Describe the major aspects of traditional Hindu social organization. How far are they relevant for present day Indian society ? (2006)
Pandharinath H. Prabhu, in Hindu Social Organization (1940), showed that the Hindu social order was not a collection of customs but a single scheme in which dharma — duty appropriate to one’s birth-group and stage of life — coordinated the whole. Its relevance today is neither survival nor disappearance but uneven transformation, and must be stated in degrees.
The scheme in outline
- Varna and jati. A fourfold ritual ranking overlaid by thousands of endogamous, hereditary, ranked jatis. G. S. Ghurye, in Caste and Race in India (1932), specified the features: segmental division, hierarchy, restrictions on food and social intercourse, civil and religious disabilities, absence of free choice of occupation, and restrictions on marriage.
- Ashrama and purushartha. Life divided into brahmacharya, grihastha, vanaprastha and sannyasa, and human ends ordered as dharma, artha, kama and moksha — giving worldly striving a sanctioned place and a terminus.
- Karma and dharma supplied the moral logic: present station is earned, and its duties, discharged, secure release — so rank appeared just.
- Family and kinship. The patrilineal joint family as the property-holding and ritual unit; gotra exogamy and jati endogamy operating together; Irawati Karve‘s Kinship Organisation in India (1953) mapped their regional variation.
- Purity and pollution. Louis Dumont‘s Homo Hierarchicus (1966) held this opposition to be the encompassing ideology, subordinating power and wealth to ritual status.
- Sanskaras, the rites from birth to cremation, bound biography to the order.
What survives with little change
Endogamy is the most durable element. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found 64 per cent of Hindus saying it is very important to stop women in their community from marrying into another caste. Sanskaras still structure birth, marriage and death, and jati remains the effective unit of matrimony and network.
What has been transformed rather than lost
- Jati survives by changing function: as caste association, electoral bloc and claimant on the state — what M. N. Srinivas captured in dominant caste and the vote bank, and what the caste enumeration in the notified Census 2027 confirms.
- André Béteille‘s Sripuram study, Caste, Class and Power (1965), found caste, class and power separating into distinct dimensions; in “Homo Hierarchicus, Homo Equalis” (1979) he rejected Dumont’s ideology-first reading.
- The joint family gives way less than is claimed: A. M. Shah, in The Household Dimension of the Family in India (1973), showed that households pass through developmental cycles, and that jointness persists in obligation and property even where residence is nuclear.
- The ashrama scheme survives as idiom rather than as a life plan.
What has been legislated against
Article 17 abolished untouchability; the Hindu Code enactments of 1955–56 recast marriage and succession; the 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act, upheld in Vineeta Sharma (2020), made daughters coparceners by birth. Yet law records persistence as much as change: the Supreme Court in Sukanya Shantha (October 2024) struck down caste-based labour and segregation written into prison manuals.
Conclusion
As a normative order, traditional Hindu social organisation has been decisively displaced by constitutional equality. As a structure of association — whom one marries, trusts and eats with — it remains powerfully relevant. India has changed the hierarchy of values faster than the hierarchy of groups.