How far is the structural functional perspective helpful in understanding changes in contemporary Indian society ? (2010)
The perspective is helpful up to a clearly marked point. It remains the best available grammar for describing how Indian institutions interlock and how the system absorbs pressure; it is progressively less useful as change is driven by conflict, coercion and the market. Put as a degree: it explains persistence and adjustment well, direction and rupture poorly — and the second has been the larger part of Indian experience since liberalisation.
Where it still works
- Latent functions. Robert K. Merton’s distinction remains the sharpest tool available for India. Caste networks supply credit, contacts, migration chains and marriage markets — consequences neither intended nor acknowledged, and invisible to a purely normative account. Reservation’s latent function has been the making of a Dalit middle class.
- Change absorbed by structure. M. N. Srinivas’s Sanskritisation still describes status claims by mobile backward and tribal groups, and remains positional change. His sharper observation holds too: pollution rules collapse in a crowded bus while caste consolidates as a political bloc — practice secularises while identity intensifies.
- Dominant caste still names agrarian power in much of the countryside, now expressed through land, numbers and electoral leverage rather than ritual rank.
Where it works only in amended form
Talcott Parsons’s structural differentiation reads urbanisation, occupational specialisation and the smaller household plausibly. But it required correction to fit India: Yogendra Singh (Modernization of Indian Tradition, 1973) found structural modernisation accompanied by cultural continuity — modern institutions run in traditional idioms. Merton’s dysfunction and functional alternatives likewise salvage analytic power, allowing state welfare and the wage to be read as replacements for jajmani rather than as its decay.
Where it fails
- Conflict is constitutive, not a disturbance. The NCRB recorded 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes and 12,960 against Scheduled Tribes in 2023. Atrocity is the hierarchy working, not malfunctioning.
- The agrarian transition has not behaved. Agriculture still absorbed 43.0 per cent of India’s workers in 2025 — a share that has refused to fall as differentiation theory expects.
- Precarity has no functional home. The NITI Aayog counted 7.7 million gig and platform workers in 2020-21 and projected 23.5 million by 2029-30. These are workers without stable roles, employers or reciprocal obligation. Rajasthan in 2023 and Karnataka’s Act of 2025 responded with welfare boards and a levy on platforms — regulation chasing a market, not a system restoring equilibrium.
- Agency. The farmers’ movement of 2020-21, which forced repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021, was organised collective action against the state, unintelligible as system maintenance.
Verdict
Roughly, the perspective is strong on structure and weak on history. It can tell us how caste, family, village and ritual continue to organise Indian life; it cannot tell us why Dalit assertion, agrarian revolt or platform capital arose, because it has no theory of interest and no place for the state.
Conclusion
Its usefulness today is diagnostic rather than explanatory, and greatest in Merton’s middle-range version. A. R. Desai’s political economy and Dalit standpoint scholarship supply what it structurally cannot: the account of who gains from the order whose working it so carefully describes.