Discuss the process of social mobility in the caste system commonly describe as sanskritisation and westernisation. Have they effected any structural change in the system? (1985)
M. N. Srinivas offered Sanskritisation and Westernisation in Social Change in Modern India (1966) as a paired account of Indian mobility — one endogenous and ritual, the other exogenous and secular. The second clause of the question is the harder one, and Srinivas himself answered it: the mobility is real, but it is positional, not structural.
The two processes
- Sanskritisation is the process by which a low caste, tribe or other group changes its customs, ritual, ideology and way of life towards those of a high, frequently twice-born, caste. First formulated as Brahminisation among the Coorgs (1952), it was widened to Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra models and to emulation of the locally dominant caste.
- Westernisation covers the changes in technology, institutions, ideology and values produced by roughly a century and a half of British rule, with humanitarianism and rationalism at its core. Srinivas preferred it to “modernisation”, which he judged evaluative and ethnocentric.
- They interlock: Brahmins Westernised first, vacating the traditional model, and non-Brahmin castes Sanskritised into the space left behind. Rail, print, the law courts and the colonial census also equipped caste associations to press Sanskritising claims across whole regions.
- Srinivas added secularisation — the retreat of ritual considerations from conduct. Its effect is paradoxical: pollution rules collapse on a crowded bus while caste consolidates as a political bloc.
Positional change, and what structural change would mean
| Positional change | Structural change | |
|---|---|---|
| What moves | A jati’s rank | The principles of ranking |
| Mechanism | Emulation; secular gain converted into ritual claim | Law, land, franchise, industry |
| Outcome | New occupants of old rungs | Endogamy, hierarchy or ascription itself altered |
- Sanskritisation changes nothing structurally. By claiming rank on the hierarchy’s own terms it validates purity as the measure of worth.
- Westernisation went further — it created secular occupations, an impersonal labour market and a legal individual — yet it too largely left endogamy and ritual distance intact, which is why Srinivas called both cultural rather than structural processes.
- Yogendra Singh therefore classified Sanskritisation as orthogenetic change and colonial law, administration and education as heterogenetic and structural.
The critique and the evidence
- B. R. Ambedkar in Annihilation of Caste (1936) held that rising within graded inequality leaves the graded inequality standing. Marxist critics add that these concepts hide the class relations deciding who can move at all.
- Real structural change has come from the state, not from either process: Article 17, zamindari abolition, adult franchise and reservation. The Supreme Court’s seven-judge ruling of 1 August 2024 permitting sub-classification within the Scheduled Castes altered the rule of distribution itself.
- Yet the boundary-making principle holds. Telangana’s caste survey of 2024 found only 5.6 per cent of households reporting an inter-caste marriage.
Conclusion
Both processes are genuine engines of mobility and neither is an engine of transformation. They rearranged occupants within a hierarchy that continued to rank by birth and marry within itself. Structural change in Indian caste has come from constitutional and market forces outside the ritual order — and even there it remains unfinished.