Compare and contrast the approaches of M.N. Srinivas and L.P. Vidyarthi to social change in village India.

Srinivas: field view and mobility

From Rampura (Mysore) and from Religion and Society among the Coorgs, Srinivas opposed the book view of Indology with the field view. Change in village India was not the death of caste but its recasting. Sanskritisation is the process by which a lower caste copies the ritual, diet and origin story of a locally higher group and claims a better rank over a generation or two. Westernisation is the take-up of British-derived education, dress, law and occupation, often by the same groups. The dominant caste — numerous, landed, with an educated elite — mediates both processes and captures panchayat and party.

Srinivas’s village is a caste system with a territory. Factions, patrons and the vote (after 1950) are the political surface of that system. Social change means mobility within hierarchy, plus the new resources of the state and the market. He is closer to British structural-functionalism (Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard) than to a tribal ecology. Critics (André Béteille, Marxists, Ambedkarite writers) say he underplayed class, untouchability as violence, and women’s labour.

Vidyarthi: sacred complex and tribal village

Vidyarthi’s Sacred Complex in Hindu Gaya (and later work) used Redfield’s great and little traditions: a pilgrimage centre organises specialists, sacred geography and a hinterland of villages. Nature–man–spirit complex (The Maler) models a hill tribe’s ecology, social organisation and religion as one adaptive set. The tribal village is not first a caste ladder; it is a forest-field-spirit system. Change comes when mines, missions, markets and planned development break that set — the Ranchi school’s development anthropology.

Vidyarthi institutionalised tribal research at Ranchi, worked on Chotanagpur, and trained students to see cultural change as disruption of an integrated complex, not only as sanskritisation. He could also describe Hindu sacred cities, so he is not “only a tribalist”. Compared with Srinivas, he gave more space to Adivasi India and to applied anthropology for administration.

Compare

| Axis | Srinivas | Vidyarthi |

|---|---|---|

| Classic field | Mysore / Coorg peasant-caste village | Gaya sacred city; Maler and Chotanagpur tribes |

| Master concepts | Sanskritisation, westernisation, dominant caste, field view | Sacred complex, nature–man–spirit, tribal transformation |

| Motor of change | Internal imitation plus Western/state resources | External development, market, mine, mission meeting an ecological-religious whole |

| Hierarchy | Caste rank is central | Tribe–Hindu civilisation contact; sacred specialists |

| Policy mood | How the village absorbs democracy and mobility | How to plan without shattering tribal complexes |

Both rejected armchair Indology. Both used intensive fieldwork. Both can miss gender and class unless supplemented. Srinivas travels poorly to a Birhor or Maler hamlet if one only looks for a dominant caste. Vidyarthi travels poorly to Rampura if one only looks for a nature–man–spirit triangle and misses jati politics.

• A full picture of village India needs both: caste mobility in the plains and ecological-sacred disruption in the hills, with Bailey’s tribe–caste continuum as the bridge.