What is a social movement? Discuss with examples the part played by social movements in bringing about social change in India. (1980)
A social movement is sustained collective mobilisation, through formal or informal organisation and guided by an ideology, directed at promoting or resisting change — the definition M. S. A. Rao develops in Social Movements and Social Transformation (1979). Social change is continuous and largely unintended; a movement is change deliberately pursued.
What distinguishes a movement
- Five elements are essential: a collective goal, a shared ideology or programme, collective action, a minimum of organisation and leadership, and duration.
- Hence a crowd that attacks a bus after an accident is a protest, not a movement; and an agitation lacking ideology and organisation is not one either. Ghanshyam Shah cautions that this boundary is disputed — he counts the demands for Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh as movements.
- Herbert Blumer distinguished general, specific and expressive movements; Rao classified Indian movements as reformist, transformative and revolutionary; Partha Mukherji graded them by change orientation into accumulative, alternative and transformatory.
- T. K. Oommen adds the life-cycle: charisma is eventually traded for institutionalisation, which secures gains while blunting radicalism.
The part played in India
Reform of social institutions. Raja Rammohun Roy’s Brahmo Samaj campaign produced the Sati Regulation of 1829, and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar’s the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856 — legislation moving society ahead of consent, which is why the Dharma Sabha arose as a counter-movement.
Anti-caste assertion. Jyotirao Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj (1873), E. V. Ramasamy’s Self-Respect movement and B. R. Ambedkar’s mobilisation refused emulation of the upper castes and demanded structural remedy. Their yield is constitutional: abolition of untouchability, protective discrimination, later the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.
Agrarian struggle. D. N. Dhanagare, in Peasant Movements in India, 1920–1950 (1983), shows the middle peasantry leading Tebhaga and Telangana; these fed directly into zamindari abolition and tenancy reform. Their successor, the farmers’ movement of 2020–21, forced the repeal of the three farm laws in November 2021.
Gender. The women’s movement converted private injury into public law: the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, the Vishaka guidelines of 1997 that became the POSH Act, 2013, and the Me Too wave from October 2018.
Environment and rights. Chipko and the Narmada Bachao Andolan placed ecology and displacement on the national agenda, contributing to the Forest Rights Act, 2006; the right-to-information campaign begun by rural workers in Rajasthan produced the Right to Information Act, 2005. Rajni Kothari read these as “non-party political formations” arising where the state failed at social transformation.
Limits
- Change is slow and contested. Movements provoke counter-movements, and gains are frequently positional — M. N. Srinivas made exactly this point about Sanskritisation.
- Shah’s review of the literature finds Indian scholarship rich in description but thin in theory, so causal claims must be modest; A. R. Desai further insisted that movements are constrained by the class character of the state.
Conclusion
Social movements have been India’s principal mechanism for converting felt injustice into enforceable entitlement — most visibly through law. Their record shows the limit too: they change statutes faster than they change structures, and endure only where mobilisation outlives its moment of charisma.