Write short note : Sanskritization. (2007, 1999, 1996, 1992)
M. N. Srinivas built Sanskritisation from fieldwork, not scripture, to name the one route of ascent a closed ritual order left open. Its interest lies in a paradox: mobility real for the group, harmless to the hierarchy.
Origin and definition
- In Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952) he called it Brahminisation, for the Coorgs’ taking over of Brahmin ritual and life-ways.
- Later data showed groups copying Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra styles and dominant non-Brahmin castes, so he abstracted the idea upward in Social Change in Modern India (1966): the process by which a low caste, tribe or other group changes its customs, ritual, ideology and style of life towards those of a high and frequently twice-born caste, so improving its local standing.
Mechanism and preconditions
- The content is ritual: vegetarianism, teetotalism, the sacred thread, Sanskritic deities, widow celibacy and tighter control over women, with a matching genealogy.
- It is group mobility over one or two generations: a lone Sanskritising family would find no marriage partners, and recognition may be withheld.
- It follows secular gain rather than producing it: land, numbers or office come first and ritual ratifies them. Srinivas held Sanskritisation impossible without secular mobility.
- The reference group is the locally dominant caste, which need not be Brahmin. Among Bhils, Gonds and Oraons the process is better called Hinduisation: Hindu practice is acquired without rank.
Its neighbours
Westernisation feeds it rather than competing with it: Brahmins Westernised first and vacated the model, while railways, print and the census let caste associations press Sanskritic claims region-wide. Secularisation cuts the other way, thinning the purity idiom the claim needs.
Critiques
- Positional, not structural: Srinivas himself conceded that castes move while the structure stands.
- J. F. Staal (“Sanskrit and Sanskritization”, Journal of Asian Studies, 1963) found its relation to Sanskrit too tangled to bear weight.
- Yogendra Singh held that it ignores non-Sanskritic sources of change — Bhakti, Buddhism, Islamic emulation in Punjab — leaving a culturological rather than sociological account.
- André Béteille (Caste, Class and Power, 1965) found Sripuram’s Brahmins internally segmented, leaving no single model to copy; under Dravidian influence prosperous non-Brahmins treated secular mobility as an end in itself.
- Owen M. Lynch (The Politics of Untouchability, 1969) traced Agra’s Jatavs from a Kshatriya claim to the Scheduled Caste Federation and, after 1956, to Buddhism, concluding that political participation had become the more effective route.
- The Dalit objection. Gopal Guru and Kancha Ilaiah argue the concept asks the oppressed to authenticate the values that subordinate them; Ilaiah (Why I Am Not a Hindu, 1996) answers with Dalitisation, asking why the reverse borrowing is never named.
Standing today
Reservation inverted the incentive: standing is claimed from the state, and dominant peasant castes now assert backwardness rather than twice-born descent. Bihar’s caste survey (2023) put Other Backward and Extremely Backward Classes at 63.13 per cent, and Census 2027 will enumerate caste for the first time since 1931. Beside this runs de-Sanskritising assertion: Chandra Shekhar Azad’s Nagina victory in 2024 is mobilisation, not emulation.
Conclusion
Sanskritisation remains indispensable for mobility in a society that ranked by birth and offered no other ladder. As an account of the present it is largely spent: numbers, votes and quotas now confer the rank ritual once had to beg.