Indian Thinkers: Gandhi, Ambedkar, Radhakamal Mukerjee, Ghurye, Srinivas and Irawati Karve
2. Radhakamal Mukerjee's social ecology and G.S. Ghurye's Indology
Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968) led the Lucknow school with D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar. Trained as an economist (The Foundations of Indian Economics, 1916), he refused the boundaries between economics, sociology, ecology and ethics. In Regional Sociology (1926) and Social Ecology (1942) he treated the region as the unit in which soil, water, plants, animals and human communities form an interdependent balance, so that social institutions must be understood as adaptations within an ecological whole — a pioneering move towards what Unit 7 calls social and cultural ecology. His later work, The Social Structure of Values (1949) and The Dimensions of Values (1964), placed values at the centre of social science, arguing that institutions embody a hierarchy of values rising from the biological to the spiritual, and that social science cannot be value-free.
G.S. Ghurye (1893–1983), trained at Cambridge under W.H.R. Rivers, headed the Department of Sociology at Bombay from 1924 to 1959, founded the Indian Sociological Society (1951) and its journal Sociological Bulletin (1952), and supervised a generation that included Srinivas, Karve, A.R. Desai and I.P. Desai. His method was Indological: he read caste, religion and culture through classical texts as well as ethnography. In Caste and Race in India (1932) he gave the most-cited list of the features of caste. In The Aborigines — 'So-called' — and their Future (1943), later The Scheduled Tribes, he argued that tribes were 'backward Hindus' already partly absorbed into Hindu society, a position that set him against Verrier Elwin's call to protect tribal isolation. Indian Sadhus (1953) studied asceticism as an institution that united a diverse civilisation.
- Segmental division of society — each caste a small social world with its own council and rules.
- Hierarchy — castes ranked one above another, the Brahmin at the top.
- Restrictions on feeding and social intercourse — rules about who may accept food and water from whom.
- Civil and religious disabilities and privileges of different sections — segregation in residence, access to wells and temples.
- Lack of unrestricted choice of occupation — hereditary callings.
- Restrictions on marriage — endogamy, with hypergamy in some regions.
3. M.N. Srinivas: Sanskritisation, dominant caste and the field view
Srinivas (1916–1999), Ghurye's student at Bombay and then Radcliffe-Brown's and Evans-Pritchard's at Oxford, brought structural-functional fieldwork to India and argued for the field view of Indian society against the book view drawn from texts. In Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952) he introduced Sanskritisation (at first called Brahminisation): the process by which a low caste, tribe or other group changes its customs, ritual, ideology and way of life in the direction of a high, frequently twice-born, caste, and claims a higher position in the hierarchy. It produces positional change within the system, not structural change of the system itself, and is often preceded by a gain in economic or political power. Its models need not be Brahmin: Kshatriya, Vaishya and locally dominant castes serve as reference too.
| Concept | What Srinivas meant |
|---|---|
| Dominant caste | A caste that is locally dominant through numerical strength, economic power (above all land), political power, a not-too-low ritual rank, and later Western education and jobs — set out in his Rampura studies (1955; 1959). |
| Westernisation | Changes in Indian society and culture resulting from over 150 years of British rule — in technology, institutions, ideology and values (Social Change in Modern India, 1966). |
| Vote bank | A term he coined in 1955 for a bloc of voters whose support a leader can deliver. |
| Vested interest in backwardness | His observation that once backwardness brought benefits, castes began competing to be classified as backward — the reverse of Sanskritisation's upward claim. |
| The Remembered Village (1976) | His ethnography of Rampura, written largely from memory after his field notes were destroyed in a fire at Stanford in 1970. |
4. Irawati Karve's kinship zones, and six views of caste compared
Irawati Karve (1905–1970), a student of Ghurye who took her doctorate in Berlin and worked at Deccan College, Pune, wrote Kinship Organisation in India (1953), which combined texts, kinship terminology and field data to divide India into four kinship zones matching its language families. In Hindu Society: An Interpretation (1961) she treated caste as an extended kin group and argued that castes arose from originally separate groups rather than by fission of the four varnas. Her Yuganta (1967), a humanist reading of the Mahabharata's characters, won the Sahitya Akademi award.
| Zone (Karve) | Distinctive marriage rules |
|---|---|
| Northern (Indo-Aryan languages) | Wide prohibited degrees, no cross-cousin marriage, village and often clan exogamy; the bride comes from afar and marriage tends to be hypergamous. |
| Central (Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha) | A mixture of northern and southern features; some castes allow cross-cousin marriage. |
| Southern (Dravidian languages) | Cross-cousin marriage and marriage with the elder sister's daughter preferred; marriage within a close circle of kin; matrilineal groups in Kerala. |
| Eastern (Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman speaking groups) | Tribal kinship systems with their own forms, including matrilineal Khasi and Garo organisation. |
| Thinker | What caste essentially is |
|---|---|
| Gandhi | A varna ideal of hereditary duties that became corrupted by untouchability and hierarchy |
| Ambedkar | Endogamy superimposed on exogamy; a graded division of labourers sanctioned by religion |
| Ghurye | A six-feature institution traced through texts and ethnography |
| Srinivas | A local system in which groups move through Sanskritisation and dominance |
| Karve | An extended kin group, varying by kinship zone |
| Radhakamal Mukerjee | One institution within an ecological and value hierarchy of the region |
Key takeaways
- Gandhi's Hind Swaraj rejects industrial civilisation for moral swaraj, swadeshi, sarvodaya, trusteeship and village self-rule; Ambedkar saw the village as a sink of localism.
- Ambedkar's Castes in India defines caste as endogamy superimposed on exogamy, maintained by sati, enforced widowhood and girl-marriage; Annihilation of Caste calls it a division of labourers under graded inequality.
- Radhakamal Mukerjee's Lucknow school developed regional sociology, social ecology and a theory of values; Ghurye's Indology gave six features of caste and called tribes backward Hindus.
- Srinivas's field view produced Sanskritisation, dominant caste, Westernisation and vote bank; Sanskritisation is positional, not structural, change.
- Karve's Kinship Organisation in India maps four zones — northern, central, southern and eastern — and treats caste as an extended kin group.
Practice questions (10)
Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.
According to Ambedkar's Castes in India (1916), the essence of caste lies in:
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Answer: D — The superimposition of endogamy on exogamy
Ambedkar argued that endogamy is the only characteristic peculiar to caste, and that caste results when endogamy is superimposed on exogamous clans. The pure-impure opposition is Louis Dumont's thesis in Homo Hierarchicus.Which book by M.N. Srinivas first introduced the concept of Sanskritisation?
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Answer: C — Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India
Sanskritisation appears in the Coorg monograph of 1952 (initially as 'Brahminisation'). Social Change in Modern India (1966) develops it alongside Westernisation; Caste and Race in India is Ghurye's.Which of the following are attributes of a dominant caste as defined by Srinivas? Select all that apply.
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Answer: A — Political power; C — Ownership of a substantial share of the land; D — Numerical strength in the locality
Srinivas stressed numbers, land and political power; ritual rank need only be not too low. The whole point of the concept is that a caste can dominate a village without being ritually highest — the Okkaligas of Rampura were peasants, not Brahmins.Irawati Karve's Kinship Organisation in India divides the country into how many kinship zones?
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Answer: D — Four
Karve described northern, central, southern and eastern zones, each correlated with a language family and with distinctive marriage rules such as the presence or absence of cross-cousin marriage.Assertion (A): Sanskritisation leads to positional change for a caste but not to structural change in the caste system. Reason (R): A caste that Sanskritises moves up the hierarchy while the hierarchy itself remains intact. Choose the correct option.
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Answer: A — Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
Srinivas made exactly this distinction: Sanskritisation changes a group's place on the ladder by adopting the ladder's own values, which reinforces rather than dissolves the hierarchy.Which of the following is NOT among Ghurye's six features of caste in Caste and Race in India?
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Answer: C — Graded inequality
Graded inequality is Ambedkar's concept. Ghurye's six are segmental division, hierarchy, restrictions on feeding and social intercourse, civil and religious disabilities and privileges, lack of free choice of occupation, and restrictions on marriage.Radhakamal Mukerjee is best associated with which pair of contributions?
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Answer: C — Social ecology and a theory of values
Mukerjee's Regional Sociology and Social Ecology, and his Social Structure of Values, define his place in the Lucknow school. The other pairs belong to Srinivas, Karve and Ambedkar respectively.Name the book, written in Gujarati in 1909, in which Gandhi set out his critique of modern civilisation. (Two words)
Numerical answer — type the value.
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Answer: Hind Swaraj
Hind Swaraj, written on board ship in 1909 and translated by Gandhi as Indian Home Rule, argues that modern industrial civilisation, not the British as such, is India's real enemy.Ghurye's characterisation of tribes as 'backward Hindus' placed him in debate with which scholar?
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Answer: D — Verrier Elwin
Elwin initially favoured protecting tribal communities from outside contact (the isolationist position), while Ghurye argued they were already part of Hindu society and should be assimilated; Nehru's integrationist policy later sought a middle path.Match the concept with its author:
(a) Sarvodaya
(b) Graded inequality
(c) Field view
(d) Caste as an extended kin group.Show answer
Answer: B — Gandhi, Ambedkar, Srinivas, Karve
Sarvodaya is Gandhi's; graded inequality is Ambedkar's; the field view versus book view is Srinivas's methodological plea; caste as an extended kin group is Karve's interpretation in Hindu Society.