M. N. Srinivas

Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas (1916–1999) was an Indian sociologist. He is mostly known for his work on caste and caste systems, social stratification, Sanskritisation and Westernisation in southern India and the concept of 'Dominant Caste'.

Srinivas was a Brahmin by birth and earned his doctorate in sociology from the University of Bombay and went on to the University of Oxford for further studies. Although he had already written a book on family and marriage in Mysore and completed his PhD at University of Bombay before he went to the University of Oxford in the late forties for further studies, his training there was to play a significant role in the development of his ideas. Srinivas served in various institutions of repute like University of Delhi, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Institute for Social and Economic Change Bangalore and National Institute of Advanced Studies Bangalore.

In the Frontline obituary he was described as India's most distinguished sociologist and social anthropologist. His contribution to the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology and to public life in India was unique. It was his capacity to break out of the strong mould in which (the mostly North American university oriented) area studies had been shaped after the end of the Second World War on the one hand, and to experiment with the disciplinary grounding of social anthropology and sociology on the other, which marked his originality as a social scientist.

It was the conjuncture between Sanskritic scholarship and the strategic concerns of the Western Bloc in the aftermath of the Second World War which largely shaped South Asian area studies in the United States. During the colonial era, the Brahmins or Pandits were acknowledged as important interlocutors of Hindu laws and customs to the British colonial administration. The colonial assumptions about an unchanging Indian society led to the curious assemblage of Sanskrit studies with contemporary issues in most South Asian departments in the US and elsewhere. It was strongly believed that an Indian sociology must lie at the conjunction of Indology and sociology.

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