Sanskritization, Westernization and Modernization

What it takes to succeed

Srinivas is careful, and a good answer follows him rather than the textbook shorthand.

Sanskritization does not automatically raise a group's status. The group must clearly claim to belong to a particular varna, Vaishya, Kshatriya or Brahman; it must alter its customs, diet and way of life to match; and where the claim has inconsistencies it must explain them, if necessary by inventing an appropriate myth.

It takes generations. The group must maintain continuous pressure and wait an indefinite period. Srinivas explains why: the people who first hear the claim know the caste is trying to pass for something it is not, so the claim has a better chance with their children and grandchildren.

It can fail, and it can backfire. A caste may overreach and incur disapproval instead of moving up. A claim that succeeds in one area or period may fail in another.

Wealth is relevant but not decisive. Economic betterment, political power, education, leadership and a desire to move up are all relevant, and each case mixes them in different measures. Srinivas expressly declines to say that economic betterment is a necessary precondition.

Group mobility, not individual mobility

This is the sentence that distinguishes caste from class, and it is worth memorising in that form. In a class system it is the individual and the family that move up or down. In a caste system the mobility is of the group. Srinivas draws the consequence: the group must be large enough to be an endogamous unit by itself, or else it takes girls in marriage from the original group without giving girls in return, which itself signals that the splinter group is regarded as superior.

He therefore calls Sanskritization a source of fission in the caste system, and says it both precedes and sets the seal on social mobility. Without it, he says, the caste system would have been subjected to great strain: it is the traditional medium through which change inside the system could be expressed.

Westernization

Srinivas uses this term for the changes brought about in Indian society and culture by more than a century and a half of British rule.

What the British changed by force of law

The nineteenth-century British found institutions in India which they considered barbarous and used all the power at their disposal to fight: slavery, human sacrifice, suttee, thuggery, and in some parts of the country female infanticide. Other institutions they disapproved of but did not try to abolish directly.

That list should be read straight into [Sati, and the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act 1987]. Suttee is on it, and the fact that the practice needed a fresh statute in 1987 is the measure of how incompletely a law abolishes a custom.

What it did to Indian self-understanding

Because the rulers looked down on much of Indian life, the leaders of Indian society were thrown on the defensive, and Srinivas traces two opposite reactions.

Reform. Movements such as the Brahmo Samaj set out to rid Hinduism of what they saw as its evils. The Arya Samaj wanted a return to a Vedic Hinduism unlike the contemporary kind.

Notice where those two names appear again. Section 2(1)(a) of the Hindu Marriage Act applies the Act to a follower of the Brahmo, Prarthana or Arya Samaj, expressly. Parliament in 1955 was still legislating around a nineteenth-century argument about who counted as a Hindu, which is exactly what [The Hindu Marriage Act: Application, and Who is a Hindu] describes.

Defensive pride. Western and Western-inspired scholarship, and the rediscovery of Sanskrit, gave Indians confidence; tributes from scholars such as Max Muller were gratefully received; and it became common for educated Indians to make extravagant claims for their own culture and to dismiss the West as materialistic.

The dilemma of the upper castes

This is the most useful passage in the paper for a family law student.

The upper castes had a literary tradition and were opposed to blood sacrifice, but in other customs they were further removed from the British than the lower castes were. The lower castes ate meat, some ate pork and beef, and drank liquor; among them women enjoyed greater freedom, and divorce and widow remarriage were not prohibited.

So the Indian leaders were caught. The customs they had looked down on were also their masters' customs, and their masters held political and economic power, a new technology, scientific knowledge and a great literature. The Westernized upper castes therefore began acquiring habits not unlike the ones they had despised. And, Srinivas adds, the evils of upper-caste Hindu society came to be treated as the evils of the whole society.

Hold that against the Hindu Marriage Act. Divorce and widow remarriage, which the Act gave to all Hindus, were not innovations imported from England; they were already the practice of most of the population, and were forbidden chiefly at the top of the hierarchy. The 1955 Act did not simply Westernize Hindu marriage. It generalised the practice of the many against the prohibition of the few.

Westernization is uneven

Srinivas insists the pace and form varied by region and by section of the population. One group Westernized in dress, diet, manners, speech, sports and gadgets; another absorbed Western science, knowledge and literature while staying relatively untouched in externals. He accepts the distinction cannot be hard and fast and is one of relative emphasis, but it must be made to tell the types apart.

Modernization, and how the three fit together

MU asks for "modernization and sanskritization" in one breath, so the third term needs an answer.

Modernization is the wider and later idea, and it is not the same as Westernization. Westernization names a source, the West, and so describes borrowing from a particular civilisation. Modernization names a direction: the movement of a society towards industry, cities, formal education, science, a money economy, and a legal order of individual rights rather than status.

Srinivas's own paper points at the part of this that matters for law: increasing Westernization brings the greater secularization of the outlook of the people, and he sets that beside the professed aim of the government of a classless and casteless society. Secularization of outlook is the connecting idea, and it is what a court is doing when it decides a family dispute by the welfare of the child rather than by the authority of a text.

The paradox to write in an answer

Srinivas states it himself and calls it one of the interesting contradictions of modern Hindu social life. While the Brahmans are becoming more and more Westernized, the other castes are becoming more and more Sanskritized. In the lower reaches of the hierarchy, castes are taking up the very customs that the Brahmans are busy discarding.

He goes further, and this is the sentence to reproduce in substance: for those castes, Sanskritization looks like an essential preliminary to Westernization. A group climbs by Sanskritizing, and having climbed, begins to Westernize.

That is the answer to any question that asks how the two are related. They are not two rival theories. They are two currents running in opposite directions through the same society, and the same group may travel on both in turn.

Srinivas ends with a caution worth borrowing. To describe change in modern India in these terms is to describe it culturally and not structurally, and structural analysis is much harder.

A worked example

An examiner asks a law student why a course on family law begins with three sociological terms.

Take a caste group that adopts vegetarianism and teetotalism, drops widow remarriage, and begins to call itself Kshatriya. That is Sanskritization, coined by M. N. Srinivas in 1952: a low group rises by adopting the customs, rites and beliefs of a higher one and claims a varna. It works over generations, it may fail, and it moves a group rather than an individual. Notice what it does to a family lawyer's material: the group's custom changes, and custom is a source of law and a defence under section 3(a) of the Hindu Marriage Act.

Now take the same period from the other side. British rule abolished suttee and comparable practices by law, and produced both reform movements and a defensive pride in tradition. That is Westernization, and the paradox is that the upper castes, highest in the traditional order, were Westernized into habits they had once despised, at the very time that groups below them were Sanskritizing towards the model those groups were leaving.

And the broader movement. Modernization: industry, science, cities and individual right. The part that reaches the law is the secularization of outlook, and it is what makes the codification of 1955 and 1956 possible and a uniform civil code arguable.

How does a student use this in an answer? Three ways. It explains why custom still matters and why it changes. It explains why the reforming statutes exist, from the sati regulation to the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act. And it supplies the argument in [The Uniform Civil Code: Article 44 and Religious Pluralism] about whether a rule is religion or a secular activity associated with religion.

What it does NOT mean

Sanskritization is not conversion. It is the adoption of the customs, rites and beliefs of a higher group, together with a claim to a varna.

It is not individual mobility. It is a group rising, and it takes generations and may fail.

It does not change the system. The hierarchy stays; only the position of a group within it moves.

Westernization is not modernization. It names the changes British rule produced in Indian society; modernization is the broader movement.

It did not produce only reform. It produced defensive pride in tradition as well.

Modernization is not Westernization by another name. Its content is industry, science, cities and individual right, and the part that reaches the law is the secularization of outlook.

Secularization is not irreligion. It is the retreat of religious authority from areas the law now governs.

Quick revision

• Sanskritization: coined by M. N. Srinivas in 1952. A low group rises by adopting the customs, rites and beliefs of a higher one, typically vegetarianism and teetotalism, and claims a varna. It works over generations, may fail, and is a mobility of groups, not individuals; the hierarchy itself is unchanged.
• Westernization: the changes British rule produced in Indian society, including the abolition of suttee and comparable practices by law, the growth of reform movements, and a defensive pride in tradition; the upper castes were Westernized into habits they had once despised.
• Modernization: the broader movement towards industry, science, cities and individual right; the part that reaches the law is the secularization of outlook.
• The paradox: the groups highest in the traditional order were the first to Westernize, while groups lower down were Sanskritizing towards the model those groups were leaving.

Test yourself

1. What is Sanskritization, and who named it? The process by which a low Hindu caste, or a tribal or other group, changes its customs, ritual, ideology and way of life in the direction of a high and frequently twice-born caste, and claims a higher position in the hierarchy. The term was coined by M. N. Srinivas in 1952.

2. Is Sanskritization mobility of individuals? No. It is a mobility of groups, it operates over generations, and it may fail if the claim is not accepted. The hierarchy itself is not altered by it.

3. What is meant by Westernization? The changes brought about in Indian society and culture as a result of over a hundred and fifty years of British rule, including changes at the levels of technology, institutions, ideology and values, the abolition of practices such as suttee by legislation, and the growth of both reform movements and a defensive pride in tradition.

4. Which part of modernization reaches the law? The secularization of outlook, that is, the withdrawal of religious authority from areas the law now regulates, which is what makes a uniform civil code arguable and what underlies the codification of Hindu law.