(a) Elaborate on M.N. Srinivas's structural-functionalist approach to the study of Indian society. (10 marks) (b) Do you agree…

(a) M.N. Srinivas's structural-functional approach

Srinivas, a student of Radcliffe-Brown at Oxford, studied Indian society through intensive village fieldwork (the "field-view") rather than Sanskrit texts, treating village and caste as parts of a working social system.

• Coorgs: Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952) showed how ritual and caste ties integrate society; here he formulated the idea later called Sanskritisation.
• Village and caste: in Rampura (The Remembered Village, 1976) castes are bound by occupational and ritual interdependence, with loyalty to the village cutting across caste.
• Dominant caste (1959): a caste with numbers, land and political power dominates village life even if ritually below Brahmins, so ritual rank is not the only basis of power.
• Change within structure: Sanskritisation and Westernisation (Social Change in Modern India, 1966) explain mobility that changes positions without changing the structure.

Critics find the approach village- and Hindu-centred, caste- rather than class-centred, weak on conflict, and prone to generalising from microcosms.

(b) Changing agrarian class structure

Yes, it is changing, though unevenly.

• Baseline: Daniel Thorner's maliks (landlords), kisans (working peasants) and mazdoors (landless labourers).
• State and market: abolition of intermediaries and tenancy reform weakened absentee zamindars and strengthened owner-cultivating peasant castes; the Green Revolution (mid-1960s onward) produced capitalist farmers in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, hiring labour and producing for the market.
• Proletarianisation: Census 2011 counted about 14.4 crore agricultural labourers against 11.9 crore cultivators, the first time labourers outnumbered cultivators. In the Agriculture Census 2015-16, small and marginal holdings were 86 per cent of holdings but 47 per cent of operated area, with a mean holding of 1.08 hectares.
• Labour relations: Jan Breman's South Gujarat study (Patronage and Exploitation, 1974) shows hali bonded labour reshaped by agrarian change while old inequalities persisted.
• Continuity: Dalit workers remain concentrated in agricultural labour, so caste still shapes class.

Class differentiation is real, but caste hierarchy and small-holding poverty persist.

(c) Challenges of tribal integration

Policy has oscillated between Ghurye's assimilation (tribes as "backward Hindus"), Elwin's "National Park" isolation, and Nehru's Tribal Panchsheel (1957), which urged development along tribal "genius" with minimal interference. Challenges:

• Land and displacement: mines, dams and industry in Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh uproot tribal communities; the Xaxa Committee (2014) recorded continuing land alienation despite protective laws.
• Weak safeguards: Fifth Schedule protections, PESA (1996) and the Forest Rights Act (2006) are poorly implemented, so gram sabha consent and forest rights are often bypassed.
• Development gaps: Scheduled Tribes are about 10.4 crore (8.6 per cent, Census 2011); their literacy was 59 per cent against 74 per cent nationally, and the 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups face acute deprivation.
• Identity and politics: pressure of dominant languages and religions erodes customary institutions; alienation fuels autonomy demands and has been linked to extremist violence in some districts.

(d) Béteille's harmonic and disharmonic structures

Béteille (Harmonic and Disharmonic Social Systems, 1971) compares the normative order, the values a society professes, with the existential order, the inequality actually lived.

• Harmonic: inequality is practised and accepted as legitimate. Traditional caste society, with purity-pollution and dharma justifying hierarchy, was harmonic.
• Disharmonic: equality is the professed norm while inequality persists. The Constitution (Articles 14-17, adult franchise) made India disharmonic.
• In Caste, Class and Power (1965), the Tanjore village Sripuram shows caste, class and power overlapping less: Brahmin dominance eroded as non-Brahmins gained land and political power.

In changing India the framework explains contested change: Dalit and backward-class assertion, reservation and the SC/ST Atrocities Act (1989) press the egalitarian norm, while discrimination persists and dominant castes demand quotas (Patidars, 2015). Disharmony is thus a source of pressure for change. The orders are ideal types: the traditional order was never fully harmonious, and old and new norms coexist.

(e) Leela Dube's "Seed and Earth"

"Seed and Earth: The Symbolism of Biological Reproduction and Sexual Relations of Production" (in Visibility and Power, 1986) examines how Indian texts and folk traditions liken reproduction to farming.

• Symbolism: the man is the seed (bija), the active, determining principle; the woman is the earth or field (kshetra), a receptive soil owned by the husband, as in Manusmriti 9.33.
• Reproduction as production: rights in the child follow the crop principle, so the child belongs to the seed-giver's lineage and a woman who leaves her husband usually loses her children.
• Consequences: control over women's sexuality, a weak maternal claim, and descent and property passing through men, with daughters kept from inheriting land.
• Critique: the homology is biologically inaccurate, as both parents contribute, and gender-biased; it naturalises patriliny and women's subordination, and shapes girls' socialisation.