MYSORE NARASIMHACHAR SRINIVAS

Transcription

1 MYSORE NARASIMHACHAR SRINIVAS 16 November November 1999 JOAN EGGAN PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 145, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2001

2 mysore narasimhachar srinivas FROM THE 1950s up to his death, M. N. Srinivas was India s leading social anthropologist, well known for his understanding of the caste system and of contemporary social and cultural change in India. Srinivas held that sociology and social anthropology should be a single discipline in India for a number of reasons. When he began teaching in 1951, anthropology departments were in the science faculty of Indian universities, while sociology was in social sciences. Anthropology did not include social anthropology or recognize the new line that he and other social anthropologists followed, the structuralfunctional method. Secondly, anthropologists who had studied tribals before Indian independence in 1947 were suspected of being servants of colonial power, were viewed as concerned with primitives, and were seen as advocates for the preservation of tribals by isolating them as unchanging museum exhibits. Srinivas agreed with many critics that the line between tribals and peasants in India was not sharp; there was rather a continuum between the cultures of tribals and the cultures of castes. He wrote, It would be absurd to label those who are studying tribals as anthropologists, and those who are studying rural and urban folk, sociologists (introduction to The Fieldworker and the Field, p. 1). In the U.S., MNS was known as an anthropologist, but he held degrees in both sociology and social anthropology, and he founded two departments of sociology and co-founded an institute of social and economic change. MNS would be the first to say that a scholar s contributions should not be judged by his writings in his case, at least four major books, three edited volumes, two co-edited ones, and more than eighty papers. Despite this substantial output, always clear and engagingly written, he explained more than once that his writing and research were curtailed by his having to build sociology departments from scratch. Along the way, he was a generous teacher who trained a host of Ph.D. s. Srinivas had plum fellowships from time to time, such as a Simon from the University of Manchester in , a Rockefeller at the University of California-Berkeley in , and two stints at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in and Concerning the latter: Srinivas was at Stanford during the Vietnam War. In a student protest on 24 April 1970, his office was burned and all three copies of his processed notes were left in ashes. Though deeply disturbed by his mother s death on 19 April, his response to the encouraging words of fellow anthropologist Sol Tax was to begin to put on paper his memories of the village Rampura. Between May and November 1970, he dictated a rough draft. As [374]

3 biographical memoirs 375 a national fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research from September 1971 to July 1974, he completed The Remembered Village (1976), his most famous book. Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas was born in 1916 into a large Iyengar Brahman family that lived in the Brahman section of Mysore City, in the south Indian princely state of Mysore. An absentee landlord, his father also worked for the Mysore Power and Light Department. The eldest son, Parthasarathy (or Pachu ), an M.A. in English literature, and a teacher of English, guided his younger brother, Chamu (MN s pet name), toward modern history, logic, and mathematics in high school, and Pachu s friend, Acharya, suggested Chamu pursue an honors bachelor s degree in social philosophy. While still an undergraduate, Chamu, an ardent cricketeer, became a writer in English of stories on local cricket matches, published on the front pages of both English and Kannada newspapers. Chamu graduated from Mysore University in He completed a law degree and then a Ph.D. in sociology at Bombay University in Through the influence of his sociology professor, G. S. Ghurye, his M.A. thesis, Marriage and Family in Mysore was published as a book in His 888-page doctoral dissertation was on the martial caste of the Coorgs, who lived in their own territory southwest of Mysore. In 1945, he went to Oxford to study social anthropology first with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who had him reanalyze his Coorg material from a functionalist perspective with an emphasis on religion, and then with Radcliffe-Brown s successor, E. E. Evans-Pritchard. He took a D.Phil. degree in In 1948, through the efforts of Evans-Pritchard, Srinivas was appointed lecturer in Indian Sociology at Oxford. During the first year of his Oxford lectureship, Srinivas lived in Rampura village, twenty-two miles from Mysore City, and three miles from his own ancestral village, where he gathered ethnographic data that became the bases for articles, including his famous one on the dominant caste of Rampura, as well as for Remembered Village. His concept of dominant caste emerged from his field experience, he said: he was deeply impressed with the power and influence of the Okkaligas, the caste with the most land in Rampura. Srinivas was one of the first in the postwar generation to do a village study in India. Economists, missionaries, and journalists had done them earlier (with a few exceptions, anthropologists, as noted, had studied tribals). After his fieldwork, Srinivas wrote The Social Structure of a Mysore Village (1951), and he edited a volume of new village studies, including his own (India s Village, 1955).

4 376 mysore narasimhachar srinivas In 1951, with some ambivalence and regret, Dr. Srinivas resigned his lectureship at Oxford and returned to become professor of sociology at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and to found a department of sociology there. Having been eminently successful at Baroda, MNS was invited to repeat his department-making activities at the Delhi School of Economics, part of Delhi University; he accepted the new chair of sociology at Delhi in After a dozen years at Delhi, his new department was regarded as the best in India. He then accepted the invitation to help establish the new Institute of Social and Economic Change in Bangalore; he joined in 1972 and retired in He then joined the National Institute for Advanced Studies in Bangalore as the J.R.D. Tata Visiting Professor. Srinivas was always a strong advocate of participant-observation for considerable periods of time as the approach to data-gathering that an anthropologist should take. (For example, he lived in Rampura for nine or ten months in , and again for two or three months in 1952.) He stressed that an essential part of participant-observation was empathy, the ethnographer s capacity to see things from his informants points of view. In one of his last essays, he wrote, Ideally, the anthropologist should be able to empathize with the Brahmin and the Untouchable, with the landowner and the landless labourer, and with the moneylender and his debtors. The anthropologist has to collect information about persons in each of these categories, their role in the total system and the world-view that goes with each position ( Studying One s Own Culture: Some Thoughts, in On Living in a Revolution, hereafter LR [1992], 146). In taking the caste system of India as a subject of study throughout his career, Srinivas s emphasis was on its flexibility and how it was ever-changing. He saw social mobility in the caste system as facilitated, first, by the chronic political disorder in pre-british times when sets of warriors could lay claim to high-ranking Kshatriya (warrior) status. Second, the vagueness of ranking in the middle ranges of local caste hierarchies fostered jockeying among castes for higher relative rank. The processes for gaining higher rank were three. First was Sanskritization, Srinivas s term for the efforts on the part of lower castes to emulate the lifestyle of high castes by giving up meat-eating and liquor-drinking, by adopting Sanskrit ritual and engaging Brahman priests, and by giving up defiling forms of work. Second was Westernization by means of English-medium education and taking up of modern jobs in the professions, and in government and business. Third was secularization, the removal of many aspects of Hindu life

5 biographical memoirs 377 bathing, cooking, eating, work from the purview of religion. His awareness of these processes, described in Social Change in Modern India (1966), came through his own formal and informal fieldwork. Colleagues found that his concepts, derived from his local knowledge, were valid for many other villages and contexts; they became standard tools in social analysis. More recently, Srinivas wrote on the effects of protective discrimination, the various government programs reserving places in government employment, in legislatures, and in universities and graduate schools for Scheduled ( untouchable ) Castes and then in the 1990s for Backward (low non- untouchable ) Castes, as well as on the effects on caste relations of population increase, urban migration, and unemployment and under-employment. Memorable to me is his lecture The Caste System and Its Future, which I heard him give at Delhi University on 30 March In it he likened current inter-caste contentions, some of them violent, to the French Revolution. (This lecture appears in LR.) The latter book and Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar (1996) record this ongoing Indian social-economic-politicalreligious revolution. Srinivas s essay The Dual Cultures of Independent India (1977; reprinted in LR) is an apt analysis of the present social divisions in India: urban, rural, with the dominant castes, though rural, oriented toward the urban, with the dominated castes left behind. Srinivas deplored the gulf between the urban middle and upper classes, on the one hand, and the vast majority of India s population, which lives in the countryside, on the other. He even advocated that officials and other social scientists (economists and others) become participantobservers and learn by first-hand experience what rural people and rural conditions were like. Dual Cultures is an essay that should be read by everyone concerned with India s future. That Srinivas was attuned to what was happening of importance in India as a whole is shown in his essay Nation-building in Independent India (1976, in LR ). From this wide-ranging assessment of independent India s accomplishments, here is one passage: The contents of primary school textbooks, the education of primary school teachers, and the use of audio-visual media in education, all assume an enlarged significance in the context of the demands of national integration. Rational and egalitarian attitudes towards women, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, speakers of languages other than one s own, members of other religions, darkskinned people, etc., can only be instilled in the home and in the first few years at school. (LR, 56)

6 378 mysore narasimhachar srinivas Going beyond his role as a university professor and administrator, M. N. Srinivas was a nationally recognized intellectual whose views the educated public wanted and needed to know, as his was a voice of sanity advocating sensible action. Elected 1974 Pauline Kolenda Emerita Professor of Anthropology University of Houston Visiting Scholar in Anthropology, U.C.-Berkeley