Showing papers in "Contributions to Indian Sociology in 1978"

The remembered village: A bridge between old and new anthropology

Abstract: The erosion of ’the human element&dquo; from social sciences today poses a grave danger in developing countries, for here the need for responding to the challenge of social and economic transition, and reducing its human cost, makes great demands on them. A dehumanized social science is the least suited to play this role. In this context considerable significance attaches to the work of social anthropologists who give far greater importance than economists to first-hand knowledge of people and their institutions. Among Indian social anthropologists M.N. Srinivas has expressed great

Structuralism in India: some issues and observations:

Abstract: Any preliminary statement devoted to introducing and evaluating the prospects of structuralism in India (e.g., see Uberoi 1974) must encounter the above rhetorical question. It is necessary because of the largely less familiar intellectual activity and tradition structuralism may represent for the majority of the Indian social science reader. The problem is only magnified as we approach the university student in a class room, for his skepticism towards the new and the unfamiliar may be stronger-and possibly for some good reasons of common sense. Any proponent’ of this new approach must therefore not only set out to clearly explain what it is that he is proposing, and how could it possibly be connected to the prevailing

M. N. Srinivas's earlier work and The remembered village: an introduction:

Abstract: A mid-twentieth century redefinition of the scope of the sociological and social anthropological studies of India became manifest in the convergence of interest in the village as the microcosm of Indian society and civilization. The division of labour between Indological studies of Hindu society by sociologists_ and fieldwork-based studies of tribal communities by anthropologists, which had generally characterized the work of the earlier generation of scholars, civil servants and others, almost disappeared rather rapidly. In this new intellectual venture, the work of M.N. Srinivas came to occupy a unique place and enjoyed widespread influence. When David Mandelbaum’s encyclopaedic survey of published materials on society in India came out in 1970, Srinivas, by then the acknowledged doyen of Indian anthropologists, expectedly turned out to be the most frequently cited author in its 700 pages (see Mandelbaum 1970). I will recapitulate brieuy in this part of the present essay the content of Srinivas’s published work up to the publication in 1976 of his most

Ritual change in the Hindu temples of Penang

Abstract: In the first generation the process is one of preservation, recreation of the Indian environment. At the upper end of the caste scale this preservation continues for further generations. Religious experts continue to be imported from India and temples are maintained as precise copies of specific institutions in Tamil Nadu and its surrounds. At other levels the pressures for preservation decrease. In some temples, ritual is reformed to

The remembered village: a failure:

Abstract: professor (Srinivas 1952: 28-37). I reread it recently in connection with M.S.A. Rao (n.d.).’ Rao’s paper is relevant to any consideration of Srinivas’s contribution to Indian sociology because the period of his active academic life has seen a marked growth in the intellectual independence in this field of which Rao’s survey is a symptom as much as it is a chart: Rao’s history of Indian sociology is an Indian history but not chauvinist.

The remembered village: reply to criticisms:

Abstract: logy has been devoted to the discussion of an anthropologist’s work. I am sensible of the honour done to me by the editor in having my work discussed, and my contributions to sociology, such as they are, assessed by colleagues from various parts of the world, and belonging to different age-groups. Understandably, praise and blame are mixed in each contribution though some are more critical than the others. Thus Mandelbaum, Epstein, Nakane and Lynch are very generous in their evaluation of The remembered village (henceforward referred to as RV) as well as my work as a whole, while the essays of Beals, Mayer and Joshi are a mixture of praise and blame in more or less equal measure. Pocock and Jain are generally very critical though Pocock is perhaps more than fair in his assessment of my contribution to Indian sociology as a whole. Gupta and Parvathamma are almost totally negative in th eir evaluation. Madan sticks to his role as master of ceremonies, and avoids trying to be a critic, though

Caste, caste association, caste federation and inequality as vocabularies:

Abstract: Despite the growing interest of the social sciences in social change, particularly modernity, ambiguities in these intellectual endeavours persist. These ambiguities may be most acute for social science efforts undertaken in societies such as India in which the quest for and the challenge of modernity is intense. For it is here that a vehicle of modernity, viz. nationalism, is most prominent. This is particularly troublesome if, as is often the case, social science analyses are anchored in the history and ethnocentrism of what are identified as modern societies; most often these

The remembered village as ethnography

Abstract: or counted, arrive on the printed page after having been filtered through the brains and bodies of members, ethnographers, typists and typographers. Hopefully, the author-ethnographers who supervise this process have some kind of inherent, although probably not innate, ability to stay relatively close to the truth. Bluntly, the test of an ethnography is not to be found in the method used but in the extent to which the ethnographer can’ be credited with the ability to tell a hawk from a handsaw. The fact that M.N. Srinivas’s new book, The remembered village (1976), is a memory ethnography is one of the least important things about it. It is, perhaps, interesting to compare such a memory ethnography with what might be called a methodical ethnography, which is based upon such formal devices as synoptic charts, random samples, taxonomic trees, or correlational surfaces. Because a methodical ethnographer is dedicated to the presentation of evidence in support of each of his ethnographic facts, it follows as the night the day, that the better his documentation, the fewer facts he can document. Whether he relies upon assembled quotations, photographs, censuses, or elaborate computer analyses, the methodical ethnographer tends to establish small truths painfully and is often reluctant to move on to larger truths. The act of choosing an item of infor-

Lotus in the mud pond

Abstract: Without prejudice to discerning ’radical’ change that may have been in the offing, and with due regard to the fact that this book is as much autobiographical as ethnographic, it may justifiably be said that the author on the eve of his study of Rampura was at a critical juncture in his professional career. He had just obtained his D. Phil. from Oxford University and, what is more, had accepted the offer to teach Indian sociology there after a year’s fieldwork in India. The story of the author’s encounter with Oxford and its social anthropology begins a little earlier, in 1945, as Srinivas has recounted elsewhere (Srinivas 1973: 139 passim). After obtaining his M.A. in Sociology (and LL.B.) at Bombay University, and having submitted his thesis for Ph.D., he found ’no prospect of a job in Sociology’. He, therefore, decided to go abroad for pursuing further studies. When the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford responded favourably to his application for admission to a B.Litt./D.Phil programme, Srinivas succeeded in raising enough money from private sources to pay for his travel to and three or four months of living in Oxford. He did not

The remembered village: memory 'maximized':

Abstract: situation. Anthropologists set great store by their field data, without processing which nothing can be produced. In this regard they are inheritors of the celebrated tradition emanating from Malinowski. Howsoever superb the body of field data, it captures only a part of the total reality, even from the point of view of the anthropologist on the spot. It is, for example, difficult to capture the ’atmosphere’ in which an event has taken place, and to evaluate the observer’s reaction to and effect upon the subjects, though this might have crucial importance to the understanding of what is going on. These doubts and reservations remain in the anthropologist’s mind and are rarely presented in anthropological works. In RV, the author has made full use of the faculties of observation, reflection and recall and, as a result, the book contains lively and human accounts of village life, and discloses delicate sectors of the interaction . between the anthropologist and individual villagers. It produces a kind of effect one associates with a painting of high quality, while a ’normal’

The village called Rampura: remembrance, annotations, comparisons

Abstract: Certain field experiences remain vivid in one’s memory. I had such an experience on the first day of January in 1959 when M.N. Srinivas took me on a visit to Rampura. I had read his papers about that village and I had heard more about its people from him. Meeting them was a memorable encounter for me in several ways. I could take in the actual milieu, the village ground, its fields, and its people. It was the busy season of harvest and of cane crushing so I could observe and ask questions about these operations. Even more stimulating was to talk in person with some of the men and women whom I already knew from Srinivas’s accounts. So I could round out my impressions of them. Thus Kulle Gowda, for