M. N. Srinivas and the village

M.N. Srinivas (1916-1999), probably the best-known Indian sociologist after independence, was born in Mysore. He studied under Ghurye in Bombay and earned two doctorates: from Bombay and from Oxford, where he studied under Radcliffe-Brown and then Evans-Pritchard.

• His Oxford thesis, *Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India*, applied the structural-functional approach of British social anthropology and made his international name.
• He returned to India in 1951 to found the sociology department at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, and in 1959 set up the department at the Delhi School of Economics, soon one of India's leading centres. In 1971 he co-founded the Institute of Social and Economic Change in Bangalore.
• He complained that institution-building left little time for research, yet wrote widely on caste, modernisation, social change and village society, linked Indian sociology with British and American (especially Chicago) anthropology, and trained a new generation of leaders in the discipline.

Srinivas on the village. The village was his life-long interest. Only after a year of fieldwork in a village near Mysore did he gain real first-hand knowledge, an experience that shaped his career. With S.C. Dube and D.N. Majumdar, he made village studies the dominant field of Indian sociology in the 1950s and 1960s.

• He wrote two kinds of work on villages: ethnographic accounts of fieldwork, and historical and conceptual discussions of the village as a unit of analysis.
• In the conceptual debate, some anthropologists, notably Louis Dumont, argued that institutions like caste mattered more than the village. Srinivas disagreed: he believed the village was a relevant social entity. Historical evidence showed villages had served as a unifying identity, and village unity mattered in rural life.
• He also criticised British administrator-anthropologists who pictured the Indian village as unchanging, self-sufficient 'little republics'. He showed that villages had changed considerably and had never been self-sufficient, being tied into regional economic, social and political relationships.

Why village studies mattered:

• They showed the value of ethnographic research methods.
• They gave eye-witness accounts of the rapid change in the countryside as independent India began planned development.
• Urban Indians and policy makers valued these vivid descriptions of 'the heartland', and sociology gained a new role in a modernising nation, beyond the study of 'primitive' peoples.

In conclusion, these four scholars 'Indianised' sociology in different ways: Ghurye brought knowledge of classical texts to questions set by Western anthropology; D.P. Mukerji, a westernised intellectual, rediscovered Indian tradition without being blind to its faults; A.R. Desai offered a Marxist critique of the state when such criticism was rare; and Srinivas adapted Western training to Indian realities. Later generations have built on their work through constructive criticism.

Example (new): a student who spends her summer in her grandparents' village and notices that the weekly market, the bus to town and relatives working in the city all link it to the wider region is seeing what Srinivas meant: the village is real, but never isolated.