M N Srinivas: Seeing like a sociologist
The author retraces the roots of M N Srinivas and his journey to becoming India's greatest social scientist
 "M N Srinivas: Seeing like a sociologist")
The citizens of ancient athens thought no one had any chance of being a great man who wasn't born in a great city. M N Srinivas's very name bears the impress of the (fleetingly) great city in which he was born: Mysore. Some time in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Srinivas's ancestors had travelled westward from Tamil country, a week's journey in an oxcart, into rural southern Mysore - hence Srinivas's first initial. There they, like countless other Brahmins, quietly violated the ancient laws of Manu by joining their tenants and servants in working the land. But literate and moderately well-off, they were quick to see the advantages of the city only a day's journey to the north, with its new colleges offering a modern, English-language education in the humanities and sciences. Srinivas's father, Narasimhachar - whose name became, in the standard way, his son's second initial, N - was one such emigrant. He left his natal village and moved to Mysore city, the capital of what the British called, with a weary condescension, a "princely state".
College Road, in Mysore, was a Brahmin neighbourhood, but even that was enough to quicken the young Srinivas's faculties of observation. The families who lived to both sides of Srinivas's were, like his, Iyengars, but these neighbours spoke Telugu rather than Tamil, and took their Vaishnavism to fanatical heights, insisting they would not step into a temple to Shiva even if they were dragged there by elephants. Srinivas's household, by contrast, was progressive enough to celebrate the annual Ganesha festival; even more eccentrically, his mother's relatives had violated Brahmin norms by studying abroad and, what was worse, marrying Bengalis.
The young Srinivas's real induction into anthropological diversity came from his illicit glimpses into Bandikeri, an area of narrow streets behind his house. The itinerant Kurubas - shepherds and weavers - were meat-eaters who worshipped the stern, puritanical deity Madeshwara, buried their dead, and had elaborate funeral rituals that looked nothing like the Brahminical rites Srinivas knew.
The reaction of the young Srinivas to the experience of human difference was visceral - "visibly and olfactorily different." But successive twists of fate took him to the academic study of these differences. A delicate boy, his adolescence was blighted by chronic malaria. His family could not see this dangerously underweight boy becoming a doctor or engineer; nor could Srinivas himself, who loathed mathematics. His father died in November 1934, when Srinivas was just 18. Decisions about his education were thus deferred to his eldest brother, M N Parthasarathy, a schoolteacher with an MA in English literature. A wilful bachelor and a rebel who rejected Brahmin orthodoxy, Parthasarathy put the choice of Srinivas's university course in the hands of a Marxist friend who, flipping through Mysore University's handbook, decided that a new honours programme in "social philosophy" would be just right.
This programme was the brainchild of a colourful character, A R Wadia. A debonair Parsi, resplendent on campus in his white trousers and silk jacket, Wadia thought the scrawny Brahmin boy under his tutelage had potential, and remained a lifelong mentor to Srinivas. The boy proved a brilliant student, but - like so many such - a poor examinee, so his second-class degree in the final examination turned out to be another stroke of luck. Ineligible for the school-teaching and civil-service jobs restricted to first-class graduates, Srinivas applied - again, at his brother's urging - to the MA programme in sociology at the University of Bombay. Once there, and with typical middle-class prudence, Srinivas attended lectures on law in the evenings. His years in Bombay brought him under the tutelage of yet another striking character: the pioneering sociologist Govind Sadashiv Ghurye.
Ghurye sent Srinivas for his doctoral fieldwork to Coorg, in what is now the state of Karnataka, in part to test a theory of his - founded on one of Rivers's wilder speculations - that the Coorgs' ancestor shrines might show the influence of the Egyptian pyramids. Srinivas's fieldwork in Coorg, interspersed with severe bouts of diarrhoea, was unpleasant and lonely, though he managed to collect a formidable amount of data about social structures and kinship.
A couple of years later, Srinivas received a much awaited letter from Oxford, offering him a place as a doctoral student, and an assurance from his ever generous elder brother of money for the passage to England. His relations with Ghurye had begun to sour: Srinivas felt like a magpie, constantly tasked by Ghurye with finding this or that bit of data but unable to do anything with what he collected. "My interest in ideas," he wrote, "had been starved." But at Oxford, he was to work with a giant of the discipline, AR Radcliffe-Brown, generally called "R-B".
He did not find Srinivas' description of his proposed research on what he called "culture patterns" among the Coorg, Toda and Chenchu communities at all promising, regarding the very idea that a culture had a "pattern" as unscientific nonsense. Instead, he suggested - wisely, as it turned out - that Srinivas revisit his material on religion in Coorg in the light of more sophisticated recent theories. He added, with the patronising air of the native speaker, that the Bombay thesis was written in very good English: where ever had he learnt it? A little at the school down the road from his home, said Srinivas, and the rest piecemeal as he went along.
A year later, R-B left Oxford, but he had read enough of Srinivas's work to commend him highly to the successor to his professorial chair, who would become Srinivas's most abiding intellectual influence, E E Evans-Pritchard - inevitably, "E-P." E-P was a recent convert to Catholicism, and much celebrated for his field study of witchcraft and oracles among the Azande people of Sudan. Srinivas took to his new supervisor straightaway, finding in him an unusual capacity for imagination, acceptance and empathy.
E-P was an unenthusiastic lecturer and a reluctant seminar leader, but he flowered in intimate, unstructured, non-hierarchical settings where a tankard of beer was an order away. Srinivas thrived there, with the freewheeling conversational style of the Mysore coffeehouse recreated in a cold climate, where talk about anthropology could lead without warning into matters both political and personal. It was at these pub gatherings that Srinivas came to feel at home in Oxford.
Srinivas, who thought himself simultaneously "a rationalist and an atheist" and a "Hindu and a Brahmin," found E-P's humane, sceptical conservatism agreeable, and its presence in his own writings would later win him radical detractors.
In August 1947, Srinivas was back in India, his second doctorate in hand. On the evening of the 14th, he was at Mysore's Subbarayana Kere, a park where nationalists used to gather, listening to the first vice president of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, address an assembled crowd. Over the next few months, he began looking for a suitable village to study. It had to be relatively small and secluded, to have rice fields and a number of caste communities. The village that eventually fit the bill was Rampura, and his 10 months there furnished him with material for a lifetime's analysis and study.
Srinivas arrived at Rampura in February 1948, with 26 pieces of luggage and a teenaged Brahmin cook in tow. He moved into the "Bullock House," one of five properties belonging to the village headman. The digestive nightmare of his Coorg fieldwork still fresh in his mind, he insisted on having all well-water boiled, and mixed with lemon to dull the brackish taste. This was put down to the eccentric fastidiousness of the Brahmin. The headman's eldest son directed him to the tree under which he was, as Srinivas delicately reports it, to "answer calls of nature." This was, he said, "the first of many occasions when I ran up against the total but implicit acceptance of the biological dimension of life which characterised rural culture."
Initially complacent about his intuitive understanding of his subjects, he came swiftly to see just "how far I [and my family] had travelled away from tradition." His early weeks in the village were full of social solecisms. The headman and his sons were appalled that he could joke about matters of religion, that he shaved after rather than before his bath, and about his bathing habits the less said the better. Baffled by his insistence on privacy during this obviously public ritual, they asked him why he couldn't bathe in the open, as normal men did? Was he, they asked, in the habit of bathing in the nude? Sheepishly, Srinivas "confessed to the depravity but in order to remove inconvenience... I decided on having a booth of woven, split bamboo erected in the courtyard. The idea was at once pronounced prodigal though typical of me. I had my way, though, and one of the attractions of the idea was that it brought me into contact with the Medas (Basketry-makers) in Rampura."
This is an extract reprinted with permission from the March 2016 issue of The Caravan ©Delhi Press www.caravanmagazine.in
College Road, in Mysore, was a Brahmin neighbourhood, but even that was enough to quicken the young Srinivas's faculties of observation. The families who lived to both sides of Srinivas's were, like his, Iyengars, but these neighbours spoke Telugu rather than Tamil, and took their Vaishnavism to fanatical heights, insisting they would not step into a temple to Shiva even if they were dragged there by elephants. Srinivas's household, by contrast, was progressive enough to celebrate the annual Ganesha festival; even more eccentrically, his mother's relatives had violated Brahmin norms by studying abroad and, what was worse, marrying Bengalis.
The young Srinivas's real induction into anthropological diversity came from his illicit glimpses into Bandikeri, an area of narrow streets behind his house. The itinerant Kurubas - shepherds and weavers - were meat-eaters who worshipped the stern, puritanical deity Madeshwara, buried their dead, and had elaborate funeral rituals that looked nothing like the Brahminical rites Srinivas knew.
The reaction of the young Srinivas to the experience of human difference was visceral - "visibly and olfactorily different." But successive twists of fate took him to the academic study of these differences. A delicate boy, his adolescence was blighted by chronic malaria. His family could not see this dangerously underweight boy becoming a doctor or engineer; nor could Srinivas himself, who loathed mathematics. His father died in November 1934, when Srinivas was just 18. Decisions about his education were thus deferred to his eldest brother, M N Parthasarathy, a schoolteacher with an MA in English literature. A wilful bachelor and a rebel who rejected Brahmin orthodoxy, Parthasarathy put the choice of Srinivas's university course in the hands of a Marxist friend who, flipping through Mysore University's handbook, decided that a new honours programme in "social philosophy" would be just right.
This programme was the brainchild of a colourful character, A R Wadia. A debonair Parsi, resplendent on campus in his white trousers and silk jacket, Wadia thought the scrawny Brahmin boy under his tutelage had potential, and remained a lifelong mentor to Srinivas. The boy proved a brilliant student, but - like so many such - a poor examinee, so his second-class degree in the final examination turned out to be another stroke of luck. Ineligible for the school-teaching and civil-service jobs restricted to first-class graduates, Srinivas applied - again, at his brother's urging - to the MA programme in sociology at the University of Bombay. Once there, and with typical middle-class prudence, Srinivas attended lectures on law in the evenings. His years in Bombay brought him under the tutelage of yet another striking character: the pioneering sociologist Govind Sadashiv Ghurye.
Ghurye sent Srinivas for his doctoral fieldwork to Coorg, in what is now the state of Karnataka, in part to test a theory of his - founded on one of Rivers's wilder speculations - that the Coorgs' ancestor shrines might show the influence of the Egyptian pyramids. Srinivas's fieldwork in Coorg, interspersed with severe bouts of diarrhoea, was unpleasant and lonely, though he managed to collect a formidable amount of data about social structures and kinship.
A couple of years later, Srinivas received a much awaited letter from Oxford, offering him a place as a doctoral student, and an assurance from his ever generous elder brother of money for the passage to England. His relations with Ghurye had begun to sour: Srinivas felt like a magpie, constantly tasked by Ghurye with finding this or that bit of data but unable to do anything with what he collected. "My interest in ideas," he wrote, "had been starved." But at Oxford, he was to work with a giant of the discipline, AR Radcliffe-Brown, generally called "R-B".
He did not find Srinivas' description of his proposed research on what he called "culture patterns" among the Coorg, Toda and Chenchu communities at all promising, regarding the very idea that a culture had a "pattern" as unscientific nonsense. Instead, he suggested - wisely, as it turned out - that Srinivas revisit his material on religion in Coorg in the light of more sophisticated recent theories. He added, with the patronising air of the native speaker, that the Bombay thesis was written in very good English: where ever had he learnt it? A little at the school down the road from his home, said Srinivas, and the rest piecemeal as he went along.
A year later, R-B left Oxford, but he had read enough of Srinivas's work to commend him highly to the successor to his professorial chair, who would become Srinivas's most abiding intellectual influence, E E Evans-Pritchard - inevitably, "E-P." E-P was a recent convert to Catholicism, and much celebrated for his field study of witchcraft and oracles among the Azande people of Sudan. Srinivas took to his new supervisor straightaway, finding in him an unusual capacity for imagination, acceptance and empathy.
E-P was an unenthusiastic lecturer and a reluctant seminar leader, but he flowered in intimate, unstructured, non-hierarchical settings where a tankard of beer was an order away. Srinivas thrived there, with the freewheeling conversational style of the Mysore coffeehouse recreated in a cold climate, where talk about anthropology could lead without warning into matters both political and personal. It was at these pub gatherings that Srinivas came to feel at home in Oxford.
Srinivas, who thought himself simultaneously "a rationalist and an atheist" and a "Hindu and a Brahmin," found E-P's humane, sceptical conservatism agreeable, and its presence in his own writings would later win him radical detractors.
In August 1947, Srinivas was back in India, his second doctorate in hand. On the evening of the 14th, he was at Mysore's Subbarayana Kere, a park where nationalists used to gather, listening to the first vice president of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, address an assembled crowd. Over the next few months, he began looking for a suitable village to study. It had to be relatively small and secluded, to have rice fields and a number of caste communities. The village that eventually fit the bill was Rampura, and his 10 months there furnished him with material for a lifetime's analysis and study.
Srinivas arrived at Rampura in February 1948, with 26 pieces of luggage and a teenaged Brahmin cook in tow. He moved into the "Bullock House," one of five properties belonging to the village headman. The digestive nightmare of his Coorg fieldwork still fresh in his mind, he insisted on having all well-water boiled, and mixed with lemon to dull the brackish taste. This was put down to the eccentric fastidiousness of the Brahmin. The headman's eldest son directed him to the tree under which he was, as Srinivas delicately reports it, to "answer calls of nature." This was, he said, "the first of many occasions when I ran up against the total but implicit acceptance of the biological dimension of life which characterised rural culture."
Initially complacent about his intuitive understanding of his subjects, he came swiftly to see just "how far I [and my family] had travelled away from tradition." His early weeks in the village were full of social solecisms. The headman and his sons were appalled that he could joke about matters of religion, that he shaved after rather than before his bath, and about his bathing habits the less said the better. Baffled by his insistence on privacy during this obviously public ritual, they asked him why he couldn't bathe in the open, as normal men did? Was he, they asked, in the habit of bathing in the nude? Sheepishly, Srinivas "confessed to the depravity but in order to remove inconvenience... I decided on having a booth of woven, split bamboo erected in the courtyard. The idea was at once pronounced prodigal though typical of me. I had my way, though, and one of the attractions of the idea was that it brought me into contact with the Medas (Basketry-makers) in Rampura."
This is an extract reprinted with permission from the March 2016 issue of The Caravan ©Delhi Press www.caravanmagazine.in