Srinivas and His Sociological Imagination * * I dedicate this article to Mrs Rukmini Srinivas who was my surrogate mother during a difficult and awkward phase of my teenage and early adulthood years.

This essay searches for the models of society and social change that emerge from Srinivas’ extensive contributions to sociology. This task also inevitably leads to his notions of theory and method. Srinivas’s academic studies of social change in India also shaped the course of social change because the concepts that he coined entered the vocabulary of politics and social life in India.