Elaborate on M.N. Srinivas’s structural-functionalist approach to the study of Indian society. (2022)
When M. N. Srinivas began writing, Indian society was being read off its scriptures. His achievement was to replace the book view with the field view and then to make the resulting ethnography carry a general theory: India as a working system of interrelated parts, integrated by caste, ritual and locality, and able to change without dissolving. The debt is to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who taught him at Oxford that structure is a persisting network of social relations and function its contribution to that continuity.
The methodological shift: from book view to field view
- Indology derived India from the Dharmashastras — four varnas, fixed rank, immobility. Fieldwork among the Coorgs (1940–42) and at Rampura found thousands of jatis, locally disputed rank, groups climbing, and a dominant caste that was not Brahmin.
- His signature move was macro-sociological generalisation built on micro-anthropological insight, then institutionalised: the edited India’s Villages (1955) launched a decade of village studies.
- The two views are not simple rivals. Sanskritisation presupposes the textual model being imitated, so the field view corrected the book view’s static picture while drawing its content from it.
Structure: caste as the architecture
- Caste in Modern India and Other Essays (1962) treats caste as a double structure — a ritual hierarchy of purity and pollution, and a secular hierarchy of land, numbers and office — the two only loosely aligned.
- Dominant caste, set out from the Rampura material (1955, 1959), prises local power free of ritual rank: numerical strength, landholding, political clout and a high though not highest ritual position.
- Structure operates above the locality too: in the Coorg monograph he ranged Hinduism from All-India down through regional to purely local forms, a single idiom across many scales.
Function: how the system reproduces itself
- Religion is examined through what ritual does — expressing and enforcing interdependence — rather than what believers intend, a Durkheimian inheritance.
- Vertical (inter-caste) solidarity integrates the locality; horizontal (intra-caste) solidarity links jatis across localities. Caste associations, federations and the vote bank (his coinage, 1955) convert the second into political currency.
Change made a functionalist problem
- Social Change in Modern India (1966) locks Sanskritisation, Westernisation and secularisation together: Brahmins Westernised first, vacating the model that non-Brahmins then Sanskritised into.
- All three deliver positional change — groups move, the ladder stands — rather than structural change. Equilibrium is disturbed and restored.
Limits
A. R. Desai found no class, no state and no colonial political economy in it; Louis Dumont and David Pocock objected that it gives behaviour without ideology and that the unit of Indian society is caste, not the village; Dipankar Gupta denies that caste is a consensual continuum at all. Yet Srinivas’s central prediction has outlasted his critics: caste has survived modernisation by becoming political identity, which is why the Census 2027 schedule, notified in August 2026, enumerates caste for the first time since 1931.
Conclusion
Srinivas made Indian sociology empirical and gave it a working vocabulary. The frame explains integration and mobility superbly, and domination badly — a reading of Indian society best used with a conflict theory beside it.