Write short note: Modernisation. (1991)
Modernisation denotes the process by which a less developed society acquires characteristics common to more developed ones. Daniel Lerner, who gave the term its classic sociological content in The Passing of Traditional Society (1958), treated it as a process of social change of which development is only the economic component — a bundle of structural, cultural and psychological transformations, not merely rising output.
Dimensions
| Dimension | Content |
|---|---|
| Economic | Industrialisation, market exchange, complex division of labour, rising per capita income |
| Political | Rational-legal authority, citizenship, mass participation, competitive parties |
| Social | Structural differentiation, urbanisation, mobility, contraction of extended kin obligation |
| Cultural | Secularisation, scientific world-view, universalistic and achievement norms |
| Psychological | Lerner’s empathy; the “modern man” of Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith (Becoming Modern, 1974) — efficacy, openness, planning |
Wilbert E. Moore stressed the totality of the transformation, and Talcott Parsons‘ pattern variables supplied its shorthand: a shift from ascription to achievement, particularism to universalism, diffuseness to specificity.
Critiques
- Ethnocentric and unilinear. The theory generalises a single European trajectory and makes the West the terminus of all histories.
- Tradition is not the obstacle. Yogendra Singh (Modernization of Indian Tradition, 1973) showed that Indian traditional institutions did not dissolve but absorbed modern functions — caste survives by performing new political and economic roles. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967) made the point through caste associations, which modernise politics while reproducing caste.
- Structural blindness. Andre Gunder Frank argued that poor countries are not “not yet modern” but actively underdeveloped by their position in the world economy — the development of underdevelopment.
- No single modernity. S. N. Eisenstadt (“Multiple Modernities”, Daedalus, 2000) held that modernity spreads as a cultural programme continually reinterpreted, producing institutionally distinct modernities rather than convergence.
- Costs. Ulrich Beck (Risk Society, 1986) argued that modernisation now manufactures the very hazards it must then manage, so its later stage is reflexive and self-critical rather than triumphal, as climate and ecological risk now make plain.
The Indian case
India displays modernisation without convergence. Demographically the country is modern: the total fertility rate fell to 2.0 in the fifth National Family Health Survey (2019-21), below replacement level. Institutionally it is a rational-legal republic with universal franchise, and among the world’s largest higher-education systems. Yet large-scale survey research consistently finds only about five per cent of Indian marriages to be inter-caste, so the most intimate institution of ascription stands intact alongside a modern economy and polity. This is Singh’s insight: modernisation in India changes the content of institutions while their form persists, producing what he called a modernisation of tradition rather than its replacement.
Conclusion
Modernisation is best used descriptively — as structural differentiation plus cultural rationalisation — and not evaluatively, as a synonym for progress. Indian experience suggests its outcome is neither replication of the West nor continuity of tradition, but a distinctive settlement in which traditional identities become the vehicles of modern institutions.