Write short note: Social movements and social mobility. (1993)
Social mobility is the movement of individuals or groups between positions in a stratification system — the vocabulary is Pitirim Sorokin’s. A social movement, for M. S. A. Rao, is sustained collective mobilisation through formal or informal organisation, guided by ideology and oriented to changing the existing system. The two are linked causally in both directions: blocked or uneven mobility generates movements, and movements in turn convert individual mobility into group mobility.
Mobility as the cause of movements
- Ted Gurr (Why Men Rebel, 1970) and Rao, in Social Movements and Social Transformation (1979), locate the trigger in relative deprivation assessed against a reference group — not in absolute poverty. Movements erupt where aspiration has risen faster than opportunity.
- André Béteille’s Caste, Class and Power (1965) supplies the Indian mechanism. At Sripuram in Tanjore, caste, class and power had begun to come apart: non-Brahmins acquired land and political office while ritual rank lagged. That disjunction, not deprivation as such, fed the non-Brahmin and Self-Respect mobilisations.
- D. N. Dhanagare made the same point agrarian: the middle peasantry, mobile enough to have resources and blocked enough to have grievance, led India’s major peasant struggles.
Movements as the cause of mobility
- Movements shift whole strata rather than individuals. Jyotirao Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj (1873), E. V. Ramasamy’s Self-Respect movement and B. R. Ambedkar’s Dalit movement all rejected the high-caste reference group rather than emulating it, seeking mobility by dismantling the scale itself.
- The backward classes movement translated numbers into entitlement, culminating in the Mandal recommendations implemented from 1990 — mobility secured through the state rather than through imitation.
- T. K. Oommen notes the price: mobilisation typically ends in institutionalisation, as charisma hardens into caste associations and parties that then service their own élite.
What the linkage does not deliver
- M. N. Srinivas conceded that Sanskritisation yields only positional change, leaving the hierarchy intact — mobility without structural transformation.
- Partha Mukherji therefore grades movements by change orientation — accumulative, alternative, transformatory — and most Indian movements are accumulative.
- The evidence is sobering: endogamy holds, with large-sample survey work placing inter-caste marriages at roughly five per cent of all Indian marriages, and the Census 2027 schedule notified in August 2026 restores caste enumeration for the first time since 1931.
Conclusion
Mobility and movements are mutually constitutive: uneven mobility supplies the grievance, movements supply the organisation that converts it into collective ascent. Whether that ascent alters the structure — as Ghanshyam Shah insists we must ask — depends on whether a movement claims a better place in the hierarchy or repudiates the hierarchy itself.