Indian Social Structure and Society: Unity in Diversity, Tribal, Rural and Urban
What this domain tests
India's composite social structure - what unifies a highly diverse society, and how tribal, rural and urban societies differ organisationally.
Core content
- Unity in diversity: diversity of language, religion, region, caste and ethnicity; unifying factors include the Constitution and single citizenship, the All India Services and bureaucracy, the market and railways, census classification, pilgrimage, cinema and mass media, and the national movement.
- Tribal society: characteristics - distinct culture and language, territoriality, endogamy, simple technology, community ownership, customary law. Assam examples: Bodos, Misings, Karbis, Dimasas, Rabhas; Sixth Schedule Autonomous District Councils; the plain/hill tribe distinction.
- Rural society: agrarian economy, caste hierarchy, jajmani-type patron–client ties, dominant caste, village exogamy, caste and village panchayats. Village studies: S.C. Dube's Indian Village (Shamirpet), Srinivas's The Remembered Village, Oscar Lewis's study of a Delhi village.
- Urban society: Wirth's urbanism as a way of life - size, density and heterogeneity producing secondary, impersonal, segmental ties; anonymity, occupational mobility, slums, migration, commuter life.
Worked example
"A Bodo village near a district town now has a tea shop, migrant labourers, a bank branch and a college-going daughter." Reading: still tribal in customary law and community land, but increasingly rural in agrarian occupation and urbanising in its secondary contacts, banking and education. The labels overlap; do not assume a tribe is untouched by change, nor treat rural and urban as watertight.
Traps
Treating "tribe" as a synonym for "backward" or "isolated"; reducing unity in diversity to "everyone is the same"; quoting Wirth without the three variables (size, density, heterogeneity); ignoring that rural and urban form a continuum.