Do you think that in a society like India, orthogenetic changes take place through differentiation? Do you observe continuities in the orthogenetic process? Elaborate your answer with suitable examples. (2025)
Robert Redfield and Milton Singer separated change a civilisation generates from within its own value system — orthogenetic — from change imposed by outside contact. Yogendra Singh carried the pair into Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973) to show that Indian tradition alters without ceasing to be itself. Differentiation, in Émile Durkheim‘s and Talcott Parsons‘ sense, is the splitting of one structure into specialised units that separately do what it once did together. My answer to both questions is yes, and the two are connected: orthogenetic change in India works through differentiation, and precisely because it does, it carries the old value core forward inside new shells.
Why differentiation is the orthogenetic mechanism
Orthogenetic change cannot import an alien principle; it can only rearrange what the tradition already holds, and the cheapest rearrangement is fission and specialisation. Singh’s four attributes of Indian tradition — hierarchy, holism, continuity and transcendence — supply the material; differentiation redistributes functions without confronting the attributes.
The Indian evidence
- Caste. M. N. Srinivas‘ Sanskritisation is differentiation at the level of the jati: a segment splits off, adopts a purer ritual style and claims higher rank. The jati differentiates further into a ritual body, a welfare-and-education trust and an electoral bloc. Rajni Kothari (Caste in Indian Politics, 1970) called this the politicisation of caste: politics finds in caste a ready organisational cluster and reshapes it to its own design. Bihar’s caste survey of 2 October 2023, counting Extremely Backward Classes at 36.01 per cent and Other Backward Classes at 27.12 per cent, is a ritual order re-enumerated as a bloc structure.
- Sect formation. Bhakti, the Lingayat movement, the Arya Samaj (1875) and the Swaminarayan sampradaya each split off with a distinct theology, membership roll and property, yet none left the civilisational frame. Temple endowments have travelled the same road into statutory boards with audited accounts and professional managers.
- The joint family. Its fused functions — production, credit, worship, welfare, dispute settlement — have devolved to firms, banks, temples, the state and the courts, leaving a residual unit specialised in socialisation and affect.
Continuities within the orthogenetic process
Differentiation here has not dissolved ascription into achievement; it has rehoused ascription in achievement-shaped containers.
- Hierarchy survives the split. In State of Punjab v Davinder Singh (2024) the Supreme Court permitted sub-classification within the Scheduled Castes — gradation reproduced inside the very category designed to abolish it.
- Endogamy is the least differentiated institution. Large household surveys have consistently put inter-caste marriages at roughly five per cent of all Indian marriages: the marriage market holds while occupation, residence and worship specialise, and a caste association with a registered office still argues its claim in varna genealogy.
- New sites reproduce the old order. S. Shakthi‘s study of caste in the Indian technology profession (South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2023) found a “corporate Brahminism” in which one firm’s senior tier was almost wholly Brahmin while its support staff were overwhelmingly Scheduled Caste.
Srinivas’ distinction fits exactly: much of what looks like transformation is positional change, movement of units, not structural change in the ladder. Singer’s compartmentalisation (When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 1972), where Madras industrialists partitioned ritual and work rather than choosing between them, is the same mechanism at the level of the person.
Conclusion
Both answers are affirmative, and they are one answer. Differentiation is how Indian tradition changes without rupture: every specialised unit it produces is also a vessel for a value it has not abandoned. That is Singh’s real finding, and its limit is the one A. R. Desai pressed — naming a continuity is not explaining it, and who gains from caste’s survival into a differentiated economy remains the harder question.