Walk into any conversation about India’s caste system and you’ll likely hear it described as rigid, fixed, unchangeable since birth. That picture isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. Sociologist M.N. Srinivas spent decades studying villages in Karnataka and found something the textbooks of his time had missed: castes and tribes actively worked to change their position within the hierarchy. He called this process Sanskritisation, and it remains one of the most influential ideas in Indian social anthropology. Here’s what Srinivas actually found, how it applies to tribal communities, and why he insisted that studying Indian society means studying a version of yourself.
Table of Contents
What is Sanskritisation?
Srinivas defined Sanskritisation as the process by which a low Hindu caste, a tribe, or any other group changes its customs, rituals, ideology, and way of life in the direction of a high and frequently twice-born caste. He first developed the idea while studying the Coorgs of Mysore, work later published as a landmark ethnography, and he refined it further in subsequent lectures and essays on caste and social change in modern India.
The word choice matters. Srinivas originally called this process Brahminisation, assuming that lower castes always modelled themselves on Brahmins. Fieldwork corrected him. In many regions, the group being imitated wasn’t a Brahmin community at all, but whichever caste held local land, political power, and social dominance, whether Kshatriya, Vaishya, or an economically powerful Shudra caste. That’s why he settled on the broader term, built around the idea of moving toward the practices of any “twice-born” or ritually high-status group, not one caste in particular.
A crucial detail is timing. This isn’t an overnight transformation. A caste typically stakes its claim to a higher position generations before that claim is actually accepted by neighbouring communities. The gap between claiming status and receiving recognition can stretch across a generation or two, which is part of why Sanskritisation functions as slow, negotiated social movement rather than a single dramatic event.
Evidence from Mysore’s caste communities
Srinivas didn’t build this theory in the abstract. His fieldwork among Harijan castes, the Smiths community, Okkaligas, Kurubas, Lingayats, and the Coorgs of Mysore gave him concrete cases of communities adjusting dietary rules, giving up meat and liquor, adopting vegetarianism, changing marriage customs, and reworking their rituals to resemble those of locally dominant groups. These weren’t isolated experiments. Across different castes and regions, the same underlying pattern kept showing up: emulate the customs of whoever holds power and prestige nearby, and use that emulation to argue for a higher rank.
Positional mobility, not structural change
Here’s the part that often gets missed. Sanskritisation lets individual castes move up, or occasionally down, within the hierarchy, but it doesn’t dismantle the hierarchy itself. Scholars studying this concept distinguish between positional change, where a specific caste’s rank shifts, and structural change, where the entire framework of hierarchical caste ranking is replaced. Sanskritisation is squarely the former. According to an analysis from Lucknow University’s sociology department, castes rise or fall in position while the overall shape of the system, and the fact that a hierarchy exists at all, stays intact. It’s mobility within a cage, not a break from the cage.
It’s also worth noting that this mobility tends to move as a group. An entire caste or a section of a caste shifts its practices together, not individual families acting alone, partly because status claims only work if there’s a whole community backing the claim and available for marriage alliances at the new rank.
Sanskritisation among tribal communities
Srinivas was equally clear that this process wasn’t confined to Hindu castes. He documented Sanskritisation among tribal and semi-tribal groups too, including the Bhils of Western India, the Gonds and Oraons of Central India, and the Pahadis of the Himalayan belt. For these communities, Sanskritisation typically worked as a pathway into the wider Hindu social order: a tribe would adopt Hindu deities, rituals, dietary restrictions, and social customs, and over time stake a claim to caste status rather than tribal identity.
From tribe to caste: the Rajputisation route
One well-documented variant of this is what researchers call Rajputisation, where forest-dwelling groups in eastern and central India claimed higher social status by tracing their lineage to Rajput warrior clans. A recent academic study on state categories and tribal identity in eastern India builds directly on Srinivas’s framework to show how groups have historically used exactly this kind of claim-making to move along the tribe-caste continuum. A concrete case is the Barman community of Assam’s Cachar district, which became progressively Hinduised after their ruler adopted Hindu court customs in the late eighteenth century, gradually restructuring their clan system, diet, deities, and life-cycle rituals along Sanskritic lines, as documented in a study revisiting Srinivas’s model against the Barman tribe.
What makes this pattern significant is what it reveals about how the boundary between “tribe” and “caste” actually functions in India. It isn’t a hard wall. It’s a threshold that groups can, and historically did, cross by reshaping their outward practices to match the dominant Hindu order around them.
Tribalisation: the reverse process
Srinivas also pointed to a phenomenon working in the opposite direction, one studied closely by S.L. Kalia and referred to as tribalisation. In this process, high-caste Hindus who temporarily live in tribal regions end up adopting the customs, food habits, and social norms of the local tribal population, even when those practices directly contradict the norms of their own caste background. Kalia’s original research on this was published as Sanskritisation and Tribalisation in the Bulletin of the Tribal Research Institute in 1959.
Jaunsar-Bawar and Bastar
Kalia observed this dynamic playing out in two specific regions: Jaunsar-Bawar in Uttar Pradesh and the Bastar region of Madhya Pradesh. In both places, upper-caste Hindus posted to these areas for work, often government officials or traders on temporary assignment, picked up local dietary habits, including meat and alcohol consumption, and social practices that were otherwise considered impure or forbidden within their own caste tradition. The shift tended to be practical and situational rather than a permanent change in identity. Once these individuals returned to their home communities, the old caste norms typically resumed. It’s worth noting that Jaunsar-Bawar itself has since been formally recognised as a Scheduled Tribe area by the Indian government, a designation that continues to shape local identity politics, as detailed in a study on identity and development in the region.
Tribalisation is a useful corrective to any assumption that cultural influence in India only flows one way, from the “great tradition” of Sanskritic Hinduism downward to local or tribal “little traditions.” Kalia’s fieldwork shows members of the great tradition temporarily becoming participants in a little tradition, adopting its practices out of proximity and daily necessity rather than any long-term identity shift. Put Sanskritisation and tribalisation side by side, and Indian social life starts to look less like a one-directional ladder and more like a two-way current, with influence and imitation moving in both directions depending on who’s living where, and for how long.
The anthropologist’s perspective: self-in-other
This bidirectional exchange led Srinivas to a broader methodological point about what it actually means to study Indian society. When an Indian anthropologist studies a different caste, tribe, or region, he argued, they aren’t encountering a completely foreign “other.” They’re studying a community that shares deep cultural forms, beliefs, values, and historical entanglements with their own background, even while genuine differences in practice and status remain. Srinivas built his career on exactly this kind of fieldwork, favouring direct village-level observation over relying purely on textual or scriptural descriptions of caste, an approach detailed in a profile of his career and methodology.
He described this relationship as one of self-in-other rather than total otherness. Indian civilisation, in his framing, is extraordinarily layered and internally complex, with castes and tribes constantly borrowing from, reacting to, and reshaping each other’s customs over centuries. Studying the tribe-caste continuum, then, isn’t just an academic exercise about classification. It’s a way of understanding how Indian society holds together despite, and partly because of, this constant internal movement.
This idea also has quiet implications for how social research gets done. An anthropologist studying their own civilisation carries assumptions, blind spots, and points of familiarity that someone studying a genuinely unfamiliar society wouldn’t have. Srinivas treated this not as a limitation to overcome, but as a feature of doing fieldwork within one’s own cultural universe, one that demands a particular kind of self-awareness from the researcher.
What do you think? If Sanskritisation only produces positional mobility rather than dismantling hierarchy itself, does that make it a genuine tool for social change or a way of preserving the existing order under a different guise? And when a community actively chooses tribal or caste status depending on which brings more social or political advantage, what does that tell us about identity as something people negotiate rather than simply inherit?
References
- https://journals.library.brandeis.edu/index.php/caste/article/download/292/77/1339
- https://www.lkouniv.ac.in/site/writereaddata/siteContent/202004241009363568deep_SDS_sanskritization_and_westernisation.pdf
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00472336.2024.2386344
- https://ssjar.singhpublication.com/index.php/ojs/article/view/400
- https://ijsw.tiss.edu/greenstone/cgi-bin/linux/library.cgi?e=d-01000-00—off-0ijsw–00-1—-0-10-0—0—0direct-10—-2——-0-1l–11-dv-50—20-help—10-3-1-00-00–4–0–0-0-11-10-1utfZz-8-00&d=HASHd03a6ba0ceede53721441f
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2277436X211005908?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.6
- https://theprint.in/theprint-profile/mn-srinivas-gave-india-a-new-way-to-see-caste-his-feet-were-firmly-on-the-ground/2380070/
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