105 M.N. Srinivas on sociology and social change in India: Extracts from an interview

7/28/2019 105 M.N. Srinivas on sociology and social change in India: Extracts from an interview

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SociologyContributions to Indian

DOI: 10.1177/006996670003400105

2000; 34; 105Contributions to Indian SociologySatish Deshpande

from an interviewM.N. Srinivas on sociology and social change in India: Extracts

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M.N. Srinivas on sociology and social

change in India: Extractsfrom an interview

Satish Deshpande

Satish Deshpande is at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.

[Professor Srinivas visited Delhi in mid-December 1998, when the

University of Delhi awarded him an honorary doctorate as part of its75th anniversary celebrations. On that occasion, we had discussed withhim our plans for a workshop on the intellectual and institutional historyof sociology and social anthropology in India being organised by the

Sociology Unit of the Institute of Economic Growth. Professor Srinivas

was enthusiastic about the workshop and offered many suggestions. Wewere hoping that he would deliver the inaugural address at our work-

shop, and we also wanted to involve him in a larger effort at compilingan archive of interviews with senior scholars that would help document

disciplinary history. It was in this context that I requested him for aninterview when on a visit to Bangalore later the same month. ProfessorSrinivas agreed readily, and we met in his office at the National InstituteofAdvanced Studies on the morning of 29 December 1998, where he

spoke almost non-stop for about ninety minutes.Since it was intended as an exploratory interview for our planned

archive, I had no detailed questionnaire and wanted only to indicatethe broad areas of disciplinary history that we would have liked him toelaborate on in future conversations. Unfortunately, due to delays in

funding, the planned workshop could not be finalised for a long time. Wehad just received confi..nation of funding and were about to write toProfessor Srinivas when we heard that he had passed away after a brief

illness.

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Given below are brief excerpts from this interview. I have omitted

topics on which Professor Srinivas has written extensively (such as his

early education and training) or those that are mainly of archival inter-est, and included his observations on sociology and social change in

contemporary India that might be of more general interest. It must be

emphasised that Professor Srinivas did not get to see the transcript of the

interview, and that I bear the responsibility for transcription and editing.I have tried to stay as close as possible to the verbatim transcript while

summarising the text and making it more readable. Interpolations areindicated by square brackets, and the questions are in italics.]

Q: I wanted you to elaborate on something which you had briefly men-

tioned, that in the generation before you, scholars who went abroad to

study (such as G.S. Ghurye or K.P. Chattopadhyay) took it for grantedthat they would return to India after their studies. Was it any different in

your generation?

MNS: Inmy generation

too, we all felt we had to come back.... In the. sciences, for instance, one of my close friends was Bal Tilak, who

became the director of the National Chemical Laboratory, he came back;he was already married though.And then there was anotherAhmad, whodidArabic studies at Oxford. He came back toAligarh and later on he

went to the Indian Institute ofAdvanced Study; he married an

Englishwoman and he came back to India.... Even in Cambridge,I.G. Patel came back-LG. Patel was my contemporary.And then

another Patel who was intomanagement

and soon, Madhubhai Patel, hereturned.And K.J. Shah, he was a student of Wittgenstein in Cambridge,

he came back.And then there was Deshmukhs younger brother, he came

back and joined the Reserve Bank.And K.S. Krishnaswamy was some-what junior to me-he was at the LSE-he came back. K.N. Raj came

back, K.R. Narayanan came back.... I think you have raised an importantpoint about which I was insensitive... or non-sensitive. You know, forthese people the excitement of an independent India was the magnet.

I left Oxford in July 1947 and I was here inAugust. I rememberonAugust 15th in Subbarayan Kere listening to the speeches ofRadhakrishnan and others... there was a large crowd and the excitement

of Independence was there. I think you know, unknown to ourselves wewere all deeply nationalistic....Partly because the British were there, yousee, the British were very neccessary for our nationalism.And Gandhi

was our hero.... I mean though we might disapprove of this or that of



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Gandhi, we might be very critical, but we were all admirers.... We werealso admirers of Nehru and Rajaji and the whole batch of leaders. Theywere... by and large they were not like the leaders today, they were verydifferent people.And all of us wanted to return. I dont think I had anyprogramme of doing wonders here, but I felt I had to get back....

I applied for a job in theAnthropological Survey of India. I appliedwhen I was in England and Evans-Pritchard was temporarily absent, so

Meyer Fortes wrote a long recommendation for me. He also wrote toKrishna Menon for funds for research. Krishna Menon never even

answered the letter...[laughs]. Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard were

in the London School ofEconomics around the time that Krishna Menon

was there, you see, but Krishna Menon was a complete politico, hedidnt care for academics, you see, and he didnt even answer Fortess

letter. But I applied for a job at theASI and I came back in the beginningofAugust and I was here for Independence Day and in November I wasinvited for a interview, and I went.

The head of theAnthropological Survey was a man called Guha,B.S. Guha, who was a physical anthropologist with a D.Sc. from

Harvard. He didnt know anything about social anthropology, and I thinkI was... I probably did not show the signs of deference which a personshould show to a teacher or to any person who is interviewing you.AndI got the impression from my interview that my answers were not liked

by him because I kept contradicting him and everything he said and hewas surprised and annoyed at my replies....And then I came back to

Bangalore via Bombay, and at my Bombay address my brother had for-warded a letter from Evans-Pritchard saying, will you please let meknow whether you will accept a lectureship at Oxford, and I need aletter from you to proceed with the arrangements. I wrote to him saying

yes, because I was sure I was not getting a job anywhere.And then sometime in 1948, I think March orApril or maybe

February, I got a letter signed by Mountbatten. I was offered a job as aClass I officer starting at 300 rupees as an officer in theAnthropologicalSurvey.And I wrote back saying, look I have just accepted an offer from

Oxford,and two

yearshence I can

join you.Guha accused me of

accept-ing a job while I was being interviewed for another...[laughs]. Can youimagine the logic? I think according to him I should have waited till Ihad heard from theAnthropological Survey before I accepted Oxford. Imean I never knew I was going to get a reply, and a positive reply at that.

And the attraction of the [Oxford] offer! Evans-Pritchard knew what I

wanted... he said the first year of your appointment you can spend in a



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village of your choice.And that changed entirely my outlook on anthro-

pology, that ten months of 1948 living in Rampura....

Anyway,Im

gladI didnt

getinto the

Anthropological Survey.The

best thing is to stay away from such organisations. I was offered even a

Secretaryship in the Government of India in the Ministry of Education.I am frightened of these bureaucracies. You see, the argument put for-ward is: Ifyou people fight shy of it, who will do it? I think a person will

be sucked into it you see. It must be somebody who is in the bureau-

cracy, who knows it, who can change it.

Q: Did you discuss the question of coming back, or was it taken for

granted?

I wanted to come back, and Evans-Pritchard wanted me to stay on. I

mean, he knew I wanted to come back but he also wanted me to stay

there longer, and he even told me that if I stayed for another three or five

years he would recommend me for a higher position in the department.But I didnt agree, I didnt say yes to him. There were various factors....

One, I felt I had to come back and do what I could here; and two, there

are always kinship ties here and I wanted to be here; and three, I felt thatif I did not come I might miss the chance of coming. The point is that

people wont wait for you, you see. It is true that in the case of econom-

ics there was a sudden expansion and we invited Jagdish Bhagwati,

Amartya Sen, I.G. Patel and so on to Delhi School of Economics, but I

think that is very, very unusual. I thought if I didnt come back I mightmiss my chance of coming back. I wanted to stay here and work.And

another immediate cause was the fact that in the two years of my stay

there was hardly any sunlight...[laughs]. Hardly a fortnight of sunlightin two years, you see, so I felt that I should be here! But at the same time

I was drawn to the department at Oxford-a wonderful department, itwas at the peak of its creativity....

Q: Theres been a lot ofdiscussion, youve also talked about it even as

early as Social change in modern India, about how your identity as anIndian was always foregrounded by reviewers of different sorts. Do you

know of any other third world country scholars who studied their own

societies at that time?

You know you must look at Edmund Leachs Social anthropology.There he has a chapter or an important section on studying ones own

society.And he comes to the conclusion that somehow the outsider is



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at an advantage-the prejudices the insider acquires while living in a

society prevents him from being objective, you see. (You know EdmundLeach started his

professional life in China.... Hecame

from a richfamily and was a mathematics or engineering graduate from Cambridge,and then he went to China. It was his Chinese experience that drew himinto anthropology. He gave up engineering and became an anthropologist.)He cites four Chinese studies, and one of them is Fei Hsiao-Tung [ 1962]who wrote a book called Rural life in Southern China or something likethat in the 1930s, with an introduction by Malinowski. Leach attacks theother three studies, saying they are really not studies of ones own soci-

ety.And then he says that the fourth study by Fei Hsiao-Tung is amarvel: how in eight weeks he was able to get data which an outsidercould not have got, and it was a pioneering study.... This contradictsthe thesis he starts with. Ive pointed this out, in Insider vs. outsider....But Leach is a very warm person, and when we met he was very warm

towards me and he inscribed this book very warmly and gave it to me,and I wrote a review of it-a laudatory review.And later on when I was

handling the problem of studying ones own society I found it was

[problematic]....

Q: From your time at Oxford do you remember anybody who was goingback to study his own society, like you did?

No. I dont think... no, they didnt go back. In fact, Jit Uberoi is a veryinteresting case in point. He got a grant to study Afghanistan, anAfghanvillage, and Max [Gluckman] his supervisor, wanted me to be his field

supervisor from Delhi.And I wrote to Max and suggested that, when

Punjab has not been studied by an insider, and Jit was very well

equipped, why should Jit go toAfghanistan? Maybe it was not a verywise letter on my part, you know, I think Jit had every right to be

annoyed with it. He wrote to Max saying, I will not go to Punjab, I will

studyAfghanistan, and he stuck to it. I think he was right. I think this

impulse must come from within....You dont find this. It was beginning in England... one of the students

in Oxford went and studied Selfridges [?]... but it was never published.But where it began in a way was in Manchester-Ronnie Frankenbergwrote about Welsh villages. But Ronnie Frankenberg was not fromWales you see... this is the interesting part-he took advantage of the

diversity within England. This is where I say in India the diversity isso great that you can study your neighbour, because there is enough



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difference between you and him. People have frequently told me... evenEvans-Pritchard once told me... why dont you go and study the Indians

in Kenya, and so on. I mean it would have been a good idea. I wish I hadspent some time in EastAfrica looking at the Indians; it would have

helped me. But this country is so rich in diversity and I felt I had to do

something to cover this diversity you see....

Q: What is striking about the early literature on the theme of social

change in India is that it becomes relatively sophisticated very early, inthe 1950s and 60s itself. We seem to have more complex accounts ofthe

process of social change compared to the much more schematic, muchcruder models that were in use at around the same timefor other Third

World countries. Why is this?-what made the discipline precocious in

India... ?

What happened is that, when I came back, I had to attend to things in myenvironment.And so instead of studying cross-cousin marriage amongthe Gonds in central India or

grandfather-granddaughter marriagewhich

is the kind of problem which Ghurye also addressed-Ghurye did other

things also, I mean one must be fair to Ghurye-I said what is happen-ing to caste, you see, caste in modern India.

And also, that was a period when crucial changes were occurring inIndia. It marked the beginning of Independence, the beginning of veryserious social change and if we didnt catch the villages then... villagesand tribes ... then we would have missed a historic opportunity.And so

we concentrated and so village studies came in.And at that time therewas Freddie Bayly studying Orissa, Kim Marriott was in UP studying a

village nearAligarh, and then Kathleen Gough was studying Kerala andTamil Nadu, and later, in the mid-fifties, Scarlett Epstein was studyingtwo villages in Karnataka, and then Dubey was studying that

Shamirpet... and all this got published [Srinivas 1955].And that bookexerted a remarkable influence out of proportion to the scholarship,because it roused the interest of the people.And village studies ceased

to be the monopoly of agricultural economists and agronomists, whohad reduced villagers to a series of statistics using production figures, [totalk about] their poverty and their inefficiency.... Completely an out-

siders picture of the villager.... I think there anthropologists did a

better job-we presented the villager from the inside, which I think was

a very important thing.



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Q: In your writings, you mention returning to the Coorg material which

you collected under Ghurye-returning to it after Oxford, so to speak-

when the theme ofchange suddenlyseems

tocome

up. Did this havesomething to do with Independence and the atmosphere at that time... ?

No, actually, even when I was observing the Coorgs I could see the

changes. Ghurye wanted me to investigate their ancestral tombs. Thatwas his interest and that was the starting point of his encouraging me.But when I went to observe one wedding I remember the then IG of

Police of Mysore catering to the wedding guests.... You know, coffee,

the prosperity it brought for the Coorgs... the sudden building of bighouses and entertaining of Europeans... that was there, and I could seeit even then. But my interest was in traditional Coorg culture and so that

interest blocked out this. But I could not help seeing it since I was thereand some of it got incorporated.... So you see, unless you were verydeficient, you could see the changes in the lifestyles of the Coorgs.Andalso the army-I mentioned that there were 3,300 Coorgis in the Indian

Army and at that time the population of Coorgs in Coorg was about

42,000 or so, and that is a pretty large proportion. So theArmy was

transforming Coorg, you see. So you could not be insensitive to changes.

Q: Social anthropology as a discipline, particularly at the time that youwere trained in it, was not primarily oriented towards change. On theone hand that was your training, and on the other hand here was a soci-

ety which, as you just described, was clearly changing. Did you feel anytension between your

trainingand what you saw?

This is a very interesting point. One of the side-effects of this is Ivebeen criticised: Srinivas is a structural functionalist, so he is not sensi-

tive to change, as though it were a logical thing. I have been accused byseveral people. But to me, you know, when the field takes you over, yourtheoretical framework breaks down. I mean if you are an honest field

worker. The field is a great educator. This is why I insisted on field work.

You may go out with structuralism, you may go out with structural func-tionalism, or you may go out with Marxism.... In fact once Panini men-

tioned that in JNU he would get students who were very active marxists

and after one year of field work with building workers or somebody,they would come back... and... you know the field would have left its

impression on them. So I think that the field is a great teacher.



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And then, regarding Social change in modern India, even before that,what happened was that the Coorg book [Srinivas 1952] was picked upby Chicago.At that time Milton Singer and Robert Redfield were inter-ested in the study of civilisations. Miltons training was in psychologyand philosophy-his Ph.D. thesis was on shame and guilt-and the twocame together, and the study of civilisations was very attractive to them.And they suddenly discovered in the Coorg book that society existed ina civilisation and must be studied, and they picked on sanskritisation andwestemisation. Milton came in 1954 and he organised a seminar, for

which my Note on sanskritisation was written. That means I was

already handling problems of social change, though I did not know I was

handling problems of social change....And then I was invited to give the Tagore lectures [at the University

of California at Berkeley, in 1963] and I picked social change in modemIndia [as my theme]. Probably it was a very unwise decision on my part,because the first drafts were not at all good. But I got a year at the Centre

and I devoted the entire year [to the revisions]. You see, I am not a theor-

ist...you

knowAndr6[B6teille]

has saidthis,

and he isquite correct,

I

am not a theorist. But when I absorb a certain amount of material, I dont

impose any categories on it; the material and my absorption gives the

pattern to me. That way the four chapters [of Social change in modemIndia (1966)] were written. You see, the point is that the last chapter[On studying ones own society] came as a natural [sequel] to that,

though it was not in the [original] four lectures. When I was writing it

up [as a book], I thought I should lay down my situation, [that] of a man

studying his own society.

Q: In the post-Independence period there seemed to be one school of

thought which was closely allied with the state and developmental pro-grammes and so on, and another school ofthought which felt some dis-tance ought to be maintained. You seem to belong to the latter school.

Could you say something more about this, the 1950s, and that context?

You know, when people talked about the Constitution and planning I

regarded them as unrealistic. I am not mentioning it as a virtue of mine,but as a failure. You see they talk about planning, and then you go to the

village or the slum and you meet ordinary people, and you find that it hadnot touched them, you see.And the other thing is that I always felt that Ishouldnt get too close to the government. I was offered umpteen jobs atvarious times in the government, and even in the UNESCO, but I said no.



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I dont know, I really cant explain it, I always felt that I should be anobserver and I shouldnt get involved in that. The contrast is, I dont know

if you will agree, I feelA.R. Desai was the other side. Though he was aMarxist he talked about planning-even if he was anti-government, andhe was studying peasant struggles and so on-but somehow [he believed

in] planning you see. The plan will do this the plan will do that.... I prob-ably had a very... kind of illiterate scepticism about planning.And alsothe other thing I found the Ford Foundation bringing in rural sociology.That Douglas Ensminger he was a rural sociologist....

Q: Did you meet him? What did you think ofEnsminger?

Yes... [I did meet him].... He brought his teacher... [they had just]visited a village, and he gave me a manhattan -I didnt know a man-hattan was a drink, you see!-and then I had dinner with him.And he

talked about villages and community projects.... Ensminger was a well-intentioned man. He was well-intentioned, but he wielded a lot of powerand that power went to his head. I remember his

telling somebodyin my

presence, such and such a chief minister wanted to see him, but he told

him no.... He became a kind of a second ambassador of the United

States, and he could go and see the Prime Minister. Nehru encouragedthe Community Development Project thanks to Ensminger.... In fact Ionce asked Ensminger if he would write about his influence in the

Government of India. He half agreed, and then I dont think he got clear-ance from the Ford Foundation....

But I

think, you know, [that] nothingis more useless thanAmerican

rural sociology for India. You can get benefit from anthropology, and

sociology, not rural sociology. Because its so different, you see, ourenvironment....

Q: Did you have any views on the involvement of thefoundations Ford,

Rockefeller and so on, infinancing this kind of research?

No, Rockefeller didnt come into the picture much, it was Ford Founda-tion you know. I tell you one thing that increasingly I find all these foun-dations are becoming involved in the determination of the direction

of research, whether it is gender studies, micro studies on supply of

drinking water in villages, or sanitation in villages.... I think these

things should be done by our government. This should be the job of our



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government, to develop infrastructure, and I dont see why they shouldbe doing this.

Theres a bigger problem here which I am really getting frightenedof....All our institutions in the social sciences are being driven by pro-jects and the foreign ones... there are two things involved: first of all, I

object to institutions being project-driven; secondly, the agendas of our

country being determined by foreigners, that I am not comfortable withat all. What I am saying is that I am not anti-foreigner, no, I believe

ultimately in the community of scholars. I have had too many very closefriends...

youknow I cant

forget myindebtedness to Radcliffe-Brown,

Evans-Pritchard and my friends at Oxford ... and Milton [Singer] wasa very dear friend of mine... and I have friends all over the world, all

over the world. I believe there is an international community of scholars.

The last thing I would be is a kind of xenophobe. But I do believe thedetermination of agendas of third world countries by foreign founda-tions is something which I dont accept. I think it is more a gut-levelthing. I think we should determine our agendas, and it is the governmentwhich should be concerned about

supplying drinkingwater and devel-

oping infrastructure, good roads and so on.And the other thing is that they determine academic ratings... they

influence academic rankings, and that means your good people are taken

away by them, and then there is what I call raiding of Indian institutions

by foreign institutions and foreign foundations. I think this is somethingwe should be concerned about. Just recently Mr. Vajpayee has said Jai

jawan, jai kisan, jai vigyan. Okay, but I think Jai samaj vigyan should

be added because without social sciences, science and technology cantdeliver the goods.And also, [to determine] what kind of development

you are going to have, there I think social sciences should be involvedand also a certain amount of social philosophy. Some kind of opendebate should be there about the kind of means, the kind of goals.

In this sense, you know, the funding of social science institutionsis a very serious problem now. You have to take projects, and then it

becomes project-oriented and then you lose your identity.... So I am

quite concerned. But where does funding come from? I think Indianindustry is not enlightened enough. I think we need a strong social sci-ence forum to put our case. I think the governments are aware of the

importance of economics because of budgets and so on, and they areaware of politics because of voting, but they have not heard of sociologyor social anthropology....



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Q: When you first came to Delhi in 1959, were you ever consulted bythe government or the Planning Commission, as a representative of the

discipline, like the economists were? Were they interested

Ashok Mehta wanted me to be member of the Planning Commission-

he once told me that.And two years after he became Deputy Chairman,I met him and he said, Brother, you have never come to see me. I have

never called on a politician.... I dont think they would have acceptedmy advice; and I dont think I have advice to give. The point is, you can

study a problem and show its complexities, but solutions are another

thing, you see. I admire the economists! If you can show the choicesavailable to you that is something....Now I think in the next few years there is going to be increasing vio-

lence between the dominant castes and dalits. What are you going to do

about it? I have said the Indian revolution will be a bleeding revolution

not a bloody thing. You know Tamil Nadu it happens, it happens in

Karnataka andAndhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, everywhere...this will

become more widespread. The dalits are getting assertive and the domin-ant castes resent it. Wherever you go this problem will become worse.

And then this whole question of reservation. Now I think reservationis an alibi for not fighting poverty. What does fighting poverty mean?

Fighting poverty means universal literacy, universal primary education,

particular importance to health care for the expectant mother and the

post-natal mother and female infants and importance to female childrenin education and employment; and then developing agriculture, horti-

culture, even floriculture so that people get jobs in villages and smalltowns. Then primary education is left to... bureaucrats and so on... I thinkit is something which the top minds in this country should be involved in.

You see the whole thing is that poverty is the biggest enemy we have.

By concentrating on caste we are diverting attention away from poverty.In fact I met Mani ShankarAiyar once and mentioned this to him, and he

said you are dead right on this; we have vote-banks we can cater to and sowe can ignore this problem of poverty. You know in 1963 (in the Balaji vs.the State of

Mysorecase) the

SupremeCourt

judgement byJustice

Gajendragadkar said that poverty is the basis for backwardness.And in

1992, the Supreme Court (in the Mandal judgement) said that social back-wardness is the basis of poverty; they said we are not attacking poverty,we are attacking social backwardness.Avery retrogradejudgement. Now,to me, our main enemy is poverty, I have gone over to this....



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The reason why I am saying that caste [should not be there in theCensus is that]... if caste is there in the Census, inter-caste violence willincrease. Castes have come together to fight for political power. Now withbackwardness being the target, they will hive off, saying we are morebackward.You see, the Vokkaligas now include the Vokkaligas, the Bunts,the Reddys of Bangalore, Hallikaras in Shimoga, and so on. Themoment you have a new Census, the Hallikaras and others will say: The

Bunts are different, we are more backward than them. Bunts are veryrich fellows you see, Bunts are now Shettys, they run banks and dowry

among

middle-class Bunts is one crore

fiftylakhs, two crores and so on.

How can you compare them to landless labourers? If you at least say all

landless labourers are entitled to scholarship, I would agree. This wasI.P. Desais argument: if they are in traditional occupations, if they are

potters, if they are weavers, if they are ghanis, then give them [reserva-tions]. But it was rejected. I have seen village Brahmins as superstitiousas the village peasants.... I think poverty should be targeted now. I am

frightened of the violence. In Tamil Nadu it is already happening....

Lawand order will

becomea

big problem.And then

you cant collectcorrect statistics because they will be fighting about who is more back-ward. This is my argument. I think it is high time we wiped out illiter-

acy, we gave universal primary education.... From the economics side

Amartya Sen is saying the same thing. Of course, he doesnt know aboutcaste ... [laughs] but that is a different thing.

I am happy that the middle classes are becoming important becausethe middle classes are the melting pot now. It is among the middle

classes that inter-caste marriages, inter-regional marriages, and inter-religious marriages are occurring. I think they point to the future. Thereis another dimension to this. The middle classes are composed of the

higher castes, and of the better-off elements among the different ethnic

groups and minorities.And ifyou look at the history of emulation in this

country, the middle classes will be emulated. In India, given the strongrural-urban links, the rural dominant castes have respect for the middle

classes. I would regard it as a hopeful trend socially, but economically it

is not, in the sense of dowry prices going up, dowry deaths and con-sumerism.... People who have been long deprived of gadgets are hunger-ing for them... refrigerators, televisions....And I think this is the future.I welcome the middle classes, though I deplore the consumerism. I

myself dont want so many things. I think the middle classes are the

melting pot. Not only caste identities are decreasing, regional identitiesare also decreasing, you know, Bengalis marrying South Indians, South

z



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Indians marrying Punjabis.... There is a great deal of integration goingon in this country....

You know in 1950, the idea that a Kannada-speaking landowner couldbecome the Prime Minister of India was unthinkable, and that has

happened. Thats why I am optimistic about India, you know. We haveset in motion forces whose power we dont know, luckily.And I think

sociologists and social scientists who say they know the future are not

really aware of the power of the underground forces.

REFERENCES

FEI HSIAO-TUNG. 1962 (1939). Peasant life in China:A field study of country life in the

Yangtze valley. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

SRINIVAS, M.N. 1952. Religion and society among the Coorgs of south India. Oxford:

Clarendon Press.

, ed. 1955. Indias villages. Calcutta: Government Press, and Bombay: Asia

Publishing House (1960).. 1956.A note on sanskritization and westernization. Far eastern quanerly 15, 4:

481-96.

. 1966. Social change in modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press.


105 M.N. Srinivas on sociology and social change in India: Extracts from an interview

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