Social Change in India: Processes and Factors
What this domain tests
Change in structure and institutions, and the four named processes in the Indian context - modernisation, westernisation, sanskritisation, secularisation - as defined by Indian sociologists.
Core content
- Factors of change: technological (Green Revolution, transport, IT, mobile telephony), demographic, ideological, educational, legal (constitutional reform, Hindu Code), economic (market, globalisation), and social movements.
- Theories: evolutionary, cyclical (Sorokin), conflict (Marx), functionalist (Durkheim's division of labour, Parsons's differentiation).
- Modernisation: Yogendra Singh's "Modernization of Indian Tradition" - growth of achievement, rationality and universalism; must be distinguished from mere adoption of things Western.
- Westernisation (Srinivas): adoption of Western institutions, values and technology - not only British, and not necessarily progressive.
- Sanskritisation (Srinivas): a lower caste or tribe adopting the ritual practices, deities and lifestyle of "twice-born" castes to claim higher status. It can raise a group's position but leaves the caste order intact.
- Secularisation (Srinivas): decline in the hold of ritual and supernatural explanations; a process, not a policy of atheism. Indian state secularism means equal respect for all religions, not indifference to religion.
Worked example
"A tribal community in Assam begins worshipping Hindu deities, gives up pig-rearing and liquor, and employs a Brahmin priest." Analysis: this is sanskritisation - imitation of twice-born practice as a status claim. It is also, in Srinivas's scheme, a form of mobility, but it does not produce a class or structural transformation. If the community instead adopted English education and modern occupations, we would label that westernisation, and the spread of rational-legal bureaucracy would be modernisation.
Traps
Calling all change "modernisation"; treating westernisation as equivalent to modernisation; describing sanskritisation as conversion or as structural change; defining secularisation as anti-religiousness; omitting that these are processes acting simultaneously.