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India offers astounding variety in virtually every aspect of social life. Diversities of ethnic, linguistic, regional, economic, religious, class, and caste groups crosscut Indian society, which is also permeated with immense urban-rural differences and gender distinctions.
- Social Stratification in India
Others collect trash, direct traffic, and put out fires....
- Castes
In Indian society the group comes first, unlike our own...
- Background Reading on Asia
Indian Influences on Western Literature. Includes case...
- Teaching for Global Understanding
A new paper from the Center for Global Education seeks to...
- News and Events
Asia Society takes no institutional position on policy...
- Social Stratification in India
This chapter puts forth a very brief idea of some of the central areas where important social institutions are located namely: (i) family, marriage and kinship; (ii) politics; (iii) economics; (iv) religion; and (v) education.
- Having
- 3.1 Caste and the Caste system
- Caste in the Past
- Jotirao Govindrao Phule (1827 – 1890)
- Periyar (E.V. Ramasami Naickar) (1879–1973)
- Sri Narayana Guru (1856 – 1928)
- M. N. Srinivas (1916–1999)
- 3.2 tribal Communities
- ClassifiCations of tribal soCieties
- acquired traits
- national DeveloPment versus tribal DeveloPment
- tribal identity today
- 3.3 Family and Kinship
- the diverse forms of the family
studied the structure and dynamics of the population of India in Chapter 2, we turn now to the study of social institutions. A population is not just a collection of separate, unrelated individuals, it is a society made up of distinct but interlinked classes and communities of various kinds. These communities are sustained and regulated by social i...
Like any Indian, you already know that ‘caste’ is the name of an ancient social institution that has been part of Indian history and culture for thousands of years. But like any Indian living in the twenty-first century, you also know that something called ‘caste’ is definitely a part of Indian society today. To what extent are these two ‘castes’ –...
Caste is an institution uniquely associated with the Indian sub-continent. While social arrangements producing similar effects have existed in other parts of the world, the exact form has not been found elsewhere. Although it is an institution characteristic of Hindu society, caste has spread to the major non-Hindu communities of the Indian sub-con...
pursued by the caste associated with it – members of other castes could not enter the occupation. Jotirao Govindrao Phule denounced the injustice of the caste system and scorned its rules of purity and pollution. In 1873 he founded the Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth Seekers Society), which was devoted to securing human rights and social justice for low...
The administration also took an interest in the welfare of downtrodden castes, referred to as the ‘depressed classes’ at that time. It was as part of these efforts that the Government of India Act of 1935 was passed which gave legal recognition to the lists or ‘schedules’ of castes and Periyar (E.V. Ramasami Naickar) is known as a rationalist and t...
Sri Narayana Guru, born in Kerala, preached brother-hood for all and fought against the ill effects of the caste system. He led a quiet but significant social revolution and gave the watchwords ‘One Caste, One Religion, One God for all men’. based lines. The middle men who recruited labour for factories tended to recruit them from their own caste a...
has become more and more complex and hard to predict, it cannot be denied that caste remains central to electoral politics. Since the 1980s we have also seen the emergence of explicitly caste-based political parties. In the early general elections, it seemed as though caste solidarities were decisive in winning elections. But the situation soon got...
‘Tribe’ is a modern term for communities that are very old, being among the oldest inhabitants of the sub-continent. Tribes in India have generally been defined in terms of what they were not. Tribes were communities that did not practice a religion with a written text; did not have a state or political form of the normal kind and did not have shar...
In terms of positive characteristics, tribes have been classified according to their ‘permanent’ and ‘acquired’ traits. Permanent traits include region, language, physical characteristics and ecological habitat.
Classifications based on acquired traits use two main criteria – mode of livelihood, and extent of incorporation into Hindu society – or a combination of the two. On the basis of livelihood, tribes can be categorised into fishermen, food gatherers and hunters, shifting cultivators, peasants and plantation and industrial workers. However, the domina...
The imperatives of ‘development’ have governed attitudes towards tribes and shaped the policies of the state. National development, particularly in the Nehruvian era, involved the building of large dams, factories and mines. Because the tribal areas were located in mineral rich and forest covered parts of the country, tribals have paid a disproport...
Forced incorporation of tribal communities into mainstream processes has had its impact on tribal culture and society as much as its economy. Tribal identities today are formed by this interactional process rather than any primordial (orginal, ancient) characteristics peculiar to tribes. Because the interaction with the mainstream has generally bee...
Each one of us is born into a family, and most of us spend long years within it. Usually we feel very strongly about our family. Sometimes we feel very good about our parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins, whereas at others we don’t. On the one hand, we resent their interference, and yet we miss their overbearing ways when we a...
Studies have shown how diverse family forms are found in different societies. With regard to the rule of residence, some societies are matrilocal in their marriage and family customs while others are patrilocal. In the first case, the newly married couple stays with the woman’s parents, whereas in the second case the couple lives with the man’s par...
To understand the social structure of Indian Society; To understand reasons and basis of modern Indian social structure; To understand lifecycle of individuals ancient India; To understand variance in the family and marriage system of India.
This course aims to provide a broad overview of the multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives adopted by sociologists to understand Indian society. It provides a historical overview of the discipline, major perspectives such as Indological, Structural-functionalist, Marxian, Structuralist and Subaltern perspectives.
12 Approaches to the study of Indian society. Poulomi Ghosh. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Introduction. 1. Construction of gender in the Hindu context. 2. Women and Kinship. 3. Anthropological Explorations into Gender. Conclusion. INTRODUCTION:
Desai highlighted certain aspects of the Marxist approach to the study of Indian society. It helps to understand social reality through the means of production, division of the labour involved, and the social relations of productions that it brings about. This approach can help trace the social and class structure that was there before ...
