Indian Society through Personal Writings

M.N. Srinivas’ personal writings combine a novelist’s imagination with the insight of a social scientist. The first three essays are autobiographical accounts of how he became a social anthropologist, of his job as the first Professor of sociology at Maharaja Sayajirao University at Baroda in 1951, and of moving from Delhi to Bangalore where he made his home. ‘Bangalore as I see it is interesting both for its content and for the fact that it is Srinivas’s only ethnographic account of a city. The next seven essays are based on his work in Rampura in Mysore. These cover subjects such as village disputes, social change, the quality of social relations, and religion. In the last essay, ‘Farewell’, the author describes how he had to wrench himself from his village and fieldwork to return to the formal atmosphere of the University of Oxford