Traversing
Traditions: Re-locating M.N. Srinivas
Website
Project for Anthropology 500a by Devika Bordia
http://anthro.annualreviews.org/cgi/content/full/26/1/1
Table of Contents
Beyond
Structural Functionalism
Early Years and Work with Ghurye
Research
at Oxford: Re-interpreting Work on the Coorg Through the Lens of Structural Functionalism
The Tyranny
of Naming and Defining: Institution Building in a New and Independent India
Defining a Village Community: The Dumont / Srinivas
Debate
Meanings Associated with the Naming of a Discipline:
Between Sociology and Anthropology
The
Maverick Who Did Not Study the Other
Obituaries and articles about M.N. Srinivas in magazines
and journals after he passed away are a testimony to his incredible
career and uniformly allude to his contribution to institution building and the development
of sociology in
Academic articles about M.N. Srinivas typically begin with his
education and work with Radcliff-Brown (from here on R-B) and Evans Pritchard
(from here on EP) at Oxford, and proceed to illustrate how he established
sociology as a ‘structural functionalist’ discipline in India.
Initially the central thesis of this website project was to seek to further
examine this process. However as I began reading more of his work, including
autobiographical memoirs, I realized the multiple layers of ideas which
influenced Srinivas, and not merely those which he was exposed to at
Srinivas returned to
Srinivas’ work is particularly significant here as I
grapple to come to a conceptual understanding of locating the anthropologist at
various layers of his interactions as well as through his texts. For instance,
does fore fronting location, a space itself provided recently within
anthropological theory, detract from the weight of the actual argument being made? Rather, could it possibly cohere to
gain a deeper and more contextualized understanding of the argument?
Though Srinivas never uses this term “native
anthropologist”, I use it here deliberately to mark the tensions with
which his work was perceived by some British Anthropologists. In several of his
writings, Srinivas has responded to a critique made by Edmund Leech who said
that when anthropologists study their own society, their visions become
distorted by prejudice of the private rather than public experience (Srinivas
1997).
In discussing the place of the native in his essay Putting
Hierarchy in Its Place, Appadurai says:
What it means to be natives are not
only persons who are from certain places, and belong to those places, but they
are also those who are somehow incarcerated, or confined in those places. What
we need to examine is this attribution or assumption of incarceration, of imprisonment,
or confinement. Why are some people seen as confined to, and by, their places?
(Appadurai
1988)
Leech’s critique
points to how the anthropologist of the metropole (1) continuously incarcerates
the “native anthropologist” by reminding him of his peripheral
status. The “native anthropologist” must therefore strive to
maintain objectivity and not let this be obfuscated by sentimentality of the
personal, to overcome his “native” status.
Srinivas alludes to the continuities and
differences faced by the “native anthropologist.”
When an Indian
anthropologist is studying a different caste or other group in
While
Srinivas’ role as a nationalist sociologist (in terms of Dirks’
analysis) is perpetually present in his work (for example all Indian people
sharing the common history of a great civilization), the tensions between the
differences and continuities which he frequently alludes to, particularly as a
native anthropologist, point to ruptures of what a nationalist sociologist
would ideally epitomize. At the end of his discussion of his work marking
“self-in-the-Other” Srinivas says: “The clash of multiple
subjectivities would, to my mind, be better than a single
subjectivity, whether that of the insider or outsider” (Sinivas 1997)
Beyond Structural Functionalism
Early Years and Work with Ghurye
M.N. SRINIVAS was brought up in
As an over-protected Brahmin...boy
growing up on College Road, I experienced my first culture shocks
not more than fifty yards from the back wall of our house....the entire culture of Bandikeri (the area behind our house there lived
a colony of Shepherds, immigrants from their village, located a few
miles from Mysore) was visibly and olfactorily different from that of College Road.
Bandikeri was my Trobriand
Islands, my Nuerland, my Navaho country and
what have you. In retrospect it is not surprising that I became an
anthropologist, all of whose fieldwork was in his own country (Srinivas
1997)
In his essay “Some Thoughts on the Study of One’s
Own Society”, Srinivas emphasizes the importance of considering
methodological issues which stem from studying one’s own society
“particularly when the society is undergoing rapid transformation”
(Srinivas 1969: 149). Urbanization and urban migration further disrupts the
already blurred boundaries between the urban and rural where the Other is literally in one’s backyard. From childhood,
Srinivas was exposed and acutely aware of the differences which exist outside
his middle class Brahmin home. These differences are so sharp that he could
start writing ethnographies where the introductory pages resemble those written
by Malinowski or EP. Yet the close spatial proximity
implies continuity where the “native anthropologist” seems
incessantly to have to justify the differences in the continuities.
Srinivas
left his “over-protected Brahmin” home after completing his honors
degree in social philosophy from
For his masters thesis, Ghurye, suggested that Srinivas should look at marriage and
family among the Kannada-speaking castes of
Fieldwork was fascinating to me, and I visited a
village for a few days and witnessed a wedding, which I enjoyed.
Village
Despite
the differences which Srinivas describes as he steps into “village
For his PhD research, Ghurye suggested
that Srinivas undertake field study of the Coorg for
which he would offer him an instituted research fellowship in sociology. Srinivas
comments that Ghurye’s interest in the Coorg
was to try to link their ancestor shrines to Egyptian pyramids. Ghurye’s interest in
I was disillusioned with the kind of sociology I was doing:
Tracing Coorg ancestor shrines to ancient
Egyptian pyramids seemed to me as absurd an enterprise as tracing
the origin of the Coorgs to the Vedas
without historical and archaeological evidence. I was bitter that I
had begun with the idea of becoming a sociological theorist but had
ended up as an antiquarian under Ghurye's tutelage (Srinivas 1997).
Despite Srinivas’ seeming disillusionment with Ghurye and subsequent “discovery” of structural
– functionalism through EP and RB, Srinivas frequently sites Ghurye in much of his work. Ghurye
was indeed one of the most influential Indian academics to write about Indian
sociology during the colonial period. Dirks comments on how Ghurye
used ancient texts to evaluate claims of British officials of the racial
origins of caste. Ghurye was also extremely critical
of the manner in which they politicized caste and the labeling and pigeonholing
of caste groups for census purposes. (2)
Srinivas’
work on the establishment of sociology and institution building, when he
returned from
Research
at
As
Srinivas became increasingly disillusioned with his work in
In
his memoirs, Srinivas recalls that though he was disenchanted with diffusionism, his earlier “habits of thought”
frequently surfaced, and this he says irritated R.B. Further, on reading
Srinivas’ thesis on the Coorgs written in
In
his memoirs, Srinivas comments on how analyzing the Coorg
material through a structural functionalist approach was exciting. The
material, he says, was “crying out for such an approach and
analysis” (Srinivas 1997).
R-B’s focus on the scientific parts and mapping out taxonomies of
social organizations is apparent in the manner in which Srinivas could
interpret his material into predefined categories of i.e. “ritual
idiom” and “spread”. His thesis culminated into a book, Religion and Society Among
the Coorgs of
In his introduction to Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India Srinivas describes in depth the
physical geography of Coorg, a tiny mountainous
province in south
In Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India,
Srinivas traces first the individual as a member of the cult of the okka, the patrilineal and patrilocal joint family. Here he describes marriage, death
and ancestor worship as they are carried out in the okka.
Second, the individual is a member of the village community, which has its own
village cult with a village deity. These village deities when properly
propitiated, protect the inhabitants from small pox, plague and other
supernatural evils, and give blessings of good health and abundant crops.
Srinivas emphasizes how the domestic and village cult aim at the well being of
the village and membership to a particular social group. Finally, in the later
chapters, Srinivas talks about how local deities of the villages have been
assimilated to the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon. In this book he
introduces his concept of Sansritization, which he
develops later and for which he is most well known.
The
caste system is far from a rigid system in which the position of each component
caste is fixed for all time. Movement has always been possible, and especially
so in the middle regions of the hierarchy. A low caste was able, in a
generation or two, to rise to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting
vegetarianism and teetotalism, and by Sanskritizing
its ritual and pantheon
(Srinivas 1952: 127)
In Srinivas’ analysis, the cult of the family and village
formed a lineage to, as he says a Pan Indian Sanskritic
Hinduisim. This analysis stems from a larger
nationalist sociological project, similar in some respect to that of Ghurye though different in method and theory, which sought
to argue for an expression of a fundamental principle in Indian civilization
indexing the idea of the nation. The concept of Sanskritization
has been critiqued by Dirks for using a single Brahmical
scale for upward mobility, which he argues was a result of a new colonial
sociology (Dirks 2001). Certainly, the categories used by Srinivas were a result
of those imposed by a colonial history, as was the legitimacy he received from
his
Srinivas
was R-B’s last student before he retired as chair and was replaced by
Evans Prichard. On completing his DPhil, both R-B and EP informed Srinivas that
they were planning to create a lectureship at
On completion of his fieldwork in
To me E-P's argument that
social anthropologists had produced nothing remotely resembling laws
in the natural sciences was self-evident; in addition, I had never
really believed in the irrelevance of historical data for
sociological explanation. Real
history, however, had to be distinguished from conjectural history,
and the latter had to be rejected (Srinivas 1997).
Srinivas’ completed his second doctoral thesis while at
I accepted, however, the functionalist idea of
interdependence of institutions and that such interdependence
enabled the anthropologist to talk of "social systems." I
accepted them only as heuristic devices that enabled me to
understand and better analyze social phenomena. Indeed a major
consequence of anthropological (or sociological) training ought to
be to enable the anthropologist to view institutions in relation to
one another, and in relation to the whole, even if the whole happens
to be, or is assumed to be, the anthropologist's own construct (Srinivas 1997)
In a discussion on R-B’s work in Eriksen
and Nielsen’s History of
Anthropology, the authors mention how R-B influenced anthropologists like Srinivas who were instrumental in founding anthropology as
a structural functionalist discipline in
In his memoirs, Srinivas talks about the importance of village
studies which became a major source of interest for social anthropologists (and
sociologists) in the 1950’s. Much of his later work, particularly after his
fieldwork in Rampura village in
In his essay “History and Anthropology in South Asia:
Rethinking the Archive”, Mathur discusses how
the Indian village became the central research focus of the “Chicago
School” “Enhanced by changes in the methods and theories of
social anthropology, by the recent independence of India, and by the
wider availability of funding”(Mathur 2000). A
culmination of this work can be seen in the book Village India which documented a series of papers presented at a
seminar at
Srinivas uses certain understandings of village studies as it
was developed by the “
Though his work focused more on the local social structure of a
village, it was located within an all-India phenomenon.
Caste is undoubtedly an all-India
phenomenon in the sense that there are everywhere hereditary, endogamous groups
which form a hierarchy, and that each of these groups has a traditional
association with one or two occupations. Everywhere there are Brahmins,
Untouchables, and peasant, artisan, trading, and service castes
(Srinivas 1966).
Srinivas does take into account regional differences and he also
emphasizes the importance of factors affecting the social structure such as
Western education, jobs in the administration, and urban sources of income.
Village studies, both in the
The Tyranny of Naming and Defining:
Srinivas returned to
Srinivas’ work was committed to nation building, not only
in the sense of establishing departments, but also in terms of his theoretical
formulations particularly on caste and the notion of a village and community.
Furthermore, his work contributed to various debates of policy making. For
example in his privileging of the ‘field view’ of Indian society,
he informed discussion of making Sanskrit a national language, which was
emerging from a ‘book view’ where Sanskrit referred to assumptions
of an unchanging
Various aspects of Srinivas’ work on institution building
and his theoretical views on understanding a village and community in Indian
society demonstrate the fundamental emphasis on demarcating disciplinary and
theoretical boundaries which are crucial in defining and legitimizing the
concept of a nation. To demonstrate this point, I will focus on two aspects of
Srinivas’ work which also in a very basic sense incarcerate a
“native anthropologist”
Defining a Village Community: The
In a debate with
Srinivas proceeds to argue for the existence of
a dominant caste dependent on numbers and not on ownership of land or the
possession of superior rights in land, as
The focus on village studies provided a space for Srinivas to
develop these ideas. Srinivas’ insistence on arguing for a conception of
a village community and the cultural and economic inter-dependence of villages,
connecting to a pan-Indian Sanskrtic civilization,
stems from a larger case for the conceptual understanding of a nation. Furthermore
the reference to constructing a pre-British history was characteristic to
several nationalist leaders. Srinivas is critiqued for adopting a Brahmin and
upper caste centered view, which itself, as mentioned earlier, stems from a
colonial sociology (Dirks 2001). However, simultaneously, Srinivas’
arguments question the presupposed generic categories formulated by Western
academics like
Meanings
Associated with the Naming of a Discipline: Between Sociology and Anthropology
Though the demarcating and subsequent naming of a discipline was
evidently inherited by a Western academic tradition, this took on a different
dimension in the way it was imagined and understood in the new independent
Indian academics perceived social anthropology as early
fieldworkers who “generally symbolized the might of colonial power to the
primitive people they studied”. Despite the fact that the method of
intensive fieldwork was gaining popularity after World War II, the discipline
continues to convey the impression that the observer is, ‘White
Christian, with strong monogamous and ethical attachments; abroad in a field
inhabited by savages, a superior being out for objectivity’ (Srinivas
1979). Srinivas says, “Needless to say, the description of social and
cultural anthropology as the study of ‘other cultures’ by Western
scholars is a hangover of the past” (Srinivas 1979: 2).
Srinivas comments on the ambiguity of labeling those
who study tribes as anthropologists and those who study rural and urban folk,
sociologists. The distinction between castes and tribes, he states was not made
by anthropologists such as G.S. Ghurye, Radha Kamal Mukherjee
and N.K. Bose who laid the foundations of the fieldwork tradition in
Disciplinary boundaries
which were supposedly based on “objective” “scientific”
categorizations were themselves a product of imaginings of what people actually
do in those disciplines, based on historical experience. It would be difficult
to conceive of a nationalist sociology within the confines of a discipline
which was so integrally linked to the colonial government. Yet the emphasis
Srinivas placed on fieldwork and participant observation demonstrates a
blurring of these demarcations and the different ways in which they may be
conceived.
The Maverick Who Did Not Study the Other
I have attempted so far to demonstrate the influences that
affected Srinivas’ academic career and his ability to synthesize strands
of different theoretical traditions rather than uncritically inherit any one
tradition. In fact, any one homogenous theoretical tradition (i.e.
“British Anthropology”, “American Anthropology”) is in
itself questionable and this is evident in the manner in which academics in
In this section, I explore how Srinivas was able to use a
specific academic position to discuss his location with respect to people he
studied in areas where he conducted fieldwork. In my review of his work, I
believe that this is best demonstrated in his book “
Srinivas writes that the seeds of his study were sown through
conversations with RB while at
It would appear that the caste system provides events and
institutions that could be constituted as “ideal” material to
analyze through the lens of structural functionalism. Gupta and
However an important reason for choosing Rampura
was also, as Srinivas puts it, “for sentimental reasons” as his
family belonged to that region and had land in a village close to Rampura. Along with the theoretical concerns of studying
caste in a village in southern Mysore, Srinivas describes in detail his search for the perfect
“field” which would further enable this study: It should contain
multiplicity of castes, where there should be Harijans,
(4) the essential artisan
and servicing castes. Rice should be grown as a major crop. It should be small
enough to be studied by a single person, not too ‘progressive’ or
‘modern’. It should be on the road, and without electricity and
piped water (Srinivas 1976). While it is common for anthropologists to search
for their “ideal field”, such detailed preconditions for the
“ideal village” are peculiar to the “native
anthropologist” who would have such insights as to how the field would
inform certain conceptual categories which the anthropologist desires to study.
Srinivas’ fieldwork in Rampura was the source for a number of books and articles,
which include India’s Villages,
Social Change in Modern India, The Dominant Caste and Other Essays, an
edited volume entitled The Fieldworker
and the Field and “The Social System of a
Ironically, the originality and fresh style of
Remembered Village is therefore a radical departure from
Srinivas’ work on the Coorgs. In contrast to Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India, the narrative style of
Such reflection on bodily hexis (6) points to the tensions as
well as the interactions between the differences (of an educated, upper middle
class urban upbringing) and continuities (being a native whose ancestral
village is 6 miles away), which would be faced by a “native
anthropologist”. On recounting an incident where Srinivas was reprimanded
by his landlords for shaving after his bath (the act of shaving causes
pollution and so a Brahmin must always bathe after he shaves), Srinivas notes,
“It was only in the village that I realize how far I (and my family) had
traveled away from tradition”(Srinivas 1976: 18). While the metropolitan Western
anthropologist, can understand his or her own society from studying distant
“out-of-the-way places”. (7)
For the native fieldworker, the “field” always presents a frame of
reference, for understanding his immediate context, that of his family and
other similar people of his caste in the city, and how far they have
“traveled” from their native roots. In several places, Srinivas
lists how he has departed from Brahmin norms, as a result of his urban
upbringing and living in England “…while in England I broke the
dietary rules of vegetarianism and teetotalism” (Srinivas 1976: 27).
Srinivas also comments on the tensions faced by
an anthropologist of conforming to norms expected of him by people in the
village, “I had gone to Rampura to study it and
I did not want to do anything to jeopardize that” (Srinivas, 1976: 18)
However Srinivas also discusses the problems of an urban, educated fieldworker
who holds ‘progressive’, ‘forward-looking’ or
‘modern’ views on social matters like caste (Srinivas 1979). This
for instance prevented him from “painting any caste mark” on his
forehead at the dissatisfaction of several upper caste members of his village
(Srinivas 1976). Such episodes reveal the constant tensions that would exist
for most “native anthropologists” as they are constantly reminded
that they are being also being “studied” and evaluated. For Srinivas the
struggle seems to have been whether to privilege certain research methods and
demands of the field, or to question what would appear
to him to be oppressive practices. In his writing, Srinivas
seems to have dealt with, what may appear to be contradictions, by directly
addressing these issues. He constantly
emphasized the importance of constant self-reflection to highlight the
inconsistencies which exist particularly “on studying one’s own
society”. Data he believed are “constructions, not reflections of
facts or relationships existing independently of the observer” (Srinivas
1979).
The complexities
which Srinivas highlights in demonstrating the
constant tensions of the differences and continuities of a “native
anthropologist” questions Dirks’ suggestion of Srinivas
as a nationalist sociologist. Srinivas
was deeply embedded in the project of nation building, of demarcating
disciplines and defining concepts using categories from western academia,
though not uncritically. However, even as his work describes the urban
fieldworker as ‘progressive’ and ‘forward looking’,
couched in a glorious modernity, fieldwork constantly throws up instances which
forces the fieldworker to come to terms with the fact that this is itself a
product of his own specific experience (i.e. urban upbringing or education at
Oxford). It therefore becomes crucial
for the fieldworker to discuss this process as integral to his or her analysis
in both ethnographic writing and theoretical formulation. Much of Srinivas’ work has been reflective in this sense.
However Srinivas
writes little about his work and interaction with faculty in
(1) I hesitate to use the term metropole here as it implies a binary understanding of the metropole and the periphery. While Gupta and Ferguson refer
to anything that was not Western metropole
institutions as the periphery, the binaries of metropole
and periphery constantly play themselves out, for example within hierarchies of
academic institutions of India. This process often blurs these distinctions.
(2) He believed that such policies had spearheaded
the anti-Brahmin movement which further politicized caste in a manner in which
it had never been before. However Dirks also comments on how Ghurye’s
nationalist agenda was coupled with a concern with attacks on the sacred
character of Brahmans and nostalgia for an age of the otherworldly prestige of
Brahmans.
(4) “Harijan” was the word coined by Gandhi for the
“untouchable” castes, it means children of God. Gandhi strove
toward the upliftment of “untouchable”
and renaming them harijan was seen to relieve them
from their specific untouchable status. However it is also indicative of a move
on the part of nationalist leaders to equate caste with religion.
(5) Srinivas states that since he had made
the decision to write the book entirely from memory, he does not even consider
using his original fieldnotes, which had survived the
fire as they were in
(6) I refer to Bourdieu’s
understanding of bodily hexis through which people
are subject to he transferal of habitus.
The bodily hexis ‘a way of walking, a tilt of
the head, facial expressions, a way of sitting and of using implements, always
associated with a tone of voice, a style of speech, and (how could it be
otherwise?) a certain subjective experience’ (Bourdieu
1977).
(7) Anna Tsing uses ‘out-of-the-way’
places to refer to how “people actively engage in their marginality by
protesting, reinterpreting, and embellishing their exclusion” (Tsing 1993: 3). I refer to it here as depicting how
anthropologists construct ‘out-of-the-way’ places.
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M.N. Srinivas
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Social Organization of the Coorgs of
1952. Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of
1966. Social Change in Modern
1976. Remembered Village.
1979. The Fieldworker and the Field:
Problems and Challenges in Sociological Investigation.
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