7 Structural-Functional approach of M.N. Srinivas-12

Poulomi Ghosh

TABLE OF CONTENTS (for textual content)

Introduction

1.      Caste System and the Village

2.      Social Change

3.      Critical view of the Structural-functional Approach

4.      Impact on the Discipline

INTRODUCTION:

This module tries to capture the essence of Srinivas’s Structural-functional approach to the study of Indian society. In order to understand Srinivas’s approach, we should first take a look at the general concept of Structural-Functionalism. Sociological functionalism is closely related to the structural-functional approach in anthropology, which tries to explain the various social forms found in tribal societies in terms of their contributions to social cohesion. To put it simply, the structural-functional approach is a perspective in sociology that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. It asserts that our lives are guided by social structures, which are relatively stable patterns of social behavior. Social structures give shape to our lives – in families, the community, and through religious organizations. Certain rituals, such as a handshake or complex religious ceremonies, give structure to our everyday lives. Each social structure has social functions, or consequences, for the operation of society as a whole. Education, for example, has several important functions in a society, such as socialization, learning, and social placement. The proponents of this perspective focus on the understanding of the ‘ordering’ and ‘patterning’ of the social world. Their theoretical and empirical analyses have generally been based on the assumption that societies can be seen as persistent, cohesive, stable, generally inherited wholes, differentiated by their cultural and social structural arrangements.

This perspective of society stresses on the elements of harmony and consistency and not those of conflict and contradiction. Structural-functionalism has borrowed elements from biological sciences, where structure pertains to the structure of an organism that is made up of relationships and functions of its various cells. Srinivas once wrote that” In the recent British social anthropology, the two important concepts of- structure and function – imply that every society is a whole and that its various parts are interrelated. In other words, the various groups and categories which are a part of society are related to each other”. This approach relies more on the field work tradition for understanding social reality so that it can be understood as a contextual perspective of the social phenomena.

1Srinivas’ sociology resounds the values of his first mentor, G.S Ghurye. His sociological visions asserted civilizational continuity, focused on the caste system and assessed this traditional structure through the site of village. The introduction of Functionalist social anthropology did allow Srinivas the space to initiate changes in the methods used by Ghurye. While Ghurye’s definition of the caste system was a couched, Indological point of view that is made from textual interpretation, Srinivas relied on the field view to extend his definition of caste. (Patel, 2010) Srinivas explained two basic concepts to understand Indian society:

1  Mysore Narsimhacharya Srinivas was born in a Brahmin family in Mysore on 16th November, 1916. Srinivas initiated the tradition of basing macro-sociological generalizations on micro-anthropological insights, thereby giving perspective to anthropological investigations of small-scale communities (Nagla, 2008). M.N. Srinivas is an internationally renowned scholar, was a student of G.S. Ghurye at the department of Sociology of Bombay University. He set up the Department of Sociology at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and later helped with the setting up of the Department at Delhi University. He obtained his MA, LLB, and PhD from Bombay and his DPhil from Oxford.

   (a) Book view- Knowledge about the elements which make up Indian society like religion, varna, caste, family, village, etc, come from sacred texts and books. This view is also known as the Indological approach.

(b) Field view- Srinivas believed that knowledge about different regions of the Indian society can be attained through field work. This he called field view. Srinivas used the field view and the empirical method of ethnography to study the caste system in village settings.

The paper will be divided into parts based on the two themes of Srinivas’ contributions to the discipline and it will try to locate the underlying perspective of structural-functionalism in two themes. The following are the categorized themes:

Caste system, the study of village, and religion Social change

1. CASTE SYTEM AND THE VILLAGE:

Srinivas viewed caste as a segmentary system. Every caste for him is divided into sub-castes which are:

The unit of endogamy

Whose members follow a common occupation The units of social and ritual life

Whose members share a common culture;

Whose members are governed by the same authoritative body, like the panchayat.

Besides these factors of the sub-caste, there are certain other attributes which are also important:

Hierarchy: Hierarchy, for Srinivas, is the core or essence of the caste system. It refers to the arrangements of hereditary groups in a rank order. According to him, it is the status of the top-most or Brahmins and the bottom-most or untouchables, which is the clearest in terms of rank. The middle regions of the hierarchy are the most flexible.

Occupational difference: According to Srinivas, there is a close relationship between a caste and its occupation. For him, caste is nothing more than the ‘systemization of occupational differentiation’. Castes therefore can be known by their occupations, e.g. Lohar (iron-smiths), Sunar (gold-smiths), etc. These occupations are placed in a hierarchy of high and low.

Restriction: on commensality, dress, speech and customs.

Pollution: The distance between castes is maintained by the principles of pollution. Any contact with the polluted, whether an object or being, renders a caste impure and demands that the caste or its member undergo purification rituals.

Caste panchayats and assemblies: Every caste is subject to the control of an order maintaining body or a panchayat. The panchayat may be formed by the elderly of each caste. Further every caste is also answerable to the authority of its caste assembly, which may extend beyond village boundaries.

These attributes of a caste determine the nature of inter-caste relations.

In his Varna and Caste, Srinivas initiates a discussion on the nature of the caste system in India. He argues for the substitution of Varna by jati (sub-castes) in order to assess the caste system. Srinivas got the idea of studying Indian villages from his mentor Radcliffe-Brown. His study of Rampur, a Mysore village is contained in his ‘The Remembered Village (1976). As a sociologist, Srinivas’s main aim was to better understand Indian society which for him was best exemplified by the caste system which prevailed and was best noticed in Indian villages. Thus when Srinivas discusses the caste system, he does by evaluating it within the limits of the village. In this, Srinivas’ approach is found to be similar to the colonial practice of identifying space as a site for examining traditions, the village (Patel, 2011).

Srinivas considered the village as the microcosm of Indian society and civilization. His search for the identity of Indian traditions lead him to infer that Indian traditions are found in caste, village and religion. His conceptualization of traditions is in no sense secular but rather at par with the Hindutva notion of Indian traditions. At this point he suggested that the caste system was resilient, adapting itself to new changes, those being inaugurated by the economy and the polity. Particularly when examining mobility in modern India, he highlighted the continuous adaptive character of the caste system and its ability to adjust to modern processes of change and presented two paths of mobility- sanskritization for those within the Hindu fold and westernization for those outside it (Srinivas, 2002).

Srinivas divides the population of the village by caste and by occupation and then examines the relationship of these castes with agriculture, and connects these to their occupation. The idea here is to show the organic interaction of each caste with each other, in a functional way. This system is shown to have flexibility because of the integration of the parts to the whole. He further states that caste is best understood by focusing not only on the middle ranks but also in the context of the internal ranking of each jati with the other. The ambiguity of rank and status allows for mobility of groups. It is in this context that he coins the concept of DOMINANT CASTE. He first proposed it in his early papers on the village of Rampura. Since then, this concept has been widely applied to a great deal of work on social and political organization in India. He defined dominant caste in terms of six attributes placed in conjunction:

Sizeable amount of arable land; Strength of numbers;

High place in the local hierarchy; Western education;

Jobs in the administration; Urban sources of income.

Of the above mentioned attributes, the following three are most important in determining the dominant caste: (i) numerical strength, (ii) economic power through ownership of land, (iii) political power. Accordingly, a dominant caste is any caste which has all the three mentioned attributes, in a village. The interesting aspect of this concept is that the ritual ranking of a caste no longer remains the major basis of its position in the social hierarchy. Even if a caste was considered low in the social hierarchy due to its ritual ranking, it could still become the dominant ruling caste or group in a village if it were numerically large, owned land and had political power over village matters. There is no doubt that a caste relatively higher in the ritual rank would find it easier to become the dominant caste but this is not always the case. For example, in the village Rampura in Mysore, as studied by Srinivas, the peasants were the dominant caste in the village even though they were ritually ranked below the Brahmins of the village. They were numerically more, owned lands and had political influence on the affairs of the village.

2. SOCIAL CHANGE:

Social change is a recurrent theme of interest among Indian sociologists and social anthropologists. Srinivas constructs a macro-level understanding of social change using a large number of micro-level findings on the processes of ‘brahmanization’, ‘sanskritization’, ‘westernization’, and ‘secularization’.

BRAHMANIZATION: Srinivas’ work Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952) led him to formulate the concept of Brahmanization to represent the process of imitation of life-ways and ritual practices of Brahmins by low-caste Hindus. The concept was used as in explanatory device to interpret the changes he observed in the ritual practices and life-ways of the lower castes that he observed through intensive field study.

SANKRITIZATION: The notion of Brahmanization had implicit possibilities of further abstraction into a higher level concept of ‘sanskritization’, which Srinivas introduced because his own field data and that of many others indicated the limitations of using an only Brahmanical model as a frame of reference. Thus, sankritization came to replace brahmanization. In ‘Social Change in Modern India (1966)’, he defined sanskritization as the process by which a ‘low’ caste or tribe or other group takes over the customs, rituals, beliefs, ideology and style of living of a high, and in particular, a twice-born caste. The sanskritization of groups usually has the effect of improving its position in the local caste hierarchy. The dominant caste of a village can be a local source of sanskritization or even a barrier to the process.

WESTERNIZATION: The term westernization was used by Srinivas to denote the changes that occurred due to contact with British socio-economic and cultural innovations.

SECULARIZATION: This term has been used to explain the process of institutional innovations and ideological formulation after independence to deal with the question of religious groups and minorities.

In Srinivas, we do not have a two-stage model of structural transformation, that of transition from pre-modern to modern. Rather, Srinivas discusses only one structure, that of the caste system which seems to encompass both stages. Secondly, in his work we do not have a theory of modernity. Instead, we have a theory of social change based on mobility of groups in society, perceived in terms of the two processes of sanskritization and westernization. This conceptual scheme, though referring mainly to cultural imitation, has a built- in structural notion- that of hierarchy and inequality of power and privilege, since the imitation is always by the castes social and economic status. This suggests that the caste system of modern India differs from that of the earlier versions of this system, which respected different occupations and ways of living. These changes have made caste adaptive to new influences, modified and moderate its characteristics, but did not lead it to transform or completely vanish. In Srinivas’ work, the structure of Indian society emerges as a kind of adjustment mechanism that expands and fits into macro-changes as these envelop castes in search of new status positions.

A  CRITICAL LOOK AT M.N. SRINIVAS’ STRUCTURAL_FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVE:

By focusing on the caste system and ‘samaj’ as the repository of civilizational and traditional Indian values, Srinivas excludes religious minorities and groups which fall outside of the Hindu fold. His sociology then studies ‘Indian society’ in an exclusive manner which does not look at the inter-sections of other groups apart from the largely Hindu population and leaves itself open to criticism for framing a discipline which was exclusive in nature. In his collapsing of social to the spatial, that is tying caste with village, he made possible the exclusion of groups and communities within the nation-state whose culture and practices could not be explained by the dual system of ‘varna’ and ‘jati’, as Srinivas understood it. This is not merely a default in his functional approach but is a larger question of exclusion of a number of different groups who define themselves differently and who are eliminated from the sociological space.

Functionalism presupposes that a distinction be made between the subject and the object, and suggests that the researcher distinguish and distance himself from the object of his study. In Srinivas’ work, ethnography merely mirrors the researcher’s ideology. According to Sujata Patel, this creates methodological ambiguities. One of the ambiguities to be observed in Srinivas’ works is an outcome of the adjustment of the structural-functional approach with colonial modernity when it examines the inter-linkages of caste and village. It becomes unclear as to which system Srinivas is studying- the village or the caste? In ‘Varna and Caste’ (in Caste in Modern India by Srinivas) he differentiates ‘varna’ from ‘jati’ and when discussing the caste system in ‘The Social System of the Mysore Village’, he does so by evaluating it within the limits of the village. The lack of theoretical clarity leads to the issue of a teleological position whereby caste can be understood only in the context of a village and vice versa. . His characterizing of caste as adaptive and evolving reproduced the colonial episteme that structured itself in terms of the theory of linear transition towards progressive changes. Colonial modernity propounded the two-fold theory of evolution of society, from pre-literate to modern. Srinivas’ structural-functionalism allowed him to posit an adaptive caste structure, which is forever reproducing itself- a theory of incremental social change. Sociologists in India have followed this perspective as identifying and practicing sociology in the country, where instead of studying India’s modernity, they studied its constructed and evolving traditional structures.

One of the implications of this approach of sociology was that we lose the analysis of colonialism as force of destruction and creation of discourses regarding the binaries of tradition-modernity,  of  capitalism  as  a  generator  of  inequitable  distribution,  and development and planning as a process governed by the elite-organized ideology. Srinivas’ sociology does not present concepts and theories that can be used to evaluate and understand the contemporary processes of change and conflict in our society, or a view which sees our society in a world-view, integrating and interacting with the world market economy which in turn produces inequitable and hierarchical relations between various locales, regions, classes and ethnic groups within the country.

IMPACT ON THE DISCIPLINE OF SOCIOLOGY

Srinivas occupies an eminent place among the first generation sociologists of India. His focus on ‘field-view’ over the ‘book-view’ was a remarkable step in understanding the reality of Indian society.

M.N Srinivas wanted to construct a sociology which used the ‘Indian’ experience to frame sociological principles. He felt that sociology in the country needed to study Indian society in a totality, a study which would integrate the various groups in its inter-relationship. Given these factors, for Srinivas, the project of social anthropology became synonymous with sociology. In doing this, he contested the popular understanding of sociology in its American form- that of conducting surveys through opinion polls and questionnaires- and gave the alternative methodology of fieldwork. According to him, a fieldwork could be initiated in a bounded concrete space which would be the macrocosm of Indian society, which for him was the village. With this in mind, Srinivas initiated the large project of re-structuring the knowledge defining sociology. First he organized the publication of a series of ethnographic papers on villages which was later published as book called India’s Villages (1955). He later went on to publish papers defining his concepts of westernization, sanskritization and dominant caste which came together in the books, Caste in Modern India and Other Essays (1963) and Social Change in Modern India (1966). These became part of the staple syllabus of graduating students in Delhi University as well as others where he and his students held influence, thus institutionalizing his brand of sociology.

M.N Srinivas did not just address an academic audience in his writings. He considered a sociologist to be a mediator who understood processes of social change and had the responsibility of communicating these findings to the public and the government. For instance, Srinivas was the chair of the University Grants Commission’s (UGC) first committee that drafted the status report on teaching of sociology and which developed the model syllabi. He was also one of the five signatories of the Memorandum of Association that set up the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR)- the other four being economists. He organized ICSSR’s first survey of sociology and social anthropology in India that charted out the specializations in the discipline, thereby directing research in defined areas.

According to Srinivas, he was living in very important phase in the history of the country which he termed as the living revolution, a revolution brought on by the adult franchise. For Srinivas, the role of the sociologist was not only to record and document the changes initiated through adult franchise and increasing democratization of the society, but also to offer comments on the impact it was having on the traditional structures of the country. He considered it the sociologist’s job to present these findings the public in an understandable language in order to prepare them for the transitions and their acceptance. In other words, we find in Srinivas’s sociology a critical and active role for social anthropologists to pave the way for post-independence nation building (Patel, 1998).

POINTS TO REMEMBER:

• M.N. Srinivas is considered as one of the first generation sociologists in the post-independence period of the country. His sociological perspective was therefore influenced by nation-building thoughts in order to promote the ideology of a unified nation.
• He derives his structural-functional perspective of sociology from Radcliffe-Brown’s notion of structure, who was his teacher at Oxford.
• Structural-functionalism is a perspective which views different parts of society which contribute to the functioning of the whole. It is ken from the biological sciences where different parts or organs of an organism function inter-dependently in order to maintain the whole of the organism.
• Srinivas therefore studied continuities in the society rather than conflict resulting from social change.
• He relied on field-work and gathering empirical data rather than on the Indological (textual or book-view) approach to construct his way of doing sociology, unlike his guide, G.S. Ghurye.
• His work focused on the caste system and village studies, the latter in which case formed the microcosm of Indian society. This comes from the ethnography following Malinowskian tradition of studying primitive societies which are more compact and small-scale in nature, thereby making it possible to study society in totality.

In his study of the caste system, he substituted the concept of caste with jati, which for him was how the population viewed caste. Jatis are sub-castes and differ from the four-fold Varna system of studying the caste system.

He brought within the discipline, terms like westernization and sankritization to explain the processes of social change in the country.

He coined the term ‘dominant caste’ to point out the flexibility or mobility within the caste system, whereby a caste of lower socio-ritual ranking could still wield political and economic control in an area.

His structural-functional perspective allowed for the exclusion of religious minorities and groups who did not fall under the fold of Hinduism.

For Srinivas, Indian traditions are those that are manifested within the caste system and the village. These traditions are then mostly Hinduized traditions and in no sense secular.

His construction of sanskritization and dominant caste put his perspective closer to the Hindutva ideology of cultural nationalism.

He maintained that social anthropology was not different from sociology in the Indian context.

His sociology does not study India in context of the wider world, capitalism and market economy and its effects on the Indian society.

He was prominent in institutionalizing his brand of sociology in the country through his interactions with the government through institutions like the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR).

He believed that the role of a sociologist was that of mediator who had the duty to present his findings in a language which made it easily understandable to the public in order to prepare them for the transitions taking place in the society.

Srinivas believed he was living in the times of a silent revolution which he later termed as a ‘living revolution’ brought on by the adult franchise.

Web links

1. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40278831

2. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23620499

3. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23620587

4. https://www.academia.edu/8716406/Social_Anthropology_or_Marxist_Sociology_A ssessing_the_Contesting_Sociological_Visions_of_M.N._Srinivas_and_A.R.Desai

REFERENCES:

• Patel, Sujata. “At Crossroads: Sociology in India” in The ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions edited by Sujata Patel. London. Sage Publications, 2010, pp280-291.
• Patel, Sujata ed. “Doing Sociology in India: Genealogies, Locations and Practices”. New Delhi. Oxford University Press 2011.
• Patel, Sujata. ‘The Nostalgia for the Village: M.N Srinivas and the making of Indian social anthropology’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, pp49-61.
• Nagla, B.K. Indian Sociological Thought. Jaipur. Rawat Publications, 2008.
• Shah, A.M. “Sanskritization Revisited”. Sociological Bulletin, Indian Sociological Society, Vol 54, No. 2, (May-August2005), pp238-249.