Revision summary
Sripuram split caste, class, and power in a Tanjore village. Land reform and democracy made the structure disharmonic. The study corrected harmony functionalism and a fused sacred hierarchy. Limits are Brahmin-centred fieldwork, thin gender, and one-village scale. Use it as a method, not as all of India.
Model answer
Introduction
Andre Beteille’s Sripuram study in Tanjore treated one village as a laboratory of caste, class, and power. The analysis is strong because it broke the single sacred hierarchy. It is limited because one agraharam-centred village cannot be India.
Body
What Sripuram showed
- Brahmins, dominant peasants, and Adi-Dravida labour did not form one functional whole in M. N. Srinivas’s harmony sense.
- Land reform and the vote shifted class and power even when caste identity remained.
- Harmonic hierarchy, where inequality is morally accepted, gave way to a disharmonic structure: equality as public value, rank as practice.
Strengths
- It separated three dimensions that Ghurye’s civilisational caste and Dumont’s purity often fused.
- It kept fieldwork without pretending the village was a closed republic.
Critiques
- The agraharam lens can over-centre Brahmins and under-see women’s kinship, which Leela Dube later insisted on.
- A. R. Desai would still want a fuller colonial class history than one Tanjore snapshot.
- Generalising Tamil wet-rice agrarian change to dry or tribal India is unsafe.
- Power outside the village—parties, mills, the state—appears, but the monograph still pulls the eye inward.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD SR[Sripuram Tanjore] --> CC[Caste] SR --> CL[Class] SR --> PW[Power] DH[Disharmonic equality] --> SR LM[Scale gender] --> CR[Critique]
Conclusion
- Beteille’s Tanjore village is a critical classic: caste is not class is not power, and modern India is disharmonic. The critique is scale, gender thinness, and the temptation to let Sripuram stand for the nation.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Has caste system hindered democracy and adult franchise in India. Discuss.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2018 · Q7(a)). View answer →
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Did Beteille deny Dumont?
He denied that purity ideology is the only ranking principle on the ground.
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Is Sripuram a dominant-caste village like Rampura?
It is a different agrarian mix. The lesson is analytical split, not a copy of Srinivas’s Mysore.
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