With reference to their understanding of the Indian village, compare the perspective of MN Srinivas and SC Dube.

MN Srinivas in his understanding of Indian villages, adopted the structure functional tradition of British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. He studied the village as a cohesive, stable whole with the component parts inter-related [eg: caste-class relationship] and influencing each other. For eg: caste influences power structure in many villages.

Through his study of Rampura village, he gave concepts like Sanskritisation, dominant caste etc whereby he spoke of mobility within caste system and how it comes to influence the overall social life in the village. His work is based on field study tradition using empiricism and comparative approach. He is however, criticised for bias towards upper sections, lack of empirical support, inadequate concern for lower castes, lack of originality in concepts, etc in his work.

SC Dube in his study of Indian villages advocates for studying facts for itself and not for fitting it into theories. Unlike Srinivas, he stays away from leaning toward Hindutva ideology as he emphasises on value-free sociology like Weber. His approach involving study of various village aspects like caste, class, power, etc makes uses of interpretive, objective and empirical analysis.