How has the process of social and cultural change been examined by Indian sociologists? Discuss their approaches. (1992)
Indian sociology has never studied change from a single vantage point. Its history is a sequence of methodological quarrels — over whether India is best read from its texts, its villages, its class structure, its value system or from below. Each approach opened one field of vision and closed another, and the discipline advanced by those blind spots being exposed.
The principal approaches
| Approach | Key figures | Organising concept | What it can see | What it cannot |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Indological / textual | G. S. Ghurye, Louis Dumont | Civilisation, varna, purity and pollution (Homo Hierarchicus, 1966) | Continuity, the ideological logic of hierarchy | Practice, power, non-Hindu and Dalit experience |
| Structural-functional / field view | M. N. Srinivas, S. C. Dube, McKim Marriott | Sanskritisation, Westernisation, dominant caste; universalisation and parochialisation | Observed mobility and local mechanisms of change | Exploitation, class, macro-structure |
| Marxist / dialectical | A. R. Desai, Ramkrishna Mukherjee | Mode of production, colonial capitalism, the capitalist state | Who gains, agrarian and industrial conflict | Ritual and culture as autonomous forces |
| Cultural-modernisation synthesis | Yogendra Singh | Structural/cultural and orthogenetic/heterogenetic sources | How tradition absorbs modern functions | Class; it names a sequence rather than a cause |
| Subaltern, Dalit and feminist | Ranajit Guha, Gail Omvedt, Uma Chakravarti, Gopal Guru | Insurgent consciousness, brahmanical patriarchy, difference | Agency of the excluded, caste-gender intersection | Broad structural synthesis; risk of fragmentation |
What each approach established
- Ghurye read change as disturbance to a civilisational continuity, a book view grounded in Sanskrit texts. Its strength was depth; its cost, an upper-caste lens.
- Srinivas answered with the field view. Social Change in Modern India (1966) gave the discipline its indispensable vocabulary — Sanskritisation as positional mobility that leaves the ladder standing, Westernisation as the distinct effect of British contact, and secularisation. Dube’s Indian Village (1955) and Marriott’s work in Village India (1955) grounded change ethnographically.
- Desai insisted change had a material cause: colonial capitalism produced new classes and thereby nationalism (Social Background of Indian Nationalism, 1948), and the post-1947 state protected propertied interests. Singh’s criticism is that the framework outruns its empirical support.
- Yogendra Singh attempted the synthesis, arguing modernisation entered at the macro level while caste, kin and village absorbed modern roles — a position echoed by Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967).
- Subaltern and Dalit-feminist scholarship supplied the correctives: Guha on peasant insurgency as conscious politics, Omvedt on anti-caste movements as democratic revolution, Chakravarti on brahmanical patriarchy as the joint reproduction of caste and gender, Guru’s argument that Dalit women speak differently. S. C. Dube (Modernization and Development, 1988) pressed the parallel case against a single Western paradigm.
Conclusion
The trajectory runs from text to field, from field to structure, and from structure to voice — each shift widening who counts as a subject of change. The forthcoming caste enumeration in Census 2027 will test all of them at once: whether caste is read as culture, as class, as value system or as claim depends entirely on which of these approaches one brings to the data.