Discuss the factors responsible for this continuity and change. (1996)
As recorded, the question has no antecedent for “this”: it follows a stem on continuity and change in Indian society, and is answered on that reading. Here neither persistence nor transformation describes the record alone — institutions that have lasted three millennia have been repeatedly refilled with new content — so the two sets of factors are best separated before asking why they cohabit.
Factors sustaining continuity
- The caste-kinship-religion complex. Caste survives less through occupation than through endogamy, which is the load-bearing wall. Kinship regulates whom one marries, religion sanctifies the rule, and caste reproduces itself without needing the jajmani order that once carried it.
- A hierarchical value core. For Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus, 1966) the opposition of purity and pollution encompasses Indian society as an ideology, so that even opposition to hierarchy is expressed in its language. André Béteille‘s Caste, Class and Power (1965) had already qualified this: at Sripuram caste, class and power were distinct and separable, and it is their partial uncoupling that makes change possible.
- Agrarian property relations. Land remains the durable base of rural dominance. The Periodic Labour Force Survey of 2023-24 puts 46.1 per cent of India’s workforce in agriculture, up from 44.1 per cent in 2017-18 — the occupational base that carries caste has not dissolved but thickened.
- The family’s socialising power and Hinduism’s absorptive capacity, which historically converted dissent into a new sect rather than expelling it.
Factors driving change
- Colonial political economy. For A. R. Desai, British rule replaced a feudal with a capitalist mode of production: commercialised agriculture, a new law of property and contract, and with them new classes.
- Industrialisation, urbanisation and migration, which separate residence from occupation and work from caste.
- The Constitution and protective discrimination, which set legal equality against ritual inequality and converted subordination into a justiciable claim.
- Education, land reform and the Green Revolution, which created new proprietary peasant castes and an aspirant service class.
- Democratic mobilisation, which turned numerical strength into political capital and made subordinate castes electorally indispensable.
- Media and digital technology. India had about 109 crore internet subscribers by March 2026, with rural tele-density at 60.5 per cent — a common informational field that no earlier agent of change ever achieved.
Why continuity and change coexist
Yogendra Singh (Modernization of Indian Tradition, 1973) supplies the decisive distinction. Modernisation here has advanced at the structural level — law, administration, market, franchise — while the cultural level of hierarchy, holism and ascription is far less touched; tradition adapts by taking on modern functions rather than dissolving. M. N. Srinivas made the point at close range: much observed mobility is positional, units moving within an unaltered ladder. Desai adds the interested explanation — caste’s survival inside industrial capitalism cheapens and disciplines labour, so continuity is not mere inertia but useful to somebody.
Conclusion
Continuity and change in India are not two processes but one: the factors of change operate through institutions the factors of continuity have preserved, and each transformation is domesticated by the structure it enters. The unresolved question is Desai’s — whose interest is served when the ladder survives the reshuffle.