“How do little tradition and great tradition coexist in contemporary Indian society?” (2022)
Robert Redfield (Peasant Society and Culture, 1956) held that every civilisation has a great tradition, the reflective culture of the literate few carried in texts, temples and schools, and a little tradition, the largely oral culture of the unlettered many in villages. In India the two do not sit in separate layers. They coexist through continuous two-way exchange, and modern media, markets and politics have speeded that exchange rather than ended it.
The mechanisms of coexistence
- Universalisation and parochialisation: McKim Marriott, studying Kishan Garhi in Uttar Pradesh (in Village India, 1955), found that local deities and festivals rise into Sanskritic forms (universalisation). Sanskritic elements, in turn, are reworked into local idioms (parochialisation). For example, a village goddess came to be identified with Lakshmi, while Sanskritic festivals took on local rites.
- Cultural performance and compartmentalisation: Milton Singer (When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 1972) showed Madras industrialists keeping ritual at home and rational practice at work. Tradition was modernised, not abandoned.
- Orthogenetic change: Yogendra Singh (Modernization of Indian Tradition, 1973) traced change within both traditions from internal sources, and also change arising from contact between them. Sanskritisation, Bhakti and reform movements were channels between the two.
- Sacred geography: pilgrimage links the village shrine to the all-India tirtha, so one devotee lives in both worlds.
Contemporary forms
| Direction | Examples |
|---|---|
| Little to great | Chhath, a sun festival of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh performed largely without priests, is now celebrated across India and the diaspora. In September 2025 the Ministry of Culture began a multinational nomination for UNESCO’s intangible heritage list. |
| Great to little | Deepavali, inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List in December 2025, is celebrated with regional rites, from Kali puja in Bengal to Bali Pratipada in Karnataka and Maharashtra. |
| State and identity | Telangana made the folk goddess festivals Bonalu and Bathukamma state festivals in 2014, turning local rites into regional identity. |
| Media and mass events | The Maha Kumbh at Prayagraj (2025) drew what the Uttar Pradesh government put at over 66 crore visits. Kalpavasis’ household rites, local akharas and textual Hinduism ran side by side there, streamed live on phones. |
Television epics, devotional music apps and online darshan standardise stories drawn from the great tradition. Yet devotees still consume them through local vows, spirit shrines and caste deities.
Limits of the model
- Louis Dumont and David Pocock argued that popular and Sanskritic Hinduism form one system, so a two-tier split can mislead.
- The dichotomy carries an upper-caste, textual bias. Kancha Ilaiah (Why I Am Not a Hindu, 1996) and Gail Omvedt read Dalit-Bahujan and tribal traditions as distinct and often counter-hegemonic, not merely “little”. Examples are the Sarna faith of Jharkhand’s Adivasis and the Ravidassia identity in Punjab.
- Coexistence is also political: universalisation can absorb and flatten local diversity. Adivasi demands for a separate Sarna religion code resist exactly that absorption.
Conclusion
In contemporary India little and great traditions coexist through interpenetration, not hierarchy alone. Local rites gain national and even global stages, while pan-Indian forms are localised. What has changed is the agent of exchange: media, the market and the state have joined priests and pilgrims, and they have made the boundary between the two traditions a site of identity politics.