Examine the features of continuity and change of Indian society in historical perspective. (1992)
Read historically, Indian society yields neither the changeless order of the Orientalists nor a clean sequence of ruptures. What recurs is a distinctive pattern: the organising principle survives while the form in which it is expressed is repeatedly rebuilt. Examining that pattern epoch by epoch is the only way to separate genuine features from appearances.
Ancient: from fluid ranking to birth-ascribed order
Romila Thapar has shown that the fourfold varna of the late Vedic hymns was a normative scheme, and that the working order grew instead through jati — lineages, guilds, craft groups and assimilated tribes ranked as they were absorbed into an expanding agrarian state. D. D. Kosambi tied that absorption to the spread of plough agriculture. The ashrama scheme likewise prescribed a life-cycle that few lived. The feature here is foundational: a textual model of order and a lived order of local groups, each shaping the other without coinciding.
Challenge, absorption and composite culture
The sramanic movements attacked ritual authority and birth-rank; Brahmanism answered not by suppression but by absorption, so that dissent returned as a sect within the fold. The medieval centuries repeated the pattern at greater scale. Islamic rule brought a rival theology and a new ruling class, and Sufi and Bhakti currents produced a genuinely composite culture in language, music, architecture and devotion. Yet caste-like ranking spread into the new communities — Imtiaz Ahmad‘s work on status distinctions among Indian Muslims records this — which is continuity of the principle in an unfamiliar form.
Colonial hardening and constitutional rupture
- Enumeration. From the census of 1871-72 caste was counted, ranked and officially fixed. Bernard S. Cohn called this the objectification of Indian society, and Nicholas Dirks (Castes of Mind, 2001) argued that caste as a single all-India system of political identity is substantially a colonial artefact.
- Property and education. The Permanent Settlement and ryotwari tenures made land alienable and created new proprietary interests; English education produced a class that reinterpreted tradition in modern terms.
- The constitutional break. Abolition of untouchability, adult franchise, reservation and zamindari abolition attacked hierarchy at its legal root — a change of principle, not merely of form. Even colonial legal scaffolding has now gone: the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, in force from 1 July 2024, replaced the Indian Penal Code of 1860.
The features extracted
| Persisting | Transformed |
|---|---|
| Endogamy and the jati as the unit of belonging | Occupation detached from caste; jajmani dependence replaced by wage labour |
| Hierarchy as an organising idiom | Its currency shifted from ritual purity to numbers, land and office |
| Absorptive capacity of the religious field | Dissent now expressed as constitutional claim rather than sect |
| The village as a moral reference | The village as an economic unit dissolved into wider markets |
M. N. Srinivas‘s distinction between positional and structural change identifies what is at stake: the first three rows record positional adjustment, the last a structural one.
Conclusion
The historical record supports a single verdict: continuity in India has generally been continuity of the principle with change in the form, and the one authentic structural break is the constitutional one — which is why its incompleteness, rather than tradition’s tenacity, is the live sociological problem.