Revisiting sankritisation in contemporary India

M.N Srinivas’ concept of Sanskritisation helped us understand that the emulation of ritual practices of people in the upper strata of the Hindu social order by those in the lower order is a critical route of social mobility in everyday life. It is in this context that the present article, delineates as to how Srinivas’s concept of ‘sanskritisation’ seen as a ‘Chronotope’ (or layered-process; used in the Bakhtian sense) helps us to (a) bring the debate out of the Brahmanical mould and hence entrench it into non-brahmanical hierarchies and (b) examine the change in community-interaction from being a mere emulation of established orders to that of setting up of alternatives. In other words, this paper tries to prod on the question as to why in recent years are caste communities articulating an independent cultural identity.