1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas (16 November 1916 – 30 November 1999)[1] was an Indian sociologist and social anthropologist.

That was in contrast to most of his contemporaries of the Bombay School, who focused primarily on a historical methodology to conduct research, mainly in Indology.

Although, he had already written a book on family and marriage in Mysore, his training there played a significant role in the development of his ideas.

[citation needed] It was the conjuncture between Sanskritic scholarship and the strategic concerns of the Western Bloc in the aftermath of the Second World War which largely shaped South Asian area studies in the United States.

The colonial assumptions about an unchanging Indian society led to the curious assemblage of Sanskrit studies with contemporary issues in most South Asian departments in the US and elsewhere.

[citation needed] By inclination, he was not given to utopian constructions: his ideas about justice, equality and eradication of poverty were rooted in his experiences on the ground.

His integrity in the face of demands that his sociology should take into account the new and radical aspirations was one of the most moving aspects of his writing.

[7] As part of his methodological practice, Srinivas strongly advocated ethnographic research based on Participant observation,[8] but his concept of fieldwork was tied to the notion of locally bounded sites.

In the case of Srinivas' writing in the 1950s, we find that he chooses to study the structure of relations arising between castes on the basis of these attributes.