Write short note : Impact of West on Indian society. (2001)
M. N. Srinivas gave the process its name. Westernisation, as he defined it in Social Change in Modern India (1966), refers to the changes brought about in Indian society and culture by roughly a hundred and fifty years of British rule, operating at four levels — technology, institutions, ideology and values. The impact is best assessed domain by domain, because it was deep in some and shallow in others.
Economic
Private property in land, revenue in cash, commercialised agriculture, a national market linked by railways and the telegraph, factory industry and wage labour together replaced a village economy of customary rights and jajmani obligations. A new occupational order — industrialists, clerks, mill-hands, professionals — cut across jati for the first time.
Administrative and legal
A centralised bureaucracy recruited by examination, a uniform territorial law, codified penal and procedural statutes, and a hierarchy of courts introduced the rule of law and formal equality before it, displacing the plural, caste-graded justice of the Dharmashastras. This institutional grammar has proved the most durable transfer of all, and continues to work on custom: the Uniform Civil Code that came into force in Uttarakhand on 27 January 2025 extends common rules of marriage, divorce, succession and live-in registration across communities in one state.
Educational
English education, institutionalised after Thomas Babington Macaulay‘s Minute (1835), created a modern intelligentsia and with it a rationalist idiom of self-examination. It also created a linguistic hierarchy in which English is transmissible advantage — which the National Education Policy 2020, by making the home language or mother tongue the medium at least to Grade 5 and preferably to Grade 8, attempts to loosen.
Social and cultural
Humanitarian and egalitarian premises underwrote legislation against sati, female infanticide and child marriage, and against untouchability. Print, the press and voluntary associations produced a public. Dress, diet, domestic arrangements and notions of privacy changed, mostly among urban upper strata — Srinivas noted that Westernisation spread unevenly, at primary, secondary and tertiary removes, and that it often accelerated Sanskritisation rather than replacing it.
Ideological — and the counter-current
Yogendra Singh, in Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973), reads this as a heterogenetic challenge to a tradition organised on hierarchy, holism, continuity and transcendence, met by adaptation more than surrender: India modernised its macro-structures while traditional values persisted at the micro level. The response was never mere imitation. Revivalist and cultural-nationalist currents — the Arya Samaj, theosophy, Swami Vivekananda‘s reinterpretation of Vedanta — answered the West in its own argumentative register. Partha Chatterjee sharpens the point: the colonised conceded the outer domain of statecraft, economy and science while declaring sovereignty in an inner domain of language, religion and the home.
Conclusion
The Western impact on India is better described as a restructuring than as a replacement. It supplied the institutional framework — market, state, law, school, press — within which Indian society now operates, but the values animating family, marriage and community were reworked, not surrendered. The dialectic between the two remains the central fact of modern Indian social life.