Literature and Art
M. N. Srinivas
THE OXFORD INDIA SRINIVAS: Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 995.
M. N. Srinivas (1916–1999) was undoubtedly India’s most distinguished and accomplished sociologist. His long and active intellectual life that started during the period immediately preceding Indian Independence extended up to the end of the millennium. As an intellectual of the Nehruvian generation, his interest in the study of social transformation in India was not merely academic. It is symbolic perhaps that his first stint of fieldwork in what later became & #8220;the remembered village” of Rampura was interrupted by the assassination of Gandhiji.
Srinivas’ was a productive life and he authored a number of papers and monographs. His writings were rich in empirical detail and, even though he did not wear theory on his sleeves, were marked by analytical and theoretical rigour. Notwithstanding his essay ‘Social Anthropology and Literary Sensibility’, which is included in the volume under review, he was no literary stylist. However his writing was always clear and lucid, and engaging with understated humour. Apart from being a prolific writer, he was an inspiring teacher who nurtured generations of sociologists and social anthropologists, and an institution-builder.
Brought out under the series, ‘The Oxford India Collection’ that brings together “writings of enduring value published by OUP,” this volume has articles that figured M.N. Srinivas’ Collected Essays (2002). It has an Introduction by Ramachandra Guha and a Foreword by A.M. Shah. Classified under eight rubrics, the essays cover a wide gamut of areas that have concerned not only Srinivas but Indian sociologists as a whole. Many of them have been frequently cited, discussed, and debated.
Study on village
The first set of essays relates to village studies, the staple of Indian sociologists. Here Srinivas draws from his decades-long fieldwork in Rampura. In the first essay, he takes on several persistent myths about the Indian village — that it is self-sufficient, to cite an example — and dispels them. He traces these myths to the writings of early British administrators and maintains that they were disseminated by thinkers such as Marx and Maine.
His seminal formulation of “dominant caste” — a numerically preponderant caste fairly high on the hierarchical caste school with considerable landholding — which explains much about the Indian countryside, finds a place in this section. A few essays study village disputes, another area where Srinivas is a pioneer. The second section has essays on ‘caste and social structure’, an area of equal importance. At the very beginning of his career, Srinivas formulated the concept of ‘Sanskritisation’ that postulates a process of mobility, wherein castes, lower down the ritual scale, aspired to a higher position by imitating the practices of the upper castes. Although his characterisation of the Brahmin as a role model is deeply problematic, his delineation of the process has been very useful in understanding the dynamics of change in caste society. Understandably, this concept has not only been used widely in academic studies but it has had a wider currency. Even if one does not agree with all that Srinivas has to say about caste as a system, there is no doubt that his essays have furthered our understanding of the relation between caste and varna, the dynamics of caste mobility, and the changing role of caste in a democratic and electoral society. The term ‘vote bank’, which he conceived in the limited sense of a patron’s ability to deliver a bloc of votes for the politician, has since expanded its meaning and acquired huge dimensions so much as to permeate the political discourse.
There are brief, yet illuminative, sections on gender, religion, and cultural and social change. As a pioneer sociologist, Srinivas had an engaging relationship with the discipline, of which he was a master practitioner. Given the difficulty in demarcating the province and practice of the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology in the Indian context, he wrote some insightful essays. His heyday came before the self-reflexive moment in anthropology. But, again as a pioneer of the fieldwork method in Indian sociology, his essays reveal much about participant observation and ethnographic research, and they should be mandatory reading for students. The last section of five autobiographical essays makes for delightful reading.
On caste
In the wake of ‘Mandal’, Srinivas received a bad press for his ambiguous views on caste as a category for state’s positive discriminatory action. Ramachandra Guha has, over the years, valiantly retrieved Srinivas’ importance and it is appropriate that he should have written the Introduction. Chris Fuller’s interview, barely a year before Srinivas’ death, rounds off the book.
It is customary to sign off a review with the remark that the book under notice is indispensable reading for the intelligent layperson and it should adorn his/her bookshelf. Maybe a cliché elsewhere, but in this case it is certainly meaningful and appropriate.
http://www.hindu.com/br/2009/11/10/stories/2009111050051300.htm
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