Contributions to Indian Sociology

http://cis.sagepub.com M.N. Srinivas on sociology and social change in India: Extracts from an interview
Satish Deshpande Contributions to Indian Sociology 2000; 34; 105 DOI: 10.1177/006996670003400105 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cis.sagepub.com

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M.N. Srinivas

sociology and social change in India: Extracts

on

from

an

interview

Satish

Deshpande

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

University of Delhi awarded him an honorary doctorate as part of its 75th anniversary celebrations. On that occasion, we had discussed with him our plans for a workshop on the intellectual and institutional history of sociology and social anthropology in India being organised by the
Sociology Unit of the Institute of Economic Growth. Professor Srinivas enthusiastic about the workshop and offered many suggestions. We were hoping that he would deliver the inaugural address at our workshop, and we also wanted to involve him in a larger effort at compiling an archive of interviews with senior scholars that would help document disciplinary history. It was in this context that I requested him for an
was

interview when on a visit to Bangalore later the same month. Professor Srinivas agreed readily, and we met in his office at the National Institute of Advanced 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 indicate the broad areas of disciplinary history that we would have liked him to elaborate on in future conversations. Unfortunately, due to delays in funding, the planned workshop could not be finalised for a long time. We had just received confi..nation of funding and were about to write to Professor Srinivas when we heard that he had passed away after a brief illness.

Satish

Deshpande

is at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.

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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 interest, 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 are indicated by square brackets, and the questions are in italics.]
to elaborate on something which you had briefly menthat in the tioned, generation before you, scholars who went abroad to as G.S. study (such Ghurye or K.P. Chattopadhyay) took it for granted that they would return to India after their studies. Was it any different in

Q: I wanted you

your generation?

MNS: In my 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 another Ahmad, who did Arabic studies at Oxford. He came back to Aligarh and later on he went to the Indian Institute of Advanced 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 into management and so on, Madhubhai Patel, he returned. 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 somewhat 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 important point about which I was insensitive... or non-sensitive. You know, for these people the excitement of an independent India was the magnet. I left Oxford in July 1947 and I was here in August. I remember on August 15th in Subbarayan Kere listening to the speeches of Radhakrishnan and others... there was a large crowd and the excitement of Independence was there. I think you know, unknown to ourselves we were all deeply nationalistic....Partly because the British were there, you see, 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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we might be very critical, but we were all admirers.... We were also admirers of Nehru and Rajaji and the whole batch of leaders. They were... by and large they were not like the leaders today, they were very different people. And all of us wanted to return. I dont think I had any programme of doing wonders here, but I felt I had to get back.... I applied for a job in the Anthropological Survey of India. I applied when I was in England and Evans-Pritchard was temporarily absent, so Meyer Fortes wrote a long recommendation for me. He also wrote to Krishna Menon for funds for research. Krishna Menon never even answered the letter...[laughs]. Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard were in the London School of Economics around the time that Krishna Menon was there, you see, but Krishna Menon was a complete politico, he didnt care for academics, you see, and he didnt even answer Fortess letter. But I applied for a job at the ASI and I came back in the beginning of August and I was here for Independence Day and in November I was invited for a interview, and I went. The head of the Anthropological 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 think I was... I probably did not show the signs of deference which a person should show to a teacher or to any person who is interviewing you. And I got the impression from my interview that my answers were not liked by him because I kept contradicting him and everything he said and he was surprised and annoyed at my replies.... And then I came back to Bangalore via Bombay, and at my Bombay address my brother had forwarded a letter from Evans-Pritchard saying, will you please let me know whether you will accept a lectureship at Oxford, and I need a letter 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 or April or maybe February, I got a letter signed by Mountbatten. I was offered a job as a Class I officer starting at 300 rupees as an officer in the Anthropological Survey. And I wrote back saying, look I have just accepted an offer from Oxford, and two years hence I can join you. Guha accused me of accepting a job while I was being interviewed for another...[laughs]. Can you imagine the logic? I think according to him I should have waited till I had heard from the Anthropological Survey before I accepted Oxford. I mean 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

Gandhi,

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village of your choice. And that changed entirely my outlook on anthropology, that ten months of 1948 living in Rampura.... Anyway, Im glad I didnt get into 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 forward is: If you 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 bureaucracy, 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 that if 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 economics 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 might miss 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 sunlight in 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, it was at the peak of its creativity....

Q: Theres been a lot of discussion, youve also talked about it even as early as Social change in modern India, about how your identity as an Indian 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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advantage-the prejudices the insider acquires while living in a society prevents him from being objective, you see. (You know Edmund Leach started his professional life in China.... He came from a rich family and was a mathematics or engineering graduate from Cambridge, and then he went to China. It was his Chinese experience that drew him into 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 like that in the 1930s, with an introduction by Malinowski. Leach attacks the other three studies, saying they are really not studies of ones own society. And then he says that the fourth study by Fei Hsiao-Tung is a marvel: how in eight weeks he was able to get data which an outsider could not have got, and it was a pioneering study.... This contradicts the thesis he starts with. Ive pointed this out, in Insider vs. outsider....
at an

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 back to study his own society, like you did?
was

going

No. I dont think... no, they didnt go back. In fact, Jit Uberoi is a very interesting case in point. He got a grant to study Afghanistan, an Afghan village, 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 to Afghanistan? Maybe it was not a very wise 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 study Afghanistan, 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 Frankenberg wrote about Welsh villages. But Ronnie Frankenberg was not from Wales you see... this is the interesting part-he took advantage of the diversity within England. This is where I say in India the diversity is so 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... even Evans-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 had spent some time in East Africa 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, in the 1950s and 60s itself. We seem to have more complex accounts of the process of social change compared to the much more schematic, much cruder models that were in use at around the same time for 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 my environment. And so instead of studying cross-cousin marriage among the Gonds in central India or grandfather-granddaughter marriage which 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 happening to caste, you see, caste in modern India. And also, that was a period when crucial changes were occurring in India. It marked the beginning of Independence, the beginning of very serious social change and if we didnt catch the villages then... villages and tribes ... then we would have missed a historic opportunity. And so we concentrated and so village studies came in. And at that time there was Freddie Bayly studying Orissa, Kim Marriott was in UP studying a village near Aligarh, and then Kathleen Gough was studying Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and later, in the mid-fifties, Scarlett Epstein was studying two villages in Karnataka, and then Dubey was studying that Shamirpet... and all this got published [Srinivas 1955]. And that book exerted 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, who had reduced villagers to a series of statistics using production figures, [to talk about] their poverty and their inefficiency.... Completely an outsiders 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 speakwhen the theme of change suddenly seems to come up. Did this have something to do with Independence and the atmosphere at that time... ?
when I was observing the Coorgs I could see the wanted me to investigate their ancestral tombs. That changes. Ghurye was 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 big houses and entertaining of Europeans... that was there, and I could see it 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 there and some of it got incorporated.... So you see, unless you were very deficient, you could see the changes in the lifestyles of the Coorgs. And also 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 the Army was transforming Coorg, you see. So you could not be insensitive to changes.

No, actually,

even

Q:

Social anthropology as a discipline, particularly at the time that you trained in it, was not primarily oriented towards change. On the one hand that was your training, and on the other hand here was a society which, as you just described, was clearly changing. Did you feel any tension between your training and what you saw?
were

This is a very interesting point. One of the side-effects of this is Ive been criticised: Srinivas is a structural functionalist, so he is not sensitive to change, as though it were a logical thing. I have been accused by several people. But to me, you know, when the field takes you over, your theoretical 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 functionalism, or you may go out with Marxism.... In fact once Panini mentioned 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 up by Chicago. At that time Milton Singer and Robert Redfield were interested in the study of civilisations. Miltons training was in psychology and philosophy-his Ph.D. thesis was on shame and guilt-and the two came together, and the study of civilisations was very attractive to them. And they suddenly discovered in the Coorg book that society existed in a civilisation and must be studied, and they picked on sanskritisation and westemisation. 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 modem India [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 theorist... you know Andr6 [B6teille] has said this, and he is quite 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 modem India (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 programmes and so on, and another school of thought which felt some distance 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 had not touched them, you see. And the other thing is that I always felt that I shouldnt get too close to the government. I was offered umpteen jobs at various 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 an observer and I shouldnt get involved in that. The contrast is, I dont know if you will agree, I feel A.R. Desai was the other side. Though he was a Marxist he talked about planning-even if he was anti-government, and he 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 probably had a very... kind of illiterate scepticism about planning. And also the 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

of Ensminger?

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 manhattan was a drink, you see!-and then I had dinner with him. And he talked about villages and community projects.... Ensminger was a wellintentioned man. He was well-intentioned, but he wielded a lot of power and that power went to his head. I remember his telling somebody in 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 encouraged the Community Development Project thanks to Ensminger.... In fact I once asked Ensminger if he would write about his influence in the Government of India. He half agreed, and then I dont think he got clearance from the Ford Foundation.... But I think, you know, [that] nothing is more useless than American rural sociology for India. You can get benefit from anthropology, and sociology, not rural sociology. Because its so different, you see, our environment....

Q: Did you have any views on the involvement of the foundations Ford, Rockefeller and so on, in financing this kind of research?
No, Rockefeller didnt come into the picture much, it was Ford Foundation you know. I tell you one thing that increasingly I find all these foundations 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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to develop infrastructure, and I dont see why they should doing this. Theres a bigger problem here which I am really getting frightened of.... All our institutions in the social sciences are being driven by projects 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 with at 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 close friends... you know I cant forget my indebtedness to Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard and my friends at Oxford ... and Milton [Singer] was a 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 the determination of agendas of third world countries by foreign foundations is something which I dont accept. I think it is more a gut-level thing. I think we should determine our agendas, and it is the government which should be concerned about supplying drinking water and developing 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 something we 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 cant deliver the goods. And also, [to determine] what kind of development you are going to have, there I think social sciences should be involved and also a certain amount of social philosophy. Some kind of open debate should be there about the kind of means, the kind of goals. In this sense, you know, the funding of social science institutions is 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 Indian industry is not enlightened enough. I think we need a strong social sci-

government,

be

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 are aware of politics because of voting, but they have not heard of sociology or social anthropology....

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When you first came to Delhi in 1959, were you ever consulted by the government or the Planning Commission, as a representative of the discipline, like the economists were? Were they interested

Q:

Ashok Mehta wanted me to be member of the Planning Commissionhe 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 accepted my 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 choices available to you that is something.... Now I think in the next few years there is going to be increasing violence 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 and Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, everywhere...this will become more widespread. The dalits are getting assertive and the dominant castes resent it. Wherever you go this problem will become worse. And then this whole question of reservation. Now I think reservation is 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 children in education and employment; and then developing agriculture, horticulture, even floriculture so that people get jobs in villages and small towns. Then primary education is left to... bureaucrats and so on... I think it 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 Shankar Aiyar once and mentioned this to him, and he said you are dead right on this; we have vote-banks we can cater to and so we can ignore this problem of poverty. You know in 1963 (in the Balaji vs. the State of Mysore case) the Supreme Court judgement by Justice Gajendragadkar said that poverty is the basis for backwardness. And in 1992, the Supreme Court (in the Mandal judgement) said that social backwardness is the basis of poverty; they said we are not attacking poverty, we are attacking social backwardness. A very retrograde judgement. 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 the Census is that]... if caste is there in the Census, inter-caste violence will increase. Castes have come together to fight for political power. Now with backwardness being the target, they will hive off, saying we are more backward. You see, the Vokkaligas now include the Vokkaligas, the Bunts, the Reddys of Bangalore, Hallikaras in Shimoga, and so on. The moment you have a new Census, the Hallikaras and others will say: The Bunts are different, we are more backward than them. Bunts are very rich fellows you see, Bunts are now Shettys, they run banks and dowry among middle-class Bunts is one crore fifty lakhs, 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 was I.P. Desais argument: if they are in traditional occupations, if they are potters, if they are weavers, if they are ghanis, then give them [reservations]. But it was rejected. I have seen village Brahmins as superstitious as the village peasants.... I think poverty should be targeted now. I am frightened of the violence. In Tamil Nadu it is already happening.... Law and order will become a big problem. And then you cant collect correct statistics because they will be fighting about who is more backward. This is my argument. I think it is high time we wiped out illiteracy, we gave universal primary education.... From the economics side Amartya Sen is saying the same thing. Of course, he doesnt know about caste ... [laughs] but that is a different thing. I am happy that the middle classes are becoming important because the middle classes are the melting pot now. It is among the middle classes that inter-caste marriages, inter-regional marriages, and interreligious marriages are occurring. I think they point to the future. There is 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 if you look at the history of emulation in this country, the middle classes will be emulated. In India, given the strong rural-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 consumerism.... People who have been long deprived of gadgets are hungering 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 identities are also decreasing, you know, Bengalis marrying South Indians, South
z

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Indians marrying Punjabis.... There is a great deal of integration going on in this country.... You know in 1950, the idea that a Kannada-speaking landowner could become the Prime Minister of India was unthinkable, and that has happened. Thats why I am optimistic about India, you know. We have set 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.
—,

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