Examine the historical roots of Indian society and identify the factors of continuity and change in it. (1988)
To speak of “roots” is to ask how India’s institutions were historically formed, not to assume they have stood still. The examination is best made institution by institution, because continuity and change are distributed unevenly across them — deep in marriage, shallow in occupation.
Caste
Its root is the varna scheme of the classical texts, filled out by jati formed as lineages, guilds and tribal groups were ranked on absorption into agrarian society. G. S. Ghurye (Caste and Race in India, 1932) catalogued its working features — segmental division, hierarchy, restricted commensality, civil and religious disabilities, hereditary occupation, endogamy. Change has removed the disabilities in law and largely broken the occupational tie; endogamy persists, which is why B. R. Ambedkar treated it as caste’s real mechanism, caste being for him an enclosed class.
Family and kinship
The root is the patrilineal, patrilocal joint household sanctioned by dharmashastra — but never uniform: Irawati Karve (Kinship Organisation in India, 1953) mapped distinct northern, central, southern and eastern kinship zones, with cross-cousin marriage normal in the south and prohibited in the north. Uma Chakravarti‘s account of Brahmanical patriarchy (1993) explains the hinge: caste purity requires control of women’s sexuality, so caste and gender are one system. Change is real but formal rather than moral — the National Family Health Survey of 2019-21 found about 58 per cent of households nuclear, with average household size 4.4, yet A. M. Shah (The Household Dimension of the Family in India, 1973) had already shown that a nuclear residence may carry wholly joint obligations.
Religion
Rooted in Vedic sacrifice, the Upanishadic turn inward and later devotional sects, the field has always been plural and absorptive. What has changed is the state’s relation to it: temple-entry legislation, statutory endowment boards, and most recently the Waqf (Amendment) Act of 2025, key provisions of which the Supreme Court stayed by interim order on 15 September 2025 — religious property now governed by administrative law and constitutional review.
The village and the agrarian order
Charles Metcalfe‘s “little republics” (1830) was administrative myth; the village was always linked to state, market and region. What endures is land as the basis of dominance — M. N. Srinivas‘s dominant caste. What has changed is who holds it: zamindari abolition, tenancy reform, the Green Revolution, and the Forest Rights Act of 2006, under which 25.11 lakh titles had been distributed against 51.23 lakh claims by 31 May 2025 — but only 1.22 lakh of these were community titles, so restitution has individualised a collective right.
The polity
The root is kingship in which ritual status and secular power were distinguished, the king protecting an order he did not author. The republic inverted this: sovereignty rests on numbers, and André Béteille‘s Sripuram material showed caste, class and power beginning to move independently of one another.
Conclusion
The roots are real; the institutions are not fossils. Change has been deepest where the state could legislate — property, office, disability — and shallowest where it reaches only through persuasion, which is marriage. That asymmetry, not any inherent Indian conservatism, is what produces the appearance of an unchanging society.