Elaborate Srinivas’s views on religion and society among the Coorgs. (2019)
Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952), M. N. Srinivas’s Oxford doctorate based on fieldwork among the Kodavas of Coorg, is the founding text of the field view in Indian sociology. Its question is not what Coorgs believe but what their ritual does: how a small, martial, landholding community is held together, and how it is joined to the wider Hindu world. Written under A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and completed with E. E. Evans-Pritchard, it is structural-functional in exactly their sense — ritual analysed for its contribution to structural continuity.
The okka: the unit of Coorg society
- The okka is the patrilineal, patrilocal joint family owning an undivided ancestral estate and centred on the ancestral house. Membership comes by birth in the male line; a woman leaves her natal okka at marriage.
- Srinivas devotes a chapter to the cult of the okka: the propitiation of dead ancestors at the household’s shrine, at harvest and at life-cycle rites. Ancestor worship is not private piety but the ritual form of the property-holding group — the okka worships itself as a corporation.
- Okkas combine into village and nad, so ritual scales outward from household to territory.
The ritual idiom: madi and pole
- Coorg life is organised by an opposition between madi, ritual purity, and pole, ritual impurity. Birth and death pollute the entire okka, not merely an individual, which is precisely why the concepts are structural rather than personal.
- Srinivas reads the life-cycle complex, mangala, as the “ritual idiom” in which relations of kinship, rank and locality are stated and reaffirmed. Occasions of pollution and its removal map the boundaries of the group.
- Because purity and pollution are the common currency of Hindu society, this local idiom is translatable into the wider one — the hinge of the book’s larger argument.
The spread of Hinduism, and Sanskritisation
- Srinivas distinguishes levels of Hinduism — All-India, peninsular, regional and local — and shows the Sanskritic layer spreading downward and outward through Brahmin priests, pilgrimage, myth and text.
- Coorg deities are progressively identified with the great gods; Brahmin priests are recruited for rites. He first named this Brahminisation, and later widened it into Sanskritisation when he found groups modelling themselves on Kshatriya, Vaishya and locally dominant non-Brahmin castes instead.
- Unity is thus achieved not by uniform belief but by a shared ritual idiom — a structural-functional answer to how a civilisation of enormous diversity coheres.
Assessment
The book gave Indian sociology its most productive concept and its fieldwork method. But it privileges the Sanskritic direction of travel, treating upward emulation as the natural current; it reads ritual without land, labour and colonial land tenure, though Coorg dominance later became the source of dominant caste; and a martial landholding community generalises poorly. The Hinduisation thesis strains hardest against assertion: the Jharkhand Assembly’s 2020 resolution for a separate Sarna religious code, pressed again before the 2027 Census, insists that absorption is refusable.
Conclusion
The Coorg study’s lasting claim is that in India religion is best studied as social structure in action. Its limitation is the mirror of that claim: ritual explains cohesion, but not who pays for it.