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Collected Essays, by M. N. Srinivas. New Delhi, India; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 733 pp. $49.95 cloth. ISBN: 019-565-174X.
Many scholars are familiar with the seminal work of M. N. Srinivas on the Indian caste system. This collection of his essays, written between 1952 and 1997, presents his other significant work to a global audience. The book is organized around seven themes: the village community, caste, gender, religion, modernity and nationhood, sociology and social anthropology in India, and methodology of social and cultural studies. It also includes a section on Srinivas' life. Since the essays are written on the basis of his field-work in a multireligious, multilingual, multipart democracy in a developing nation, Srinivas' ideas are likely to be a valuable resource for scholars who study topics such group conflicts within nations in the current phase of globalization, for sociologists looking for appropriate methodologies for studying other societies, and for all those who seek to understand how modernity and tradition intersect to create new hierarchical social structures.
Srinivas' work on caste in modern India remains relevant to the study of other social inequalities. By studying the social-structural bases of castes, Srinivas broke away from the older "culturally oriented" scholarship on caste by scholars such as Dumont. The earlier scholarship emphasized the rigidity of hierarchical caste boundaries that prevented individual mobility and assumed such a system would break down with increasing modernization of society. Srinivas challenged these...