Structural-functional perspective: M.N. Srinivas, S.C. Dube, McKim Marriott

1. The perspective

Structural-functionalism views society as a system of interrelated parts (structures such as caste, family, village, religion), each of which performs a function that helps maintain the whole. It came to India from British social anthropology: A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and E.E. Evans-Pritchard at Oxford, where Srinivas studied.

Its features in Indian sociology:

• Field-view over book-view. Knowledge of Indian society should come from intensive fieldwork (participant observation in a village), not from sacred texts.
• Village as a unit. The village studies of the 1950s were the main product.
• Focus on structure and integration. How caste, kinship and economic exchange fit together, and how change happens within the system.
• Criticism: it tends to stress harmony and equilibrium and to neglect conflict, exploitation and history (the Marxist objection).

2. M.N. Srinivas (1916–1999)

Srinivas studied under Ghurye at Bombay and under Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard at Oxford. He founded the sociology department at the M.S. University of Baroda and later the Delhi School of Economics department.

Main works.

• Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952): a structural-functional study of Coorg religion and ritual; first use of the concept later called Sanskritisation.
• India’s Villages (ed., 1955) and the paper on the social system of a Mysore village (1955), introducing the dominant caste.
• Caste in Modern India and Other Essays (1962).
• Social Change in Modern India (1966): Sanskritisation, Westernisation, secularisation.
• The Remembered Village (1976): his study of Rampura near Mysore, written from memory after his field notes were destroyed in a fire at Stanford in 1970.

His structural-functional contribution.

1. Field-view. He insisted that caste as lived in the village differs from the varna model of the texts. The book-view gives four varnas; the field-view shows hundreds of jatis whose ranking is disputed and mobile.
2. Caste as a system. In Rampura each caste performed functions for others through exchange of goods and services; caste, land and patron-client ties were bound together.
3. Dominant caste. A caste is dominant in a village when it is numerically strong, owns much of the land, has political power and does not rank too low ritually; Western education and urban jobs add to dominance. Examples: Okkaligas and Lingayats in Karnataka, Jats in north India.
4. Unity of the village. Against Marxist and Gandhian images of the village as a republic or a site of pure exploitation, he showed it to be a real social unit with vertical (caste) and horizontal (kin) ties.
5. Mobility within structure. Sanskritisation explains how a caste rises within the hierarchy without changing the hierarchy itself (positional, not structural, change).

3. S.C. Dube (1922–1996)

• Indian Village (1955): study of Shamirpet, a multi-caste village near Hyderabad. It covers the village’s setting, social structure, economy, ritual, family and change.
• India’s Changing Villages (1958): the impact of Community Development programmes; he found that benefits went mostly to the upper and dominant castes.
• Society in India (1990) and Indian Society (National Book Trust).

Contribution. Dube saw the village as a unit but also linked to the wider region and nation. He identified several bases of village stratification: caste, land and wealth, position in government service, age and personal qualities. He stressed that tradition and modernity coexist, and drew attention to the role of planning and development in change.

4. McKim Marriott

An American anthropologist (University of Chicago) who studied Kishan Garhi in western Uttar Pradesh. In Village India (ed., 1955) his paper “Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization” used Robert Redfield’s distinction between the great tradition (Sanskritic, textual, all-India) and the little tradition (local, oral, folk).

• Universalisation: elements of the little tradition move upward into the great tradition (a village goddess becomes identified with a Sanskritic deity).
• Parochialisation: elements of the great tradition move downward and are reshaped locally (a Sanskrit festival takes on local meanings and is celebrated in local form).

Later, with Ronald Inden, Marriott developed ethnosociology: analysing India through Indian categories (substance, transaction, the person as “dividual”), which links to Unit V.

How this is examined

The January 2026 80-mark paper set “Explain the structural functionalism of Dr. M.N. Srinivas” for 10 marks; February 2025 set the same as a 6-mark note. Open with a definition of the perspective and its origin in British anthropology, then give Srinivas’s works and the five points above, ending with the criticism. Dominant caste, also set as a 6-mark note (January 2026), is answered from point 3 of section 2, expanded with the six attributes.