Structural functionalism (M N Srinivas)

Structural-Functionalism as a Perspective

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• The structural-functional perspective treats society as a whole made of interrelated parts, and asks how those parts fit together to sustain a persistent, cohesive social order — its central preoccupation is the “problem of order,” not the problem of change.
• A.R. Radcliffe-Brown gave the perspective its classic formulation: the total social structure of a society, together with the totality of its social usages, forms a functional unity — a state in which every part works with the others with a sufficient degree of harmony and internal consistency.
• The framework borrows its core metaphor from biology: just as a living organism has a structure (a stable arrangement of interdependent cells and organs) whose parts each perform a function for the whole, Herbert Spencer extended the same definition of life itself to “the body social,” while Émile Durkheim insisted on the priority of structure over its individual elements, developing the idea of social morphology.
• Evans-Pritchard added the idea of social structure as a set of persistent social groups — relationships that endure and can be mapped, not just momentary interactions.
• Taken together, the perspective carries several working assumptions worth stating plainly, since each has drawn sustained criticism: it stresses harmony and consistency over conflict and contradiction; it treats social order as a self-evident good the system is organised to preserve; it assumes society is a relatively persisting configuration held together by underlying consensus; and it treats change as a slow, cumulative process of adjustment, explaining apparent conflict as something the structure contains and absorbs rather than something that can transform it.
• M.N. Srinivas brought this British social-anthropological perspective into Indian sociology and, crucially, married it to sustained fieldwork — which is why his version of the perspective is often described as a “contextual” or “field view” of Indian social reality, distinguishing it sharply from purely textual approaches (see the companion article on G.S. Ghurye’s Indology).

M.N. Srinivas: Life and Place in Indian Sociology

• Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas (1916–1999) is best known for his work on caste, social stratification, and Sanskritisation in southern India, and he occupies a central place among India’s first generation of professional sociologists, alongside G.S. Ghurye, R.K. Mukherjee, N.K. Bose, and D.P. Mukerji.
• His doctoral training under Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard at Oxford gave him the structural-functional toolkit, but his real originality lay in refusing to let that toolkit stay a Western import: he insisted on understanding India through direct observation and field study, not through Western textbooks or indigenous sacred texts alone.
• Srinivas started the Department of Sociology at Delhi University in 1960 — alongside colleagues including André Béteille, Veena Das, and J.P.S. Uberoi — establishing what became known as the Delhi School’s micro, field-based approach, in productive contrast to the more macro, Parsonian orientation that developed at JNU under Yogendra Singh from 1965.
• He conducted intensive fieldwork among the Coorgs of South India (1940–42), later published as Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India, and returned to a single Mysore village, Rampura, across a span of roughly a quarter-century, publishing his findings as The Remembered Village — a rare longitudinal, diachronic study of change in one place over time.
• Srinivas pioneered a distinctive scale of theorising in Indian sociology: macro-sociological generalisation built from micro-anthropological insight — using intensive, small-scale village and community studies as the empirical base from which to generalise about Indian society as a whole, rather than constructing grand theory first and fitting India into it.

Book View versus Field View

• Srinivas’s most consequential methodological contribution is a simple but sharp distinction between two ways of knowing Indian society.
  • The book view (or bookish perspective) derives knowledge of Indian society from sacred texts — religion, varna, caste, family, and village are all described as they appear in scripture. Srinivas identifies this view with Indology itself, and argues it presents caste hierarchy — Brahmins at the top, “untouchables” at the bottom, strict restrictions on commensality and mobility — as uncontestable and immutable, a fixed textual blueprint rather than a lived, negotiated reality.
  • The field view derives knowledge from direct fieldwork and empirical observation. Srinivas preferred this path decisively, favouring intensive small regional studies over the construction of grand universal theory, on the grounds that fieldwork alone reveals the lived reality behind scriptural prescription — including the social mobility, negotiation, and contestation the book view assumes away.
• This preference had a further, less obvious implication: Srinivas also argued sociology needed a stronger mathematical and statistical orientation, noting candidly that a fear of mathematics had historically pushed many able scholars toward “humanistic” disciplines like sociology instead of more rigorous quantitative work.
• Method, for Srinivas, followed directly from this commitment: empirical data collection, comparative methodology across village studies, a reductionist willingness to build general claims from specific local material, and a stated commitment to objectivism — a deliberate departure from what he saw as the romanticism of purely textual sociology toward a more grounded sociological realism.

Sanskritisation

• Sanskritisation is Srinivas’s best-known concept: the process by which a “low” caste, tribe, or other group takes over the customs, ritual, ideology, and style of life of a “high” and, in particular, a “twice-born” (dwija) caste, usually with the effect of improving the group’s position in the local caste hierarchy.
• The concept had an earlier, narrower ancestor in Srinivas’s own work: his Coorg fieldwork first produced the idea of Brahminisation — lower castes imitating specifically Brahminical ritual practice — which he later generalised into Sanskritisation once his own and others’ field data showed the reference point for imitation was not always Brahminical; it could be any locally dominant caste or group.
• Several features of the process matter for how it is examined.
  • It produces only positional change, not structural change — individual castes or caste-sections may move up or down the hierarchy, but the shape of the hierarchy itself, and the fact of hierarchy as such, remains intact. This positional/structural distinction is one of Srinivas’s most frequently tested conceptual contributions.
  • Mobility through Sanskritisation is necessarily group mobility, not individual mobility — an entire caste or caste-section moves together, partly so that marriage alliances remain available and the claim to higher status is not undermined by inconsistent status-claims among individual members.
  • It is not confined to Hindu castes: tribal communities — the Bhils of western India, the Gonds and Oraons of central India, the Pahadiyas of the Himalayan region — have also undergone Sanskritisation, coming to identify as Hindu. Whether this is best called Sanskritisation or a separate process of Hinduisation remains contested (see Criticisms, below).
• Srinivas himself distinguished several distinct models of Sanskritisation depending on which caste category served as the reference point — not only a Brahmanical model, but Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra models of upward mobility, depending on which locally dominant group a given caste actually emulated.

Criticisms of Sanskritisation

• J.F. Staal argued the concept is definitionally slippery — its relationship to “Sanskrit” as a language and corpus is far more complicated than the term implies, making it a cluster of related ideas rather than one precise concept.
• Yogendra Singh argued the concept fails to account for large stretches of Indian cultural change that owe nothing to Sanskritic tradition — the Bhakti movement, Buddhism, and Islamisation all produced major cultural mobility outside the Sanskritic frame entirely, which makes Sanskritisation, on this reading, more a culturological than a fully sociological model. McKim Marriott’s own village studies reinforced the point: he found Sanskritic rites typically added onto existing non-Sanskritic practice rather than replacing it.
• Harold Gould offered a sharper reinterpretation: Sanskritisation, for the groups practising it, is not really imitation at all but a form of rebellion — the point is less to copy upper-caste culture than to directly challenge and contest upper-caste monopoly over ritual status.
• Nicholas Dirks criticised the concept for applying a single Brahmanical yardstick to a plural society, effectively producing what he called a “new colonial sociology” — reproducing, under a scholarly label, the same hierarchy-centred lens the colonial administration itself had used.
• Sanskritisation is also not a uniform, all-India phenomenon: Punjab’s dominant historical process of cultural mobility was Islamisation, not Sanskritisation, and Uttarakhand saw significant tribalisation instead — a reminder that Srinivas’s model, developed largely from South Indian material, does not travel evenly across the subcontinent.
• A cluster of later, more normatively charged critiques — often associated with Dalit and feminist scholarship — push further: Sanskritisation accepts upper-caste norms as the standard worth aspiring to, and in doing so it can naturalise the very inequality it describes; the practices it spreads (seclusion of women, dowry in place of bride-price) have often been disadvantageous to women; and by treating lower-caste labour, craft, and knowledge traditions as inferior once “Sanskritised” away, the concept can end up devaluing the very cultural forms it displaces. Yogendra Singh additionally argued Srinivas’s account, by focusing so heavily on caste and village, effectively ignored the structural sources of social change altogether, making the framework narrower than it presents itself as being.
• Even within its own logic, Sanskritisation produces a genuine paradox: Srinivas held that political and economic advancement normally accompanies and enables Sanskritisation, yet India’s policy of caste-based reservation — a direct political-constitutional route to improving a group’s status — has in practice often worked against, not for, the classic Sanskritisation pathway.
• A further complication concerns downward mobility: Srinivas’s own material records cases of de-Sanskritisation — the Smiths of Mysore, for instance, saw their status fall to the point where even groups conventionally considered untouchable refused to accept food from them — a reminder that the hierarchy the concept describes is dynamic in both directions.

Westernisation

• Srinivas defined Westernisation as “the changes brought about in Indian society and culture as a result of over 150 years of British rule,” spanning change at the level of technology, institutions, ideology, and values — a simpler, more clearly bounded concept than Sanskritisation, and one Srinivas presented as comparatively value-neutral, built around ideas like humanitarianism and rationalism rather than any single group’s status claims.
• He distinguished three levels at which Westernisation could operate: primary (surface adoption — dress, food, technology), secondary, and tertiary Westernisation, reflecting how deeply Western influence had penetrated a person’s or group’s values and self-understanding.
• Crucially, Srinivas argued Westernisation does not retard Sanskritisation — the two often run simultaneously, and Western-introduced infrastructure has repeatedly accelerated Sanskritic practice: railways made pilgrimage easier, the printing press reproduced the Manusmriti alongside scientific texts, radio carried devotional bhakti sangeet, television now carries religious satsang broadcasts, and the postal system and later the microphone extended the reach of religious organisation and mass mobilisation alike.
  • Srinivas captured the resulting pattern in a fourfold typology of individuals: those internally and externally Sanskritised; those internally Sanskritised but externally Westernised (traditional values, Western habits and fashion); those with the reverse combination; and — the empirical majority, in his account — people who are internally Sanskritised and externally Westernised at once, selecting values secularly outside the home and religiously within it. This is his direct answer to the question of how “tradition” and “modernity” actually coexist in practice, rather than displacing one another.
• Yogendra Singh elaborated the institutional consequences of Westernisation as Srinivas defined it: the growth of a universalistic legal superstructure, expanded education, urbanisation and industrialisation, denser communication networks, and the growth of nationalism and political mobilisation — concrete outcomes including judicial reform, and legislation against child marriage, infanticide, and sati.

Criticisms of Westernisation

• Daniel Lerner raised several specific objections to the concept. It is too locally labelled a term, since the model actually imitated by a non-Western society undergoing change need not be Western at all — it could equally be, say, Russian, as the postwar appeal of Communism in several non-Western societies illustrates. Westernisation in one domain of behaviour, Lerner also observed, does not reliably produce Westernisation in another connected domain; and while societies undergoing this process share some common elements, each represents its own particular variant, with real differences between one country’s experience and another’s.
• A broader objection concerns Srinivas’s claim to ethical neutrality: critics have pointed out that the “Western” model itself carries real contradictions — historical racial prejudice, colour-based segregation, an often exploitative economic order — that sit uneasily with the humanitarian, rationalist values Srinivas associates with Westernisation, suggesting the concept smuggles in a positive evaluation of “the West” that is not, in fact, ethically neutral.
• More fundamentally, both Sanskritisation and Westernisation have been criticised for analysing social change almost entirely in cultural terms — customs, styles, values — rather than structural terms, which limits how far either concept can travel as a general theory of change, and confines Srinivas’s model most usefully to caste-organised Indian society specifically rather than to social change in general.

Orthogenetic and Heterogenetic Change

• Srinivas resisted any single-cause account of Indian social change, arguing instead that change is genuinely multidimensional, and he classified its sources along two axes.
  • Orthogenetic change originates from within the tradition itself — the Bhakti movement, Buddhism and Jainism as internal religious reform, Sanskritisation, and the gradual entry of tribal groups into the caste system are all, on this reading, changes generated from inside Indian civilisation’s own logic.
  • Heterogenetic change originates from outside — colonialism, globalisation, and Westernisation are the standard examples, forces impinging on Indian society from beyond its own internal dynamic.
• A related, often underappreciated point in Srinivas’s account of family change: he argued the joint family has not actually disintegrated into the nuclear family, as a simple modernisation narrative would predict. What has changed is chiefly residential and demographic — members increasingly live in smaller, geographically dispersed households — while the underlying jointness persists in practice: family members stay in regular contact, participate together in ceremonies, and often continue to hold land jointly in the ancestral village. The degree of jointness, he showed, varies systematically by caste, class, region, religion, occupation, income, and family size, rather than following one uniform national trend.

Extensions and Successors

• Srinivas’s field-based structural-functional approach was carried forward and applied to new domains by a wide circle of scholars: André Béteille on social stratification, M.S.A. Rao on urban society (his study of Delhi, for instance, argued the city was not a genuine “metropolis” in the sociological sense, since its Punjabi and Bengali populations remained largely segregated into their own residential and social worlds), Anita Minocha on community medicine, B.S. Baviskar on rural development, and A.M. Shah on family and kinship.

Assessment and Critique

• The most persistent methodological criticism concerns scale: a single village is arguably too small and too specific a unit to license generalisations about the whole of Indian society, and Srinivas’s own model has been faulted for confining “Indian tradition” too narrowly to what could be observed in caste and village life specifically.
• A related limitation is the perspective’s difficulty with revolutionary, discontinuous change — structural-functionalism, by its own logic, is built to explain gradual adjustment within a persisting structure, and struggles to account for ruptures like the Maoist (Naxalite) movement, which are better approached through historical and conflict-oriented analysis than through a framework oriented around social order and equilibrium.
• T.K. Oommen criticised Srinivas for a form of objective idealism — producing studies that are meticulously fact-based yet still, at bottom, connected to an essentially idealistic, traditionalist reading of Indian society.
• Anand Chakravarti argued Srinivas neglected gender and contemporary movements — Dalit mobilisation, peasant movements — remaining too narrowly focused on caste and village material, which left his account of Indian society, on this critique, methodologically traditional and somewhat dated even in its own time.
• A more pointed ideological criticism holds that Srinivas’s traditions are, in the end, Hinduised traditions — his own account concentrates on caste, village, and religion understood through a broadly Hindu lens, marginalises non-Hindu and lower-caste perspectives, and — in the reading of some critics — sits closer than he might have acknowledged to a Hindutva-adjacent cultural nationalism, an assessment M.N. Srinivas’s own later writing on Indian secularism, which argued Indian public philosophy could not simply be secular humanism, has been read as reinforcing.
• M.N. Srinivas’s own verdict on the rival Indological perspective is worth holding onto as a summary of the whole debate: he judged that where Indologists were culturally deterministic, reading Indian society off its texts, Marxist sociologists (see the companion article on A.R. Desai) were economically deterministic, reading it off its property relations — implicitly positioning his own field-based structural-functionalism as the corrective to both.

Contemporary Relevance

• Srinivas’s insistence that caste is dynamic rather than fixed remains directly relevant to contemporary Indian politics: his own observation that caste consciousness has, if anything, increased with the politics of reservation — so that “the politics of reservation has replaced the sociology of reservation” — anticipates debates that remain very much alive in Indian electoral and social life today.
• His dominant caste concept — a caste with sizeable landholding, numerical strength, high local ritual standing, and growing access to modern education, administrative employment, and urban income — continues to be the standard sociological tool for analysing caste-based power at the local and regional level in India; its fuller elaboration belongs to the dedicated unit on the caste system.

Key Terms at a Glance

• Book view / field view — Srinivas’s contrast between knowledge of Indian society derived from texts versus from direct fieldwork.
• Sanskritisation — a low caste or tribe adopting the customs and ritual practice of a high, “twice-born” caste to raise its position in the local hierarchy.
• Westernisation — change in Indian technology, institutions, ideology, and values resulting from over 150 years of British contact.
• Positional change versus structural change — individual castes moving up or down the hierarchy, versus a change in the hierarchy’s underlying shape.
• Orthogenetic and heterogenetic change — change generated from within Indian tradition itself, versus change imposed from outside it.
• Dominant caste — a caste combining land, numbers, and modern educational/administrative access to exercise local power.