Write short note : Obstacles to change in Indian society. (2005)
To call something an obstacle to change suggests inertia — a society too heavy to move. The useful question is different: who is advantaged by the present arrangement, and through what structures, beliefs and institutions do they defend it? Obstacles are best sorted into four kinds.
Structural obstacles
- Endogamy. Caste survives less through occupation than through control of marriage. Telangana’s 2024 caste survey of 3.55 crore people found inter-caste marriage at only 5.6 per cent, and at 3.3 per cent in rural areas.
- Patriarchy. Uma Chakravarti‘s account of brahmanical patriarchy explains why the two lock together: caste purity requires control of women’s sexuality, so an attack on gender hierarchy is read as an attack on caste itself.
- Land and poverty. Concentrated landholding sustains the dominant caste described by M. N. Srinivas, while informality removes the security on which risk-taking depends — 56.2 per cent of workers were self-employed and 20.2 per cent casual in 2025 (Periodic Labour Force Survey).
Cultural and ideological obstacles
- Max Weber (The Religion of India, 1916-17) argued that karma and rebirth supplied the most consistent theodicy ever constructed: present station is earned, and salvation lies in fulfilling caste duty, not in transforming the world. This is best used with its Indian correction — Milton Singer found Madras industrialists compartmentalising ritual and business rather than being paralysed by either, so the doctrine constrains rather than forbids.
- Ritual purity and the sacredness of custom. For Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus, 1966), purity and pollution encompass Indian society as an ideology, so even dissent is voiced in its idiom.
- Legal pluralism. Statute is routinely overridden by customary norm. Dowry has been illegal since 1961 yet featured in about 95 per cent of rural marriages surveyed over 1960–2008.
Institutional obstacles
Gunnar Myrdal (Asian Drama, 1968) named this the soft state: impressive legislation, weak enforcement, elites exempt in practice. Land-ceiling laws were drafted with loopholes and administered by legislators who were themselves landholders. The pattern endures — of 57,789 atrocity cases against Scheduled Castes recorded in 2023, only 31.9 per cent ended in conviction, and manual scavenging, prohibited since 1993, coexists with 498 sewer and septic-tank deaths reported to Parliament since 2019.
Reactive resistance
Change is not merely absorbed; it is fought.
- Orthodox mobilisation followed the Sati Regulation (1829) and the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act (1856), and the Age of Consent Act (1891) drew nationalist opposition.
- Khap panchayats still punish same-gotra and inter-caste marriage. In Shakti Vahini v. Union of India (2018) the Supreme Court held that class honour cannot smother an adult’s choice of partner and ordered preventive and punitive measures.
- Dominant peasant castes resisted tenancy reform through eviction and benami transfer, and later demanded quotas themselves — the Maratha reservation of 2018 was struck down in 2021 for breaching the fifty per cent ceiling.
Conclusion
None of this is inertia. Every obstacle listed has an identifiable beneficiary, and A. R. Desai‘s question — whose interest does continuity serve — is the right one. Resistance to change is itself a form of organised social action, which is why change has gone deepest where the state could legislate on property and office, and shallowest where it must persuade inside the household.