In what respect is M. N. Srinivas’ study of Indian village society based on structural and functional perspective? Analyse. (2026)
Trained at Oxford under A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, M. N. Srinivas carried British social anthropology’s method into the Indian countryside. His village is not a bundle of customs but a structure — a persisting network of social relations — whose parts are examined for what they contribute to the survival of the whole. Analysing that work means separating the structural skeleton from the functional questions put to it.
The structural units he isolated
- The village as a bounded whole. Against Louis Dumont, for whom the village was a colonial construct and caste the real unit, Srinivas defended its vertical unity in The Indian Village: Myth and Reality (1975) — shared deities, festivals, a panchayat, and a collective honour against neighbouring villages.
- Caste as a double hierarchy. Rank is fixed ritually by purity and pollution, but position is also secular — land, numbers, office. The gap between the two is what sets the system in motion.
- Jajmani interdependence. Hereditary, multi-stranded ties bind landowning patrons to service castes, paid by a customary harvest share rather than a wage: an economy read as role complementarity.
The functional questions he put to them
- Dominant caste, elaborated in “The Dominant Caste in Rampura” (1959), is the integrating and controlling mechanism. The Okkaligas of Rampura ran the village through numbers, land and political weight without ranking highest ritually, settling disputes and dispensing patronage — order without a state.
- Vertical solidarity, the inter-caste tie within the village, integrates; horizontal solidarity, the intra-caste tie across villages, pulls outward. Their balance is the system’s equilibrium.
- Sanskritisation, first formulated as Brahminisation from his Coorg fieldwork of 1940–42, supplies change the structure can absorb: positional change, a group’s rise on a ladder left intact, not structural change. The Remembered Village (1976) accordingly reads Rampura as a self-reproducing order.
Where the analysis strains
Interdependence is the ideology of an unequal arrangement, not a description of it. A. R. Desai objected that the village is treated as an isolate when markets, planning and the state were remaking it; the Dalit hamlet sits outside the vertical unity being celebrated, and the “little republic” image lingers even though he rejected self-sufficiency. The exclusion is measurable: 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes were recorded in 2023, and in Sukanya Shantha (October 2024) the Supreme Court struck down caste segregation written into prison manuals — enforced hierarchy, not ritual complementarity.
Conclusion
Srinivas’s village is structural-functional in its units, in its questions and in its theory of change. Its strength is that it showed how the rural order actually works; its limit is that it could not ask whom that order works for.