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Published in
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences,
Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2001

CULTURE
Madhava Prasad
Department of Cultural Studies
The English and Foreign Languages University
Hyderabad, India

The article discusses studies of culture in South Asia, from colonial times to the present,
focusing on the changing meanings of the term, the contribution of various disciplines to
research in culture, and recent developments in cultural studies proper. In the South Asian
context, culture can mean the cultural heritage of the nation-states of the region, cultural
practices or ways of life, community identities, as well as culture in the aesthetic sense,
including literature and the arts.

Key Words

73 South Asian studies, culture

1. Colonial beginnings
The first elaboration of the idea of an Indian culture occurs in the colonial era, through the
combined efforts of western Indologists and Indian nationalists. The Indologists’
construction of an Indian tradition, based largely on textual sources, was picked up by the
nationalists, who divided the cultural realm into “two domains -- the material and the
spiritual”, conceding the West’s superiority in the former, while claiming sovereignty over
the “spiritual” domain, which bore the “‘essential’ marks of cultural identity” (Chatterjee
1993). This realm was to be out of bounds for colonial reformers, but at the same time, as
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Chatterjee has argued, the nationalists had their own project “to fashion a ‘modern’ national
culture that is nevertheless not Western.”

At this stage, however, terms like tradition and civilization were more prevalent, and the
meaning of culture was not fixed. In 1910, during the era of swadeshi (movement for the
promotion of native industry), Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, a cultural nationalist and art
historian who included even present-day Sri Lanka in his map of Indian culture, describes
culture as a “capacity for immediate and instinctive discrimination between good and bad
workmanship” and a “view of life essentially balanced”. Here culture is understood as a
historically developed human attribute, an assimilated refinement of taste that goes with a
certain settled, rooted way of life (“restlessness is essentially uncultured”), recalling the ideas
of William Morris (Coomaraswamy 1994). It is this meaning that seems to have prevailed
when the nationalists translated culture as sanskriti, a word now used in most of the major
Indian languages, while Rabindranath Tagore’s suggestion of krishti, which is closer to the
English word in its derivation from krishi or cultivation, never gained acceptance even in his
native Bengal, in spite of his being the most influential cultural figure of his time.

In its substantive definition the national culture included the classical heritage in the arts,
traditions of education (the guru-sishya parampara), family structure (the joint family was
celebrated as quintessentially Indian), and the deep-rooted customs and practices of village
India. The twentieth century witnessed a widespread campaign for the reform, rediscovery
and revival of the classical arts. Thus a traditional temple dance around which a system of
courtesanship had developed was taken and “purified” to create “Bharatanatyam”, one of the
currently widely practiced national dance forms. The textual tradition was re-visited in the
light of orientalist scholarship and selectively annexed to the national cause, with the
Bhagavadgita emerging as a sort of national text, embodying the spiritual distinction of
Indian civilization. The search for a “living tradition” which would supplement the classical
heritage led to the celebration and appropriation of folk arts and village crafts (Guha-
Thakurta 1992). Early nationalist constructions of India’s cultural heritage tended to focus
exclusively on Hindu achievements, ignoring the Islamic heritage, on the basis of an
ideological negation of Muslim rule as the cause of decline of Hindu civilization.

Intellectuals like Rabindranath Tagore and the progressives in the national movement on the
other hand tried to construct a more inclusive cultural history, locating themselves in the
modern present and acknowledging the irreversible re-making of Indian culture and society
by colonial intervention. Jawaharlal Nehru, who became India’s first prime minister, was a
key figure in this project but it was a sociologist, D.P. Mukherjee, who produced the first
extended reflection on the idea of a “modern Indian culture”. In the forties, when Mukherjee
wrote his book, the cultural climate seems not to have been very hospitable to such an idea,
given the widespread preoccupation with the revival and preservation of the disappearing
cultural heritage of the nation. Mukherjee’s project in the book is to reflect on the
contemporary cultural situation in the soon-to-be-independent nation, to inventory the
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cultural, social and intellectual heritage and its effectivity in the present, as well as to
produce a concept of the present moment as constituted by a diversity of forces, traditions,
and processes. Uncharacteristically for his time, Mukherjee, a partisan of a socialist future for
India, distances himself from any approach to culture that privileges nationalism, and insists
on a sociological account of culture as “the whole social process” (Mukherjee 1948).
Rejecting the idea of culture as heritage, he locates modern culture in a society marked by
“the artifice of an unreal class-structure”. He attacks the idea of India as a land prone to the
mystic and the spiritual, and is, throughout, preoccupied with the most pressing issue of the
time: that of the co-existence of Hindus and Muslims, and other minorities, within a modern
nation-state.

2. Tradition and Modernity

The 1940s and 1950s are a crucial period for the emergence of culture as an object of study.
In this period we see the triumph of social anthropology over sociology as the disciplinary
home of culture studies, and in consequence, the decline of Mukherjee’s idea of a modern
Indian culture as defined by contemporary struggles between social forces, whether
traditional, entrenched, emergent or imposed. The overwhelming sense of the contemporary,
which favored a strictly sociological approach, was soon replaced by a more historicist
approach, as the dualism of Tradition and Modernity, by far the most influential paradigm in
South Asian cultural studies, took hold.

The key figures in this shift were M.N. Srinivas and Milton Singer, an associate of Robert
Redfield. In 1952, Srinivas published Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India,
a work which, Singer asserts, demonstrated how the social anthropological method could be
applied to a Great Tradition. It was Redfield who proposed, in his project for the study of
civilizations at Chicago (Srinivas had been in California), the fundamental distinction
between Great and Little Traditions, roughly equivalent to “higher” and “lower” orders of
cultural practice, the former more reflective, more systematic, and textually elaborated, while
the latter is considered to be more spontaneous, fragmented, primitive. Until then the
anthropological method had only been employed in the study of the so-called primitive
societies, but Redfield was proposing a research project of global sweep to study the cultural
heritage of humanity. Singer undertook the Indian portion of the study, concentrating on the
south Indian city of Madras, later published under the title When a Great Tradition
Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization, with a foreword by M.N.
Srinivas. Singer argued that the Indian Great Tradition (the use of the singular was to attract
criticism) “was culturally continuous with the Little Traditions to be found in the diverse
regions, villages, castes and tribes” and that therefore, “even the acceptance of ‘modernizing’
and ‘progress’ ideologies does not result in linear forms of social and cultural change but
may result in the ‘traditionalizing’ of apparently ‘modern’ innovations’ (Singer 1972). The
most significant element in this formulation is the suggestion that a civilization with a
tradition evolved over the longue duree acquired the strength to assimilate ideas and changes
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coming from outside, and to convert them into organic elements of its own make-up.
One of the most influential and controversial concepts in this new disciplinary thrust was
Srinivas’s “Sanskritization” which, together with “westernization” served to explain social
change in modern India. Sanskritization, a process by which the lower orders of traditional
caste society aspire for a higher social status by adopting the customs and manners of the
upper castes, was seen as one of the ways in which the continuity of Little and Great
Traditions was maintained. Singer’s concept of “cultural performance” illustrates both the
notion of cultural continuity between Great and Little traditions and that of the absorption of
modern influences. Singer defines a cultural performance in the broadest possible manner,
including within its ambit plays, concerts, and lectures, and the cinema and radio, as well as
“prayers, ritual readings and recitations, rites and ceremonies, festivals, and all those things
we usually classify under religion and ritual rather than with the cultural and artistic”(Singer
1972). In other words, the anthropologist’s, the Indologist’s and the aestheticist’s definitions
of culture have here been fused into one, to constitute a seamless continuum of culture,
object of the new social anthropology. The disruptions and displacements brought about by
colonial modernity, which were foregrounded in Mukherjee’s sociology of the present, are
now located as challenges which the Great Tradition takes in its stride. A. K. Ramanujan, a
pioneer of Indian folklore studies, also based in Chicago, rejected the Great and Little
Tradition dichotomy and asserted that “cultural traditions in India are indissolubly plural”
and organised according to the principles of context-sensitivity and reflexivity (Ramanujan
1999).

3. Culture and development

Around the sixties, the dualism “culture and development/ modernization” begins to vie for
space with its elder cousin Tradition/Modernity. Culture and development acquired wide
currency at a more grassroots level, as development projects, undertaken by the nation state
and international agencies, began to transform the territory. While the Tradition/Modernity
paradigm was prevalent among Indologists, anthropologists and the nationalist intelligentsia,
“culture and development” rallies a wide range of social science disciplines including
economics, political science, sociology, gender studies, as well as environmentalists and
other grassroots activists and NGOs. Culture and development is the decolonizing,
modernizing nation-state’s version of tradition/modernity. Culture in this framework can be
a hindrance to development, as in Amartya Sen’s famous formulation about the “missing
women,” who are the victims of cultural constraints on women’s access to food.
Superstitions and prejudices nourished by entrenched cultural practices can come in the way
of educating illiterate people in family planning, health, education, hygiene and other
developmental concerns. Culture can also be a resource: traditional cultural forms can be
usefully employed to spread developmental messages. Ecological debates have thrown up
notions such as “masculinist forestry” and turned to women as good agents in preserving the
environment (Dietrich in Menon 1999). Thirdly, there is also the question of “cultural
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survival”, cultural rights of minorities, tribes and other groups, which come under threat from
development’s blind onward march and the imposition from above, of western models of
linear progress and development.

The most sustained critique of development and modernization from a point of view that
affirmed the validity and continuity of Indian traditions was undertaken by Ashis Nandy.
Recouping a Gandhian “critical traditionalism”, Nandy attacked the deracinating effects of
western rationality, individualism, and other ideologies adopted by the Nehruvian state and
the middle class intelligentsia in its developmental campaign. Against the western tendency
to emphasize rupture as the precondition of change, Nandy, following Gandhi, emphasizes
continuity. Against the rigid separation between male and female, between individual and
individual, Nandy argues that fluid identities and ambiguous selves are more
characteristically Indian. The imperative of cultural difference and diversity, of multiple
rationalities, also gives rise to a critique of western science and its hegemonic universalism,
in the work of Nandy, Shiv Vishwanathan and others. The assertion of cultural specificity
occurs in other fields of knowledge as well. Thus Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst, has argued
for a culture-sensitive psychoanalytic practice and has elaborated his own analytic picture of
the Hindu psyche. There is a substantial body of psychoanalytic readings of South Asian
culture, including the work of Girindrashekhar Bose, the first Indian analyst, Philip Spratt,
Erik Erikson, Gananath Obeyesekere, and Nandy (see Vaidyanathan and Kripal 1999). There
is sometimes a tendency to culturalist reduction in these writings, producing a domesticated
psychoanalysis from which the fundamental alienation that psychoanalysis posits at the
threshold of human subjectivity is wished away. More recently, Lacanian psychoanalysis has
found favor among film studies scholars.

Nandy’s rise to eminence as an ideologue of decolonization roughly coincides with the

emergence of “postcolonial studies”, galvanized by the publication of Edward Said’s
Orientalism in 1978. In India, Saidian postcolonial studies as well as studies of development
undertaken in the social sciences were influenced by Nandy’s discourse. Postcolonial
theorists like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha also shared this space of the
critique of colonial reason. Apart from this, another important development was the
emergence of Subaltern Studies, a series of volumes to which mainly historians contributed,
in which colonial and nationalist historiography was critiqued and a “subaltern history,” of
ordinary people, of tribal and lower caste groups, during colonial rule and after, was
undertaken. Culture plays a very important role in this project, especially when there is an
emphasis on the spontaneity of “peasant insurgency” and tribal uprising, and the question of
the subaltern mentality.. Postcolonial studies, the Subaltern Studies project, and the critique
of development and modernization by Nandy and others, together constitute the legacy of
cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s.

4. Globalization and Local Cultures

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In the 1990s, the terms shift again, as globalization arrives on the scene. In “Globalization
and local cultures” we have the third and most recent version of the Tradition/Modernity
paradigm, where again the emphasis is on questions of cultural survival in the face of
globalization, the resilience of local cultures and their ability to “consume modernity” on
their own terms. Arjun Appadurai has offered a comprehensive theory of globalization and
the emergence of what he terms “public culture”. Appadurai treats culture as “the dimension
of difference”, of identity based on difference, emerging after the rupture of globalization, in
a world where he considers nation-states to be on their last legs.. Global relations and
movements, or “flows,” have a more decisive bearing on human lives today than national
identification. Others are less sanguine about the effects of globalization, and more skeptical
about the nation-state’s imminent demise. Appadurai is confident about the ability of
societies to assimilate modernity, which is what globalization transports: although we have
travelled far, we are still within Singer’s paradigm where traditional societies respond to and
assimilate modernity in their own ways.

The three variants of a paradigm that have been examined so far all share one thing in
common: they approach the question of Indian culture on an international plane. In each case,
one term in the opposition refers to a force, a process – modernity,
development/modernization, globalization – which is of extraneous provenance, while the
other term indicates the culture which is at the receiving end. None of them was developed
with specific reference to India, which is only one of the sites to which they are applied. The
concept of culture employed in all three variants is also predominantly anthropologically
defined.

5. National Culture

Within India, other paradigms of cultural analysis have devoted themselves to reading and
analyzing the stuff of national culture. Some of them emphasize a distinctive native culture
with its own rationality, its sense of self and strategies of survival. There are also attempts to
forge an indigenous conceptual series for the study of Indian culture, to reconnect with
indigenous intellectual traditions after the “amnesia” of colonialism. Beginning in the mid-
1980s and throughout the 1990s, as questions of globalization assumed importance, the
domestic politics of communalism, which resulted in popular mobilization and widespread
violence against minorities, led to a fresh attempt to re-examine the past. As the Hindu
nationalists put forth versions of history that supported their political activities, liberal and
left intellectuals, particularly historians, re-visited the past to re-assert the plurality and
ineluctable syncretism and hybridity of India’s cultural heritage (Thapar 2000 ). The question
of multiculturalism, and of cultural rights, also became more urgent as cultural and ethnic
conflict was seen as threatening the secular-democratic fabric of the nation-state.

Social anthropologists have noted the difficulty in the Indian instance, of separating a sphere
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of culture from those of religion, community, caste, etc. Caste has been a central category for
understanding Indian society, from Dumont’s notion of homo hierarchicus to more recent
studies of caste conflict in a contemporary setting, where caste has more to do with cultural
and political identity, than with social position. This shift to caste as identity brings it into the
realm of culture, and various studies have asserted, against the idea of a universal dynamic of
Sanskritization, that caste groups enjoy a measure of cultural autonomy and strive to
maintain their cultural identity through the formation of networks across regional and
language barriers. Dalits’ (literally, “the oppressed,” a term now used for the lowest castes in
the caste hierarchy, especially the “untouchables”) struggles for social justice have included
literary movements and other forms of cultural expression, as well as attempts, under the
broad rubric of folklore studies, to record and study the traditional cultural forms prevalent
among these groups.

Feminist scholarship has engaged with questions of culture at many levels (see Menon 1999
and Thapan 1997). For nationalists woman was the guarantor of cultural identity and
continuity. In the confrontations between the nationalists and the colonial government, and
after Independence, in the confrontations that arose between religious groups and the nation-
state, women became the object of reformist attention and patriarchal protectionism. Two
recent debates arising out of events in the 1980s that have had a lasting impact on the
character of the national polity have posed a challenge to feminist scholarship, raising
questions of the competing claims of women’s and minority cultural rights and the law, and
of female agency in traditional practices that are offensive to a modern, secular outlook.
These relate to an incident of sati (self-immolation by a widow on her husband’s funeral
pyre, a practice that was thought to have died out) in a village of Rajasthan, and the case of
Shah Bano, a divorced Muslim woman who filed a suit for maintenance from her former
husband, leading to a debate about the competing claims of the state and the community’s
own institutions to handle such disputes. Using these incidents from the 1980s and the
legislative moves that followed each, the anthropologist Veena Das has investigated how “a
web of creative or destructive tensions in the matter of cultural rights” determines relations
between communities, the state, and the individual (in Menon 1999). Feminist scholarship
has shown how communities deploy culture as a means to assert the supremacy of
community rights over women’s rights as citizens in a democratic polity. At the same time,
on the Uniform Civil Code issue, which has been intensely debated in recent years, feminists
have become more sensitive to community laws which, in certain instances, may be more
beneficial to women, in opposition to the Hindu nationalist deployment of the discourse of
citizenship to press for a civil code that will prevail over all other culturally specific laws (see
Menon 1999).

The realm of Indian politics is also continuous with that of contemporary popular culture, in
particular the culture of popular cinema. South Indian cinema culture has been the breeding
ground of some of the most powerful political leaders to have emerged in the states of Tamil
Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Sociologists have studied the ways in which the
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unique film cultures of these regions have functioned as a platform for electoral politics. The
fan clubs of these popular film stars are today an important feature of everyday political and
social life, in some cases emerging as militant frontrunners in campaigns for a linguistic
national identity.
Meanwhile, the impact of the Birmingham school of cultural studies and a reconstructed
anthropology’s search for new objects of research have spurred cultural studies projects in
India, notably studies of communities of reception for the popular film, popular cultures of
photography, music, etc. Film has come to be seen as the emblematic cultural institution of
modern India, and in recent years film studies has acquired legitimacy as a discipline, with a
multidisciplinary resource base. The importance of globalization notwithstanding, there is a
distinct national sphere of cultural studies, which draws upon many of the ideas and
paradigms mentioned above, but locates its concerns within the national space. One instance
is the studies of aesthetic modernism Post-colonial societies attract development and
modernization approaches, where cultural issues are subsumed under sociological, economic
and political questions. Studies of modernism, on the other hand, are concerned with the
emergence of artistic practices and ideologies which participate in the international modernist
movement while speaking from within (though not only about) their own national space.
Modern literature, cinema, theatre, architecture, painting and other fine arts have been the
object of this critical appreciation (Kapoor 2000), with the Journal of Arts and Ideas serving
as an important forum for the theorization of an Indian modernism.

In the contemporary field of cultural studies, the traditional disciplines like anthropology are
joined by new discourses like postcolonial studies, feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics,
post-structuralism and postmodernism (see Niranjana et al 1993; Spivak 1988).
Ethnographies of cultural communities, including traditional ones as well as newer
consumerist types of community, feminist critiques of gendered cultural forms and
expressions, and of patriarchal ideologies, film and television studies, and studies of other
modern, technology-dependent cultural forms, caste politics, popular religion, histories of
modern and popular art, political cultures, these are some of the types of cultural study being
currently undertaken in India at present, by scholars belonging to a range of social science
and humanities disciplines (See Manuel 1993, Niranjana et al 1993, Thapan 1997,
Vasudevan 2000). The concept of culture has undergone a definite shift of emphasis from
ancient heritage and primitive ways of life to the more unstable and complex practices and
processes of contemporary existence. The past co-exists with the present, as it does in any
social formation, but not in a historicist time-space. Cultural studies increasingly regards the
present moment as a synchronic dimension, where all constituent elements, whether ancient
or recent, foreign or indigenous, constitute a symbolic network with its own unique
properties, making it radically contemporary (Dhareshwar 1995). Forging the tools for
analyzing this complex cultural space is the task of the future.
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