Write short note with a sociological Perspective: How far Srinivas’s Sanskritization is modernizing force or traditionalizing force in understanding the changes in caste system? (2015)
M. N. Srinivas built Sanskritisation in Social Change in Modern India (1966) as one half of a pair, the other being Westernisation. The pairing itself answers the question: he reserved the modernising work for Westernisation. Sanskritisation is overwhelmingly a traditionalising force, modernising only in its unintended effects.
The traditionalising case
- It accepts the hierarchy’s own criteria. A caste claiming rank by vegetarianism, teetotalism, the sacred thread and twice-born ritual is conceding that purity ranks people. Emulation is the sincerest ratification of the model.
- It produces positional, not structural, change. Srinivas was explicit: the caste rises, the ladder stands. No principle of the system is disturbed.
- It strengthens the ritual idiom at the moment secular forces are weakening it, and reproduces the value scheme through the very act of mobility — the mechanism Antonio Gramsci would call consent to a dominant order.
- It is regressive for women. Uma Chakravarti shows that the emulating caste imports Brahmanical patriarchy — seclusion, restrictions on widow remarriage, dowry replacing bride-price.
- It is collective and ascriptive. The unit is the jati, not the individual; birth still fixes who may move and with whom.
The modernising case
- It presumes an open aspiration: a caste believes its rank is negotiable, which breaks the fatalism of karma and dharma that the book view assumed.
- It needs secular resources first — land, numbers, office — so it registers real economic and political mobility, as with the Nadars of Tamil Nadu and the rise of dominant peasant castes.
- Harold Gould read it as protest against low rank rather than admiration, making it a precursor of later assertion.
- Srinivas noted that Westernisation accelerates it: print, rail and the colonial census let caste associations organise Sanskritising claims across regions.
Where the balance falls
The modernising effects are by-products of the means, never of the goal. The goal is a better position within an unequal order, which is why B. R. Ambedkar in Annihilation of Caste (1936) rejected the whole path. Where genuine modernisation appeared — law, franchise, schooling, reservation — the source was outside caste.
Conclusion
Sanskritisation is a traditionalising force with modernising side effects. Its idiom is now displaced: with the Census 2027 schedule, notified in August 2026, carrying caste enumeration for all groups for the first time since 1931, claims to status are pressed through numbers and the state rather than through ritual emulation.