Write a critique of the structural and functional perspective used by M.N. Srinivas in the understanding of Indian society. (2017)
M. N. Srinivas gave Indian sociology its method and half its vocabulary: the field view, Sanskritisation, dominant caste, the vote bank. A critique must therefore be of a working paradigm, not a failed one. Its flaw is not inaccuracy but selection — a frame built to explain how the order holds together cannot easily ask why it should not.
The conservative bias built into the frame
The structural-functional question is what each part contributes to the survival of the whole. Applied to India, caste becomes a system of complementary roles, ritual an integrating mechanism, and the village an equilibrium disturbed and restored. Change enters only as positional change — groups rise, the ladder stands. The perspective is thus tacitly committed to the durability of what it studies, and Srinivas’s sociology, avowedly descriptive, seldom asked how the arrangement might be dismantled.
Conflict and exploitation read as function
- Jajmani appears as hereditary reciprocity. Thomas O. Beidelman’s comparative analysis (1959) showed it to be asymmetric and coercive, resting on the landowner’s monopoly of land, with reciprocity as its ideology.
- Untouchability appears as ritual complementarity rather than as the enforcement of segregation. Gerald Berreman made the decisive methodological point: hierarchy looks consensual only when observed from the top of it, and the upper-caste host’s account becomes “the village’s” account.
The Marxist critique
A. R. Desai objected that the village studies produce a caste-and-ritual India with no class, no state, no colonial political economy and no history — the village treated as an isolate at the very moment markets, land legislation and planning were remaking it. Kathleen Gough’s Thanjavur work showed the same terrain yielding agrarian class struggle once property, not purity, was made the axis.
The Dalit critique
Sanskritisation names mobility but models it on the oppressor. It makes Brahmanical practice the natural destination of aspiration, treats the hierarchy’s legitimacy as given, and by its own definition leaves the structure untouched. B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936) demanded the destruction of the graded order, not entry into it; post-Mandal Dalit and backward-class assertion has more often rejected the upper-caste model than copied it.
Conceptual and methodological objections
- Dipankar Gupta (Interrogating Caste, 2000) denies the continuum the model assumes: castes are discrete blocks, each with an origin myth claiming superiority, so hierarchy is contested rather than consensual.
- Louis Dumont and David Pocock attacked from the opposite side — Srinivas gives behaviour without ideology, and the sociological unit of India is caste, not the village, which is only an assemblage of people.
- The method’s own limits are visible in The Remembered Village (1976), reconstructed from memory after his Rampura notes burned in 1970.
Verdict
The evidence has gone against the integrative reading. The NCRB recorded 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2023, and in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024) a seven-judge bench permitted sub-classification within the Scheduled Castes — an internally stratified, contested field that a single ladder of ritual rank cannot describe.
Conclusion
Srinivas’s concepts remain indispensable as description and unreliable as explanation. Used with the political economy and the standpoint of the excluded restored to them, they still work; used alone, they turn domination into design.