Revision summary
Little and great traditions already mixed at village and tirtha. Globalisation adds media, brands, and world prices. Sanskritisation still moves local custom toward the Sanskritic great. Westernisation and missions are rival greats. The village translates all three; it is not only a receiver.
Model answer
Introduction
Little and great traditions, in Redfield and Marriott, are local custom and civilisational text in traffic. Globalisation adds a third stream: brands, media, and NGOs.
Body
Classic interplay
- Village rite and Vidyarthi’s Gaya pandas already mixed little and great.
- Sanskritisation is little tradition reaching for the great.
What globalisation does
- Television epics and temple live-streams nationalise the great tradition faster than the old pilgrimage.
- English, Islam, and evangelical media offer rival great traditions. Caste WhatsApp keeps little tradition alive.
- Global markets price jhum, craft, and feast. FRA struggles are little-tradition land claims in a world commodity chain.
Nature of the new interplay
- It is not replacement of the pair by the West. It is a three-way mix: local, Sanskritic-civilisational, and global.
- Srinivas’s Westernisation names part of the third stream. Yoga brands show the great tradition going global the other way.
- The village still translates. It does not only receive.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD L[Little tradition] --> M[Marriott traffic] G[Great tradition] --> M GL[Global media market] --> M
Conclusion
Globalisation thickens the little–great traffic and adds a world circuit. Indian traditions now interplay as local, civilisational, and global at once.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Panchayati Raj Institutions and Social Change
Next question on this syllabus topic (2015 · Q1(d)). View answer →
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Does globalisation kill little tradition?
It can thin it. Phones also archive and sell it.
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Is Bollywood a great tradition?
It is a modern national-popular stream that now sits beside the Sanskritic great.
PYQ trend
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More from this topic
Q1(e) · UPSC Mains 2025 · Anthropology GS 2 · 10 marks
Characteristics and communication between Little and Great Traditions.
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Redfield’s Great Tradition is textual, specialist and pan-regional; the Little Tradition is local, oral and village or tribal. Marriott’s universalisation and parochialisation, and Srinivas’s Sanskritisation, describe the traffic between them. Vidyarthi’s Gaya sacred complex is a pilgrimage switchboard. Tribal festival-taking and sacred-grove law (FRA, PESA) are living two-way examples. The pair is a civilisation process, not two separate India.
Q4(a) · UPSC Mains 2024 · Anthropology GS 2 · 20 marks
What are the ethical concerns in biological and socio-cultural anthropology because of recent advances in AI and genetic research?
Indigenous and exogenous processes of socio-cultural change in Indian society
Genetic ethics: informed and community consent, privacy, no racial misuse of ancestry or aDNA, voluntary medical screening, strict control of heritable genome editing. Artificial intelligence ethics: biased classification, surveillance, loss of ethnographic anonymity, deepfakes and false cultural authority. ICMR, IRB, AAA and Nagoya-type benefit-sharing are the working rules. Do not treat genomes or models as a new Risley. Communities must be able to refuse sampling and recording.
Q3(a) · UPSC Mains 2023 · Anthropology GS 2 · 20 marks
"Sanskritization is a culture-bound concept." Critically comment to assess the strength and limitation of this concept in developing a theoretical framework to study social change.
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Srinivas defined Sanskritisation as group copying of a higher caste’s ritual style to claim better rank. Its strength is empirical fit with Indian caste mobility and the little–great tradition traffic. It is culture-bound: it belongs to Hindu caste civilisation, not to all societies. Limits include conversion, non-Brahmin politics, class, and gender costs of new taboos. A theory of Indian social change needs Sanskritisation plus Westernisation, law, and conflict.
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