Indian Anthropology III: Stages of Development, Village Studies (Dube, Marriott, Wiser, Epstein, Srinivas, Bailey), Sanskritisation, Westernisation, Modernisation, Globalisation, the Sacred Complex and the Nature-Man-Spirit Complex, and the Early Indian Anthropologists

L.P. Vidyarthi, in the Rise of Anthropology in India (1978), divided the discipline's history into three phases, a scheme most accounts still follow. The formative phase, from the late eighteenth century to 1919, was the work of colonial officials, missionaries and scholars. The Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded by William Jones in 1784, began the study of Indian languages, texts and peoples; the Census, from 1871–72 and regularly from 1881, recorded castes and tribes; and the Ethnographic Survey of India, begun after Risley's Census of 1901, produced the multi-volume handbooks — Risley's Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891), Crooke's Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (1896), Edgar Thurston's Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909), R.V. Russell and Hira Lal's Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India (1916) and others. Monographs by administrators and scholars described particular peoples: W.H.R. Rivers's The Todas (1906), and later J.H. Hutton's The Angami Nagas and The Sema Nagas (1921) and J.P. Mills's studies of the Lhota, Ao and Rengma. The first Indian ethnographer of stature, Sarat Chandra Roy, published The Mundas and Their Country in 1912. The constructive phase, 1920–49, saw the discipline institutionalised by Indians. The first university department of anthropology in India opened at Calcutta in 1920, sociology having begun at Bombay in 1919 under Patrick Geddes, with Ghurye soon at its head; S.C. Roy founded the journal Man in India in 1921; D.N. Majumdar, N.K. Bose, T.C. Das and B.S. Guha did fieldwork and published; the 1931 Census under J.H. Hutton, and Guha's racial survey for it, marked the high point of physical anthropology in the colonial mould; and the Anthropological Survey of India was established in 1945, with Guha as its first director. The analytical phase, from 1950, was shaped by independence and the Constitution, by close contact with British and American anthropology, and by the new state's need for knowledge of its peoples. Departments multiplied (Delhi in 1947, Lucknow, Ranchi, Saugar, Gauhati, Utkal and others); village studies, tribal development research and applied anthropology flourished; Tribal Research Institutes were set up in the States; and Indian anthropologists produced concepts — the dominant caste, Sanskritisation, the tribe–caste continuum, the sacred complex — that entered world anthropology. Later large projects include the Anthropological Survey of India's People of India programme (1985–92) under K.S. Singh, which surveyed 4,635 communities, and its national surveys of anthropometry and genetics. Since the 1980s the discipline has also been shaped by the critique of colonial categories, by Dalit and tribal scholars writing about their own communities, and by the growth of biological, medical and forensic anthropology.

The colonial image of the Indian village was Charles Metcalfe's "little republics" (1830), self-sufficient and unchanging while dynasties rose and fell — an image Marx and Maine repeated. The village studies of the 1950s tested it in the field and found villages tied to towns, markets, pilgrimage centres, the state and wider networks of caste and kinship, and changing fast. Two collections of 1955 mark the moment: India's Villages, edited by M.N. Srinivas from articles first published in the Economic Weekly, and Village India, edited by McKim Marriott; Louis Dumont and David Pocock (1957) then argued that the village is a unit of residence but not the unit of Indian society, which must be studied through caste and kinship that cross villages. The six scholars the syllabus names each stand for a line of work. William H. Wiser, an American Presbyterian missionary, studied Karimpur in Mainpuri district, Uttar Pradesh, and in The Hindu Jajmani System (1936) described the hereditary exchange of services and grain between patron (jajman) and serving (kamin) castes; with Charlotte Wiser he wrote Behind Mud Walls (1930), and the village was restudied later by her and by others. S.C. Dube's Indian Village (1955), on Shamirpet near Hyderabad, was among the first full monographs on an Indian village by an Indian anthropologist, describing its structure, economy, ritual, family and the changes brought by the city; India's Changing Villages (1958) studied the effects of the Community Development programme. McKim Marriott worked in Kishan Garhi, in Aligarh district, and in "Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization" (1955) proposed that the little (local) and great (Sanskritic) traditions interact through two processes: universalisation, the carrying upward of local elements into the great tradition, and parochialisation, the downward localisation of great-tradition elements, as when a Sanskritic festival is absorbed into a local cult; he later developed transactional and ethnosociological approaches to caste. M.N. Srinivas studied Rampura, near Mysore, from 1948; his field notes were destroyed in a fire at Stanford in 1970, and he wrote The Remembered Village (1976) largely from memory. Rampura gave him the dominant caste and much of his analysis of Sanskritisation. T. Scarlett Epstein, in Economic Development and Social Change in South India (1962), compared two villages of Mandya district, Karnataka, after canal irrigation: Wangala, which received irrigation, intensified its agriculture and changed little in its social structure, and Dalena, left dry, whose men diversified into the wider economy, which changed its politics and social relations more; she restudied them in South India: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1973) and later. F.G. Bailey studied Bisipara in the Kondmals of Odisha: Caste and the Economic Frontier (1957) showed how new wealth from trade let lower castes buy land and challenge the old order; Tribe, Caste and Nation (1960) compared Konds, Oriya castes and the new political arena; Politics and Social Change: Orissa in 1959 (1963) studied the village's links with electoral politics. Other monographs of the period include Oscar Lewis's Village Life in Northern India (1958), Adrian Mayer's Caste and Kinship in Central India (1960), André Béteille's Caste, Class and Power (1965) on Sripuram in Thanjavur, and Kathleen Gough's studies of Thanjavur villages. Restudies of the same villages, taken up in Unit X, have since become a method in their own right.

M.N. Srinivas introduced Sanskritisation in Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952), having first called it Brahminisation, and defined it in Social Change in Modern India (1966) as "the process by which a 'low' Hindu caste, or tribal or other group, changes its customs, ritual, ideology and way of life in the direction of a high, and frequently, 'twice-born' caste", generally followed by a claim to a higher position in the caste hierarchy, usually over a generation or two. He replaced "Brahminisation" because the models imitated were not always Brahman: Kshatriya, Vaishya and locally dominant castes also served as reference groups. Sanskritisation brings positional change, not structural change — a caste moves up, but the hierarchy remains — and it has been associated with giving up meat and liquor, adopting Sanskritic deities and rites, prohibiting widow remarriage and adopting dowry. Critics noted that it was often accompanied by economic or political mobility, that it described upward movement within the frame of Brahmanical values, and that many Dalit and backward-class movements rejected rather than imitated the high castes; others noted de-Sanskritisation in the Tamil non-Brahman movement. Westernisation, in Srinivas's usage, is "the changes brought about in Indian society and culture as a result of over 150 years of British rule, the term subsuming changes occurring at different levels — technology, institutions, ideology, values"; it includes humanitarianism and egalitarianism, the new professions and education, and it was adopted first by the higher castes, so that Sanskritisation and Westernisation could proceed together. Modernisation is a broader and less culture-bound idea: the transformation of societies through industrialisation, urbanisation, literacy, secularisation, mass media and democratic institutions. Yogendra Singh, in Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973), analysed change in India along orthogenetic (internal) and heterogenetic (external) sources, at the levels of cultural tradition and social structure; Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967) and Milton Singer (When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 1972) argued that tradition and modernity are not opposites, since caste associations, religious institutions and joint families could carry modern ends. Globalisation is the intensification of worldwide flows of capital, goods, people, images and ideas; Arjun Appadurai (Modernity at Large, 1996) described it through five "scapes" — ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes — and Roland Robertson's "glocalisation" names the local reworking of global forms. Anthropologists of India study its effects on agrarian livelihoods, migration, the IT and service economy, consumption, the diaspora, and the resurgence of local identities. Two ideas came from L.P. Vidyarthi. The sacred complex (The Sacred Complex in Hindu Gaya, 1961) is the analysis of a pilgrimage centre as a whole, in three dimensions — sacred geography (the sacred centres, segments and clusters of the landscape), sacred performances (the rites, such as the Gaya shraddha for the ancestors) and sacred specialists (the Gayawal priests and others) — linking Redfield's little and great traditions to a concrete place; it inspired studies of Kashi, Puri and other centres. The Nature-Man-Spirit complex (The Maler: A Study in Nature-Man-Spirit Complex of a Hill Tribe in Bihar, 1963) is his framework for the ecological and religious unity of tribal life among the Maler (Sauria Paharia) of the Rajmahal hills: nature (forest, hills, shifting cultivation), man (social organisation) and spirit (deities and spirits of the forest, village and ancestors) form one interconnected whole, so that economic, social and religious life cannot be understood apart.

Sarat Chandra Roy (1871–1942), a lawyer of Ranchi, is often called the father of Indian ethnography. His monographs on the peoples of Chotanagpur — The Mundas and Their Country (1912), The Oraons of Chota Nagpur (1915), The Birhors (1925), Oraon Religion and Customs (1928), The Hill Bhuiyas of Orissa (1935) and The Kharias (1937, with R.C. Roy) — were based on long acquaintance and defended tribal land rights in the courts; he founded Man in India (1921). G.S. Ghurye (1893–1983), trained under Rivers at Cambridge and head of sociology at Bombay for thirty-five years, combined Indology with ethnography in Caste and Race in India (1932), The Aborigines — "So-called" — and Their Future (1943), Indian Sadhus (1953) and many other books, and trained a generation of Indian sociologists and anthropologists. D.N. Majumdar (1903–1960), of Lucknow, studied the Ho of Kolhan (A Tribe in Transition, 1937) and tribal change (The Fortunes of Primitive Tribes, 1944), wrote Races and Cultures of India (1944), studied a village near Lucknow (Caste and Communication in an Indian Village, 1958), did serological and anthropometric surveys, and founded The Eastern Anthropologist (1947). N.K. Bose (1901–1972), geographer and anthropologist of Calcutta, wrote "The Hindu Method of Tribal Absorption" (1941), on how tribes were drawn into Hindu society by adopting its deities, rites and caste places while keeping their own customs, and The Structure of Hindu Society (Hindu Samajer Gadan, 1949), which explained caste as a non-competitive system of hereditary occupations; he was Gandhi's secretary in Noakhali (1946–47), director of the Anthropological Survey (1959–64) and Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (1967–70). Verrier Elwin (1902–1964), an Oxford-trained English missionary who left the church and lived among the Gond and Baiga of central India, wrote The Baiga (1939), The Agaria (1942), Maria Murder and Suicide (1943) and The Muria and Their Ghotul (1947), on the youth dormitory of the Muria of Bastar; he became an Indian citizen in 1954, served as Adviser for Tribal Affairs in NEFA, wrote A Philosophy for NEFA (1957) and his autobiography The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin (1964). T.C. Das (Tarak Chandra Das), of Calcutta University, wrote The Purums: An Old Kuki Tribe of Manipur (1945), which Rodney Needham later used as a test case of prescriptive matrilateral alliance, and a survey of destitutes in the Bengal famine of 1943. Irawati Karve (1905–1970), of the Deccan College, Pune, trained in Berlin, wrote Kinship Organisation in India (1953), dividing India into four kinship zones — northern, central, southern and eastern — by their rules of marriage and terminology; Hindu Society: An Interpretation (1961), which saw caste as an aggregate of separate endogamous groups; and Yuganta (1967), essays on the Mahabharata. S.C. Dube (1922–1996) studied the Kamar of Chhattisgarh (The Kamar, 1951) before his village studies, and later wrote on development and modernisation. M.N. Srinivas (1916–1999), trained under Ghurye and at Oxford under Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard, gave Indian anthropology Sanskritisation, Westernisation, the dominant caste and the phrase "vote bank", and built sociology at Baroda and Delhi. L.P. Vidyarthi (1931–1985), of Ranchi University, gave the sacred complex and the Nature-Man-Spirit complex, wrote the history of the discipline and organised the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in New Delhi in 1978. Surajit Sinha (1926–2002) studied the Bhumij and state formation in tribal central India ("State Formation and Rajput Myth in Tribal Central India", 1962), proposed the tribe–caste and tribe–peasant continua, directed the Anthropological Survey and was Vice-Chancellor of Visva-Bharati.

Five of the names in the syllabus built biological anthropology and prehistory in India. B.S. Guha (Biraja Sankar Guha, 1894–1961), who took his doctorate in physical anthropology at Harvard, conducted the anthropometric survey for the 1931 Census and proposed, in its report and in Racial Elements in the Population (1944), a classification of India's population into six main "racial" elements — Negrito, Proto-Australoid, Mongoloid (Palaeo-Mongoloid and Tibeto-Mongoloid), Mediterranean (Palaeo-Mediterranean, Mediterranean and Oriental), Western Brachycephals (Alpinoid, Dinaric and Armenoid), and Nordic. The classification is now of historical interest only: typological races have no standing in modern human biology, as Unit II of this course explains, and genetic studies describe India's populations through ancestry components and admixture rather than racial types. Guha was the founding director of the Anthropological Survey of India (1945–54), which under him combined physical, cultural and prehistoric research. S.S. Sarkar (Sasanka Sekhar Sarkar), of Calcutta, a physical anthropologist of the same generation, worked on the anthropometry and serology of Indian peoples and on ancient human skeletal remains, and wrote The Aboriginal Races of India (1954). P.C. Biswas, who founded the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delhi in 1947, worked in both physical and social anthropology — he wrote on the Santals, among other subjects — and built one of the country's main teaching departments. S.R.K. Chopra, of Panjab University, Chandigarh, was a palaeoanthropologist who worked on the fossil apes of the Siwalik hills — Sivapithecus and the specimens once called Ramapithecus, now placed within Sivapithecus (Chapter 4) — and on Siwalik fossil faunas, making Chandigarh a centre of palaeoanthropology. Dharani Sen, of Calcutta University's Department of Anthropology, was a prehistorian who worked on the Palaeolithic of eastern India, excavating at Kuliana in Mayurbhanj, Odisha, and who co-edited, with A.K. Ghosh, the Robert Bruce Foote memorial volume Studies in Prehistory (1966). Together with Irawati Karve's anthropometric and serological work in Maharashtra and D.N. Majumdar's surveys in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, their work laid the base on which later human genetics, dermatoglyphics, growth studies and forensic anthropology in India were built. The same tradition carried the mistakes of its time — the ranking of castes by head form and nose shape in Risley's generation, and the racial typologies of the 1930s — and the modern discipline teaches these as history, alongside the evidence that human variation is continuous, clinal and overwhelmingly within rather than between groups.