Write short note with a sociological perspective: Perspectives on the study of caste by M.N. Srinivas and Andre Beteille. (2011)
M. N. Srinivas and André Béteille both displaced the textual account of caste with fieldwork, but they studied different objects. Srinivas studied the village as a working system of ritual and dominance; Béteille studied it as a site where distinct orders of inequality could be separated and compared.
Criteria-wise comparison
| Criterion | M. N. Srinivas | André Béteille |
|---|---|---|
| Method and unit | Intensive participant observation in one village (Coorg, Rampura); macro-generalisation from micro-observation | Fieldwork in Sripuram treated as a case within a comparative sociology of inequality |
| Theoretical frame | Structural-functional, after A. R. Radcliffe-Brown; caste as a functioning system | Weberian pluralism — status, class and power as separate dimensions |
| Central concepts | Sanskritisation, Westernisation, dominant caste, vote bank; book-view against field-view | Caste, class and power; cumulative against dispersed inequality; harmonic and disharmonic structures |
| Reading of change | Positional mobility within a surviving hierarchy — the ladder outlasts every climb | Structural change — the dimensions decouple while the professed values turn egalitarian |
| Quarrel with Louis Dumont | Dominance is real; ritual rank alone cannot explain who rules a locality | Status and power were fused in Sripuram, not disjoined; ideology is not the whole account |
| Stance | Largely descriptive, the sociologist as observer | Explicitly normative — equality of opportunity, scepticism of group entitlement |
What the comparison reveals
- The relation is cumulative, not rival. Srinivas separated local power from ritual purity with the dominant caste; Béteille completed the separation by adding class in Caste, Class and Power (1965) and then showed the three coming apart historically. Between them they make Dumont’s single-principle model unusable as a description of the contemporary village, without refuting it as an account of traditional ideology.
- Their questions differ. Srinivas asks how caste works; Béteille asks how inequality is structured, caste being one dimension of it — which is why he urged that India be studied from a stratification perspective rather than a caste perspective.
- They share a limitation. Both entered the village from its upper end, so the field-view inherited part of the bias it set out to correct — the objection later pressed by Dalit scholarship, notably by Gopal Guru, that the view from above cannot register humiliation.
Conclusion
The notified Census 2027, which will enumerate caste across all groups for the first time since 1931, needs both perspectives: Srinivas’s insistence that caste is a live field reality rather than a textual category, and Béteille’s warning that counting caste explains little unless it is read together with class and power.