Background
Mysore Srinivas was born on November 16, 1916, in Mysore, India.
123, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Kala Ghoda, Fort, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400032, India
The University of Mumbai where Mysore Srinivas received a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Oxford OX1 2JD, United Kingdom
The University of Oxford where Mysore Srinivas studied.
educator social anthropologist sociologist writer
Mysore Srinivas was born on November 16, 1916, in Mysore, India.
Mysore Srinivas studied at the University of Mumbai where he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree. Later he went to the University of Oxford where he also received a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Mysore Srinivas started his career as a social anthropologist in 1942 when he wrote a book Marriage and Family in Mysore. At the same time, he made an intensive field study of Coorgs and in 1952 he published Religion and Society Among the Coorgs. Later he started to study caste and religion and proposed conceptual tools like ‘dominant caste’, ‘sanskritization-westernization’ and ‘secularization’ to understand the realities of inter-caste relations and also to explain their dynamics. Srinivas also conducted the study of Rampur – a Mysore village – which gave him the concept of ‘dominant caste’. The study has been contained in his book The Remembered Village that was published in 1976. Later Srinivas published such books as Village, Caste, Gender, and Method: Essays in Indian Social Anthropology, Caste in Modern India and Other Essays and Social Change in Modern India.
Mysore Srinivas also served as a lecturer in various institutions like the University of Delhi, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. In 1951, he established the Department of Sociology at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and later, in 1959, the Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. Srinivas also was a co-founder of the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. In 1992, he became the first JRD Tata Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies. He held this post until his death in 1999.
Srinivas believed that knowledge about the different regions of Indian society can be achieved through the fieldwork. He preferred the empirical study to understand our society.
Mysore Srinivas was a Fellow of the British Academy, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mysore Srinivas was married to Rukmini Srinivas. The marriage produced two daughters.