I came to know of MN Srinivas as a UC Berkeley student in a course on “Social Stratification in India” taught by Anthropology Professor Gerald Berreman (a CASBS Fellow in 1976). Best known for his concept of “sanskritization” which explained upward mobility in a caste-based society by lower-ranked groups who adopt the “Sanskritic” symbols of higher-ranked socially dominant groups (such as the wearing of sacred thread or the adoption of vegetarianism), Srinivas, who had degrees in Law, Sociology, and Social Anthropology, also founded two renowned departments of Sociology (at Baroda and Delhi Universities), and trained the better part of a generation of Indian sociologists. That quarter we had been assigned to read his monograph, The Remembered Village (University of California Press, 1976). As is the case with anything considered a classic, many things can be said about it, but surely its wry dedication struck me most forcefully as an undergraduate:
Had not all the copies of my processed notes been burnt in the fire on 24 April 1970 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, I would not have thought of writing a book based entirely on my memory of my field experience. I wish therefore to acknowledge the part played by arsonists in the birth of this book.
The Stanford University campus was suffused in protests that day, and there were not a few incidents of violence that spring: between April and May of 1970, police had been called to campus 13 times as students protested the Nixon administration’s expansion of the Viet Nam war into Cambodia.(1) The arson at the Center (which included a motorcycle conflagration on Alta Road set to block the fire department from quickly reaching the burning studies), and attacks on the Stanford Provost’s and President’s houses captured national attention;(2) Nixon called personally to express his regrets to Srinivas about the loss of his work.(3)
The first few pages of the Remembered Village tell us much about the culture of the Center, how it rallied around a Fellow who had lost his mother days earlier, and then a near lifetime of scholarly work. The entire Center community chipped in to help Srinivas salvage what he could of his burnt notes: friends, and a legion of wives married to Center fellows and Stanford faculty collected scraps of charred fragments, inserted them into clear plastic folders, and photographed them. The original field notes back in Delhi were also located, microfilmed and sent to the Center; Srinivas’s former student and field assistant arrived to help with reconstructing the analytic notes. So it wasn’t a complete loss, though Srinivas was still devastated. Consoled by one of his fellow Center colleagues, the anthropologist Sol Tax, to consider writing his ethnography from memory, Srinivas took the plunge and began working with a dictaphone. He found it awkward at first, but by November of 1970, while still at the Center, had dictated a rough draft working from memory. It would take Srinivas another three years, after returning to India, to finish the manuscript. No doubt feeling that working from piecemeal notes would not produce the work he had initially envisioned, Srinivas was yet scrupulously methodological: resolving to write entirely from his recollection and only resorting to the reconstructed notes when he was unsure of his memory. The result was an innovation, a “memory ethnography”(4) of uncommon plain-spokenness and social complexity; of dry humor and nuanced social analysis. The fire at the Center had proved a boon in disguise.
One of the frontispiece quotes to the Remembered Village by Marcel Mauss, “The anthropologist has to be a novelist able to evoke the life of the whole society” sums up the considerable achievement of the book. Part elegy to a passing form of rural life in the late 1940s (after Gandhi’s assassination, and the flagging of Gandhian ideals) and a monograph written to describe the social, economic, political, and religious institutions of South Indian society, the Remembered Village was recognizable as monograph written in the British structural-functionalist style in which Srinivas was trained by AR Radcliffe Brown and EE Evans Pritchard at Oxford, and one that also broke its form. In acknowledging that his own social position as an upper-caste male in a rural village both limited and made possible the cultural knowledge he was able to describe, Srinivas anticipated some of the debates about self-reflexive analysis that were to dominate the field of Anglophone Anthropology from the late 1980s through the 1990s.
Travelling to India in 1985 as a young graduate student at Stanford, I went in search of MN Srinivas at the Institute of Social and Economic Analysis which he had helped found in 1972, then on the outskirts of Bangalore (and before its high tech boom of the 1990s). After spending nearly two hours in traffic in a three-wheeler, my father and I arrived tired and dusty at a nearly abandoned campus. Eerily empty concrete halls echoed our hesitant footsteps before we found a wary staff person who directed us to Srinivas’s office. This wing, too, was deserted. After his heyday of teaching Sociology in the fractious but vaunted Delhi School of Economics (or D-School as it is still affectionately called), I wasn’t sure Srinivas had yet found the post-retirement sinecure close to more bucolic Mysore where he was raised. Surely someone as eminent as he would not wind up in such a void, I mused.(5)We waited a bit outside his padlocked office, but I was not to meet Professor Srinivas on this visit to India.
I would, however, meet him at my old teacher Gerry Berreman’s office, some three years later. Sanskritization had, by the 1980s, come under attack by Marxist sociologists and critics of the modernization paradigm in which it had emerged. Village studies had fallen out of favor as a new generation sociologists struggled to come to grips with urban India. A group of graduate students gathered around Srinivas in the department lounge at Kroeber Hall asked him whether he had he reconsidered his theories in light of urbanization. Did he think that sanskritization was still salient for understanding city life? Srinivas seemed unhappy and annoyed with the questions. “Yes, of course” he replied somewhat testily, “Sanskritization is not the same as westernization, it still applies.” Though no one disputed the distinction, I remained dissatisfied with his answer. Turning the second millennium, a year after Srinivas died, yet another set of critiques, this time from feminist and Dalit (former untouchable) sociologists and intellectuals,(6)i would put his understanding of rural India and the theory of sanskritization to the test once again–proof enough that a classic never remains unread.
I continue to assign the Remembered Village to my undergraduate students of India.
Notes and Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Peter Stansky and Amanda Thomas for their feedback and assistance in locating sources.
- http://historicalsociety.stanford.edu/pdfST/ST35no1.pdf
- These are recounted by former Stanford University President Richard Lyman in an excerpt from his memoir, “At the Hands of the Radicals” https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=30505 although the dates of the attacks on the administrators’ residences have been disputed by another former Stanford University faculty member who spoke at the rally on April 24, 1970: “A Rebuttal to Lyman” https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=30056
- Unpublished memoirs of Alan Henderson, CASBS Business officer, p. 9
- See Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
- ISEC continues as a thriving institution, and a memorial dissertation prize is awarded in Srinivas’s honor. In 1988, he moved to the newly created National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore.
- See “India in South Africa: Counter Genealogies for a Subaltern Sociology?” in Kamala Visweswaran. Un/common Cultures. (Duke University Press, 2010)
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