Write short note on the following with a sociological perspective : Interaction of ‘little tradition’ and ‘great tradition’. (2012)
Robert Redfield, generalising from his Mexican fieldwork in Peasant Society and Culture (1956), proposed that a civilisation carries two traditions: a great tradition, the reflective, textual culture of the literate few cultivated in temples, schools and courts, and a little tradition, the largely oral culture of the unlettered many, lived in village ritual and folklore. His crucial point was relational: a peasant society is a part-society, so the two traditions are in constant traffic, not stacked in separate layers.
The Indian elaboration
- McKim Marriott, studying Kishan Garhi in western Uttar Pradesh (“Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization”, in Village India, 1955), turned the traffic into two named processes. Universalisation carries a local rite or deity upward and gives it Sanskritic sanction; parochialisation pulls an all-India festival downward and reworks it in local idiom, with local materials and local meanings. Neither tradition is the origin of the other, which is why Indian religion cannot be read off its texts.
- Milton Singer, working in Madras, located the mechanism of transmission in cultural performances — recitations, bhajan groups, temple festivals, dance drama — and in the cultural specialists who carry texts into villages and village forms into the canon.
- M. N. Srinivas had reached a parallel formulation in Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952) with his levels of Hinduism — All-India, peninsular, regional and local — which explains how a village goddess and a Vedic deity belong to one religion. Sanskritisation is the same interaction observed from the side of caste mobility.
- Yogendra Singh absorbed the pair into his account of change, treating this internal traffic as the orthogenetic engine that let Indian tradition alter without importing anything.
Critical assessment
- Louis Dumont and David Pocock, in Contributions to Indian Sociology (1957), objected that the dichotomy is descriptive rather than structural. Popular and Sanskritic Hinduism are aspects of one system of ideas and values, and splitting them into two “traditions” substitutes a difference of degree for genuine analysis of the underlying structure.
- The assumption of a single great tradition is the deeper problem. It is effectively Sanskritic and Brahminical, which leaves Islamic, Christian, Sikh, tribal and Dalit religious life to be filed as “little” — a classification that is itself an act of subordination.
- Tribal and Dalit religion resists absorption. The demand for a separate Sarna religious code, on which the Jharkhand Assembly passed a resolution in November 2020 and which has been pressed again for the Census of 2027, is precisely a refusal to be enumerated as a local variant of a great tradition.
- The model is under-political. Universalisation today is driven by broadcast media, pilgrimage infrastructure, state festivals and party mobilisation as much as by priests, and its effect can be homogenising rather than integrative.
Conclusion
As a description of how a literate civilisation stays connected to its villages the pair remains useful, and Marriott’s two processes are still the sharpest field tools for Indian religion. As a map of Indian society it is dated: the traffic is real, but it runs between unequal partners, and who defines the “great” tradition is now itself a political question.