About the Book
Milton Singer, in this major work Traditional India: Structure & Change has collected, organized and edited the papers contributed to a symposium of studies of India’s changing traditional culture. These studies have two major bonds of unity: one, the underlying unity and continuity of Indian civilization itself, and, the second, method and concept in the study of civilization. In fact, this work expounds Robert Redfield’s recent formulations of how a civilization may be conceived and studied as a ‘structure of tradition’ and answers the question: how are the culture and society of India’s villages related to the Great Traditions of Indian civilization? How does there exist an overwhelming unity and continuity of tradition in India, despite clearly differentiated groups which ‘carry’ variants of a common tradition? The stratagem adopted in the present symposium is to look for clues to the structure of the whole tradition through intensive studies of selected parts of it.
How can the generic conception of a structure of tradition be particular to particular variants? In order to achieve this particularization, two operational concepts have been achieved, ‘The Social Organization of Tradition’ (Section I) and ‘Cultural Performances and Cultural Media’ (Section II). In Section III, both these modes of particularization are employed to study changes in the structure of tradition.
In Section I, Daniel Ingalls, John T. Hitchcock, Stella Kramrisch, and Helen Lamb, in their papers, have traced historically the traditions of the four major orders (or varnas) across the span of Indian civilization. And, Norman Brown, in his comments, calls attention to the functional significance of the disciplines and skills cultivated by a group: learning, war and administration, arts and crafts, track, and the changing interrelation of these within the framework of Indian society.
In Section II, one may peep through the papers by Norvin Hein, J.A.B. van Buitenen, M.B. Emeneau, William McCormack and V. Raghavan, into the cultural performances, cultural media, and cultural structure of India. These papers indicate, explain and illustrate how a comparative analysis of cultural performances can be used as a method for studying the structure and changes of a cultural tradition, and particularly of the interactions of the Great and Little Traditions.
In Section III, in the papers by Milton Singer, T.B. Naik, Nirmal Kumar Bose, Bernard S. Cohn and Martin Orans, some specific problems of change in traditional culture, cultural and societal data have been combined in varying degrees. These papers specifically deal with some aspect of the effects of urbanization on traditional culture. The papers by Surajit Sinha, Kathleen Gough, and I.P. Singh, in this section, deal with cultural processes which are either recurrent or at least have strong parallels beyond the horizon of a particular time and space.
Contents
I. The Social Organization of Tradition
Hie Brahman Tradition / Daniel Ingalls
The Idea of the Martial Råjpýt / John T. Hitchcock
Traditions of the Indian Craftsma / Stella Kramrisch
The Indian Merchant / Helen Lamb
Class and Cultural Traditions in India / W. Norman Brown
The Vahîvancå Bårots of Gujarat: A Caste of Genealogists and Mythographers / A. M. Shah and R. G. Shroff
Foreword / M. N. Srinivas
II. Cultural Performances and Cultural Media
The Råm Lîlå / Norvin Hein
The Indian Hero as a Vidyådhara / J.A.B. van Buitenen
Oral Poets of South India: The Todas / M. B. Emeneau
The Forms of Communication in Vîra¹aiva Religion / William McCormack
methods of Popular Religious Instruction in South India / V. Raghavan
III. Some Problems and Processes of Culture Change
The Great Tradition in a Metropolitan Center: Madras / Milton Singer
Religion of the Anåvils of Surat / T. B. Naik
Some Aspects of Caste in Bengal / Nirmal Kumar Bose
Changing Traditions of a Low Caste / Bernard S. Cohn
A Tribal People in an Industrial Setting / Martin Orans
Cults of the Dead Among the Nåyars / E. Kathleen Gough
A Sikh Village / Indera Singh
Tribal Cultures of Peninsular India as a Dimension of the Little Tradition: A Preliminary Statement / Surajit Sinha
About the Author / Editor
Milton Singer is the Paul Klapper Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology and in the College, University of Chicago. He is an eminent Anthropologist and his special interests are the comparative study of civilization, particularly India, and the relations of cultural anthropology to psychology, and philosophy of the social sciences. He travelled in India and Asia during 1954–55. He is also the editor and co-author of Krishna: Myths, Rites and Attitudes (1966) and co-editor, with Benard S. Cohn of Structure and Change in Indian Society (1961).
