2380070/
6. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/socf.70010