The Oxford and Cambridge Society of Bangalore welcomes you and your guests, to a lecture by David Gellner, he will be speaking about the life and times of MN Srinivas.

MN Srinivas was the founder of modern social anthropology (or ‘sociology’ as it is usually known locally) in India. He is famous for his monographs Religion and Society among the Coorgs and The Remembered Village, as well as many other works. He invented and popularized the concepts ‘Sanskritization’, ‘dominant caste’, and ‘vote bank’. The talk will discuss Srinivas’ life and achievements and will focus in particular on the role that his time in and a doctorate from Oxford played in his evolution as an anthropologist.

About David Gellner

David Gellner is an anthropologist specializing in the study of religion, politics, ethnicity, caste, and social change in Nepal and north India. From 2002 to 2008 he was the Lecturer in the Anthropology of South Asia in the University of Oxford, the position that was created for MN Srinivas in 1947. Since 2008 he has been the Professor of Social Anthropology, the position formerly occupied by Srinivas’ teachers, Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard.

Some Open-access articles by David Gellner:

• ‘Politics in Gorakhpur since the 1920s: The Making of a Safe “Hindu” Constituency’
• ‘Masters of Hybridity: How Activists Reconstructed Nepali Society’
• ‘The Idea of Nepal’
• ‘The 2013 Elections in Nepal’