Describe the process of modernization in India. Discuss the factors that have impeded this process. (2003)
Yogendra Singh, in Modernisation of Indian Tradition (1973), treats modernisation not as Westernisation but as the spread of a rational and universalistic attitude to issues. He reads Indian change along two axes — structural (law, administration, occupation) against cultural (values), and orthogenetic (generated within the tradition) against heterogenetic (imported by contact). On that grid India’s modernisation is real but lopsided: advanced at the macro level, shallow at the micro.
The process, in phases
- Pre-colonial contact, including Islamic contact, produced change that was largely cultural and worked through the tradition’s own idiom. M. N. Srinivas’s Sanskritisation (Social Change in Modern India, 1966) is the type case — positional mobility that leaves the hierarchy itself intact.
- Colonial contact was heterogenetic and eventually structural. It worked on law, land and learning rather than on ritual: codified personal law, the Zamindari, Ryotwari and Mahalwari settlements, a rational-legal bureaucracy and judiciary, English education after 1835, railways, the press and the professions. Singh’s crucial qualification is that this growth was selective and segmental — after 1857 the British largely left family, caste and village untouched, so the modern order sat above the micro-structures rather than transforming them.
- The nationalist phase generated its own modernising political culture. Singh reads Mahatma Gandhi as an orthogenetic response — a modern mass politics in an unmistakably traditional idiom.
- After 1947 the state became the agent of modernisation: adult franchise, the Constitution’s equality guarantees, planned industrialisation, land reform, Community Development, elected panchayats and reformed personal law. Post-1991 liberalisation added services, markets and a digital infrastructure now reaching 1,092.79 million internet subscribers (TRAI, Q1 2026).
The impediments
- Structural discontinuity. Modernisation arrived at the top without dissolving what lay beneath. Caste did not retreat; it took up modern work. Census 2027, notified in August 2026, will enumerate caste for the first time since 1931 — an index of how central the category remains.
- The resilience of the value-themes. Singh identifies hierarchy, holism, continuity and transcendence as the organising values of Indian tradition. Each pulls against the universalism modernity requires. About 5% of Indian marriages are inter-caste (National Council of Applied Economic Research data), and Naveen Bharathi, Deepak Malghan and Andaleeb Rahman found block-level caste dissimilarity indices of 0.51 to 0.71 across five metros — the city has not dissolved caste, only rescaled it.
- Uneven and elite-captured reach. Urban internet penetration stands at 126.80 per 100 against rural 48.31 (TRAI, Q1 2026); female labour-force participation is 40.0% against male 79.1% (PLFS 2025); 56.2% of workers remain self-employed. Modern institutions cluster where advantage already is.
- Modernisation mistaken for modernity. Dipankar Gupta (Mistaken Modernity, 2000) sets four tests — dignity of the individual, universalistic norms, achievement over birth, accountability in public life — and finds consumption standing in for all four.
- The political economy objection. A. R. Desai held that modernisation theory smuggles in capitalist development as a value premise, leaving the question of who gains unasked.
Conclusion
India has modernised its structures far more thoroughly than its social relations — arguably modernisation without modernity. The impediment is less tradition’s stubbornness than the sequence Singh identified: change entered from outside and above, and the micro-order learnt to perform modern functions without surrendering its ascriptive logic.