About the Book
The present book is indispensable not only to anyone who wishes to understand the forces operating beneath the surface in modern India but also to all students of social and cultural change and, in particular, of the modernization process in developing countries. —M.N. SRINIVAS
A passage to more than India, this major work by Milton Singer records the refinement, through three trips to India and almost two decades of research, of a theory of cultural change. By alternating chapters of field reports with chapters of theoretical analysis, Singer illuminates the central problem of the book—how cultural change is shaped by the interaction between India’s “Great Tradition” of Sanskritic Hinduism and the life of a modern city, Madras.
The method of discovery has been the anthropological one, getting to know another culture in its own terms. The three field trips reported in this volume are explorations of an extended method for a social anthropological study of civilizations. They should be read in this spirit and in the context of the more general issues discussed in the theoretical papers. A roughly chronological sequence is retained in the volume as a whole to make it possible for the reader to retrace the order of discovery.
Singer’s incisive work focuses on one “Great Tradition” in a single city at the present time, but his remarkable insights into the interplay between tradition and modernity cannot but enrich our understanding of cultural and social change in other civilizations, both past and present.
Contents
Part One: India and the Comparative Study of Civilizations1. Passage to More than India: A Sketch of Changing European and American Images
2. Text and Context in the Study of Contemporary Hinduism
Part Two: Structure and Transformation of a Great Tradition
3. Search for a Great Tradition in Cultural Performances
4. The Social Organization of Sanskritic Hinduism in Madras City
5. Urbanization and Cultural Change: Bhakti in the City
Part Three: Myth, Ritual, and Social Change6. The Radha-Krishna Bhajanas of Madras City
Part Four: Modernization and Traditionalization7. The Social Organization of Indian Civilization
8. Industrial Leadership, the Hindu Ethic, and the Spirit of Socialism
Appendix A: List of Companies
Appendix B: Analysis of Backgrounds of Candidates Applying for Industrial Employment, 1963
Part Five: Beyond Tradition and Modernity
9. Beyond Tradition and Modernity in Madras
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 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).
