Illustrate the conflicts and tensions experienced by societies undergoing social change. (2013)
Change is never frictionless, because it redistributes resources, status, authority and meaning, and redistribution is contested. Lewis Coser (The Functions of Social Conflict, 1956) stated the relationship exactly: conflict is both a product of change and a producer of it. The tensions fall into recognisable types, each with its theorist and its Indian illustration.
Normative tension: anomie
Émile Durkheim (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893; Suicide, 1897) argued that when change outruns the moral regulation of appetites, the result is anomie — deregulation rather than oppression. His forced division of labour adds the case where positions are filled by inheritance rather than aptitude, so the new order lacks legitimacy. India’s agrarian distress, with its persistent toll of farmer suicides among cultivators caught between commercial risk and vanishing collective support, is anomie in Durkheim’s precise sense.
Institutional tension: cultural lag
William F. Ogburn (Social Change, 1922) located the difficulty in the unequal pace of material and non-material culture. Gig platforms outran employment classification long before any law caught them, and data collection outran privacy regulation: the Digital Personal Data Protection Act came in 2023, six years after Puttaswamy (2017) made privacy a fundamental right.
Structural contradiction and class conflict
For Karl Marx, tension is not a lag but a fetter: relations of production that once enabled the forces of production come to obstruct them, and the contradiction surfaces as class struggle. The farmers’ movement of 2020–21, ending in repeal of the three farm laws, was a conflict over who would control the terms of agrarian commercialisation. The stakes are visible in the distribution: a World Inequality Lab study by Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty and Anmol Somanchi (2024) found India’s top 1% holding 22.6% of income and 40.1% of wealth in 2022-23, the highest concentration in a century.
Tension of rising expectations
Robert K. Merton‘s reference group theory explains why prosperity can breed unrest: deprivation is relative to the group one compares oneself with. The reservation agitations of dominant peasant castes — Patidars, Jats and Marathas — are led not by the poorest but by landowning groups whose agrarian dominance, in M. N. Srinivas‘s sense, no longer converts into modern occupational advantage.
Identity and recognition
Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci read contemporary movements as struggles over identity and cultural definition, not distribution alone. The ethnic conflict in Manipur since May 2023, which has left tens of thousands still in relief camps, shows competition over land, forest rights and reservation categories fought in the idiom of community.
The lesson from theory
Ralf Dahrendorf held that conflict is ineradicable but institutionalisable through bargaining, courts and elections. Neil Smelser (Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, 1959) showed that differentiation produces disturbance before integration catches up. Coser’s rigidity thesis completes the account: conflict within a flexible structure yields adaptive change, while a structure that suppresses it accumulates hostility until it shatters.
Conclusion
Tension is the signature of change, not evidence of its failure. Societies differ not in whether they experience conflict but in whether their institutions are elastic enough to convert it into reform — which is why a changing society’s health is measured by the channels it keeps open, not by the quiet it maintains.