Write short note: Reformative social movements. (1996)
Reformative (or reformist) movements seek to alter a part of the social order while accepting its legitimacy as a whole. The term is David F. Aberle’s (The Peyote Religion among the Navaho, 1966), who classified movements by two criteria — whether the locus of change is the individual or the social order, and whether the amount of change sought is partial or total. A movement aimed at the social order but demanding only partial change is reformative; one demanding total change is transformative.
Defining features
- Working within legitimacy. The reformer condemns a practice, not the system that houses it. Means are institutional — petition, press, litigation, legislation, education, philanthropy.
- Gradualism. Change is cumulative and negotiated, not seized; the movement expects to persuade the state rather than replace it.
- Political preconditions. Reformative movements are almost impossible under authoritarian rule; they require tolerance of criticism, which is why they multiply in democracies.
- Typical leadership. Historically an educated, urban, professional stratum acting on behalf of a distressed group — a fact that shapes both their reach and their blind spots.
- They provoke counter-movements. When Brahmo reformers campaigned against sati, defenders formed the Dharma Sabha and petitioned the British against legislation.
Indian illustrations
- Nineteenth-century socio-religious reform: Raja Rammohan Roy’s Brahmo Samaj (abolition of sati, 1829); Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and the Widow Remarriage Act (1856); the Prarthana Samaj; Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Aligarh movement. Dayananda Saraswati’s Arya Samaj is instructive — revivalist in idiom (“back to the Vedas”) yet reformative in effect, attacking untouchability and child marriage.
- Anti-caste reform: Jyotirao Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj (1873), Narayana Guru’s SNDP movement, E. V. Ramasamy Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement.
- Post-independence rights campaigns: the Right to Information campaign, which grew from a rural wage-records struggle in Rajasthan into the RTI Act (2005); the right-to-food and right-to-work campaigns behind MGNREGA (2005).
- Contemporary: the Madiga Reservation Porata Samithi (1994) pressed for three decades for sub-categorisation within the Scheduled Castes, held constitutionally permissible in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024); platform workers’ unions secured the Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers Act (2025), whose welfare board was constituted in January 2026.
Critique
- A. R. Desai read colonial-era reform as the project of a new middle class, leaving property relations untouched; reform can thus stabilise the very order it criticises.
- B. R. Ambedkar pressed the objection furthest — reforming Hindu practice cannot annihilate caste, since the hierarchy is sanctioned by the religion being reformed.
- Reform can also be absorbed upward: what M. N. Srinivas called Sanskritisation raises a group’s position while leaving the hierarchy intact.
- Legal reform outruns social reform. The National Crime Records Bureau’s Crime in India 2023 recorded 57,789 cases of atrocities against Scheduled Castes.
Conclusion
Reformative movements are the characteristic mode of change in a constitutional democracy: slow, legalistic, and vulnerable to co-option, but cumulative. As T. H. Marshall’s account of expanding civil, political and social rights suggests, a long enough sequence of partial reforms can amount to transformation — provided each new right is enforced, not merely enacted.