Process of Social Change in India
• Some concepts and approaches about socio-cultural change in India
are grouped as: Sanskritization, Westernization, Modernization,
Globalisation, etc.
Sanskritization
• Sanskritization has had a long career.
• The concept was first used by Srinivas in his study of the Coorgs of
South India (Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India,
1952).
• It was elaborated in “A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization”
(Far Eastern Quarterly, 1956), reprinted in Caste in Modern India
(1962);
• The concept is developed further in Social Change in Modern India
(1967).
• Srinivas used sanskritization to 'explain some features of religious, cultural
and social change in India‘.
• He found that lower castes, in order to raise their position in the caste
hierarchy, adopted some customs of the Brahmins and gave up some of
their own, considered to be impure by the higher castes.
• For e.g., they gave up meat-eating, consumption of liquor, animal sacrifice
to their deities. They imitated Brahmins in matters of dress, food and
rituals.
• By doing this, within a generation or so they could claim higher positions in
the hierarchy of castes.
• This process of mobility was first denoted by the term Brahmanization.
• Sanskritization is 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.
• He asserted that 'sankritization seems to have occurred throughout
Indian history and still continues to occur'.
• He suggests sanskritization has occurred mostly within Hindu social
structure and in the rural areas.
• He has offered a number of cultural elements which are ideally
Sanskritic—the adoption of mangalashtaka stotras in marriage rites,
the ideal of monogamy, pre-puberty marriage, prohibition of widow
remarriage, abstention from alcohol, and the adoption of such values
as karma, dharma, papa, samsara, moksha.
• Srinivas has argued that Sanskritization often leads to a higher status
for the caste in the caste hierarchy.
• He also states that Sanskritization is not confined to Hindu castes, but
also occurs in semi-tribal groups such as the Bhils of Western India,
the Gonds and Oraons of Central India, and the Pahadis of the
Himalayas.
• The usual outcome of this process is that the tribe undergoing
Sanskritization claims to be a caste and therefore Hindu.
• Harold A Gould suggested – the motive force behind Sanskritization is
not of cultural imitation per se but an expression of challenge and
revolt against the socio-economic deprivation.
• Sanskritization is thus a cultural camouflage for latent interclass and
intercaste competition for economic and social power, typical of a
tradition-bound society where the traditionally privileged upper
castes hold monopoly to power and social status.