Define social movement. Elucidate the role of reformist movements in social change. (150 words) (2013)
A social movement is a sustained collective mobilisation, through formal or informal organisation, oriented towards changing or resisting change in the social order. M. S. A. Rao treats ideology, mobilisation and organisation as its components — what separates a movement from a riot.
What reformist movements are
They accept the existing order as legitimate and seek change within it — through the press, courts, legislature and education, not force. David F. Aberle (The Peyote Religion among the Navaho, 1966) terms them reformative: the social order is the target, the change partial.
Their role in social change
- Law: Raja Rammohan Roy‘s Brahmo Samaj secured abolition of sati (1829); Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar‘s campaign, the Widow Remarriage Act (1856).
- Consciousness: Jyotirao Phule‘s Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) and E. V. Ramasamy Periyar‘s Self-Respect Movement made caste a public question.
- Today: the Madiga Reservation Porata Samithi (1994) campaigned three decades for sub-categorisation of Scheduled Castes, held permissible in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024).
Conclusion
Possible only where dissent is tolerated, they change society incrementally. Their ceiling shows — Crime in India 2023 recorded 57,789 atrocity cases against Scheduled Castes — yet cumulative reform widens citizenship.