Salient Features of Indian Society: Unity in Diversity, Caste, Tribe, Family and Social Change

Salient Features of Indian Society: Traits and Ascriptive Identities

Seven Main Traits of Indian Society: Diversity to Continuity

Indian society is a society of communities. A person is born into a family, a caste or tribe, a religion, a language and a region, and these identities, fixed by birth, give a deep sense of belonging. What marks India out is how many such communities live together and how old institutions keep changing without disappearing.

The main features of Indian society are these:

• Diversity: Many kinds of social groups and communities, defined by cultural markers such as language, religion, sect, race or caste.
• Unity in diversity: A strong national identity built by accepting this variety instead of erasing it.
• Caste: An institution uniquely associated with the Indian sub-continent, which has spread even to non-Hindu communities.
• Tribes: Among the oldest inhabitants of the sub-continent, with their own languages, livelihoods and ways of life.
• Family and kinship: Nuclear and joint families, patrilineal and matrilineal descent, with patriarchy as the common pattern.
• A rural, agrarian base: Most Indians live in villages, and many festivals celebrate the harvest.
• Continuity and change: Tradition is constantly reinterpreted, so one person can be modern in some ways and traditional in others.

Ascriptive Identities and Why Community Belonging Matters

Every person needs a stable sense of identity, and in India that sense comes mostly from community. Community identity rests on birth and belonging, not on any qualification a person acquires. Such identities are called ascriptive: They are determined by birth and involve no choice. Nobody chooses a mother tongue, a family or a faith, yet people feel a deep security in belonging to communities they did nothing to earn. This is unlike belonging to a profession or a sports team, where a person must show competence first.

Two features of ascriptive identity explain much of Indian social life. First, the circles of belonging overlap and expand: Family, kinship, caste, ethnicity, language, region and religion all give a person a place in the world. Second, they are universal. Everyone has a mother tongue and a motherland, so every community feels an equal and equally strong loyalty to its own. When one community feels threatened, people react emotionally, sometimes violently. Each side then exaggerates its own virtues and the other side's faults, which is why conflicts of language, religion, caste or region are so hard to settle.

Unity in Diversity in India

India as a State-Nation: Assimilation, Integration and Accommodation

The idea of unity in diversity in India came from the national movement. In the long struggle against colonial rule, Indian nationalists understood the imperative need to recognise and respect India's diversity, and "unity in diversity" became shorthand for the plural and diverse nature of Indian society. The makers of the Constitution knew that a strong and united nation could be built only when all sections of people had the freedom to practise their religion and to develop their culture and language.

Most modern states distrust diversity and try to reduce it, either by assimilation or by integration. India chose a third path, which the UNDP's Human Development Report 2004 called a state-nation: A single state in which many ethnic, religious, linguistic and indigenous identities co-exist, and in which citizens can identify with both their country and their community.

Comparative surveys of long-standing democracies show that India has been very cohesive despite its diversity, and that its citizens are deeply committed to the country and to democracy. India's problems have lain more in implementation and practice than in laws or principles.

Bonds of Unity: Constitution, Federalism and a Syncretic Heritage

Three bonds hold the diversity together. The first is the Constitution's treatment of identity. Article 29 gives any section of citizens with a distinct language, script or culture the right to conserve it, and bars denial of admission to a State-run or State-aided educational institution on grounds only of religion, race, caste or language. Article 30 gives all minorities, religious or linguistic, the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice and bars discrimination in aid against them. Article 350A asks every State to provide instruction in the mother tongue at the primary stage to children of linguistic minority groups.

The second bond is federalism. The Constitution divides subjects between the Union and the States through lists, with a Concurrent List where both may act. The State legislatures help determine the composition of the Rajya Sabha, and the Finance Commission, set up every five years, decides how tax revenues are shared between the Centre and the States. Federalism has been a means of accommodating regional sentiments.

The third bond is a long tradition of religious pluralism that ranges from peaceful co-existence to actual inter-mixing, or syncretism. The devotional songs and poetry of the Bhakti and Sufi movements are its clearest record, and Kabir's poems, which join Hindu and Muslim devotion, remain a cherished symbol. Indian nationalism also refused to define "the people" by religion, ethnicity, race or caste, and Gandhi and Tagore warned against exclusive nationalism.

Linguistic States and National Unity

Language also redrew the map. In the 1920s the Indian National Congress reorganised its own provincial units on linguistic lines, and Gandhi and other leaders promised that free India would be built on provinces based on language. After Independence and Partition in 1947, top leaders such as Nehru, Patel and Rajaji hesitated: If intense attachment to faith had led to Partition, how many more partitions might intense loyalty to language bring?

The rank and file pressed on. Marathi and Kannada speakers, spread across several political regimes, organised vigorous movements, but the most militant protests came from Telugu speakers. In 1952 Potti Sriramulu, a veteran Gandhian, went on an indefinite fast for a Telugu-speaking State and died after 56 days. His death provoked violent protests and led to the creation of Andhra State in October 1953, and to the States Reorganisation Commission, whose report was implemented on 1 November 1956 and put the final seal on the principle of linguistic States.

The feared outcome did not follow. Far from undermining unity, linguistic States helped strengthen it, because one can be Kannadiga and Indian, Bengali and Indian, Tamil and Indian at once. The contrast is Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then known. In the same year, 1956, its Parliament proclaimed Sinhala the sole official language despite Tamil protests, and a civil war followed in 1983. Pakistan was divided in 1971 because its western wing would not respect the sentiments of the Bengalis in the east.

Not every identity became a State on language alone. Chhattisgarh, Uttaranchal and Jharkhand were created in 2000 on a combination of tribal identity, language, regional deprivation and ecology. India now has 28 States and 8 Union Territories.

Religious and Linguistic Diversity of India

Religious Composition of India and Its Regional Concentration

India is home to followers of many religions. In the 2011 Census, 79.8 per cent of the population followed Hinduism, 14.2 per cent Islam, 2.3 per cent Christianity, 1.7 per cent Sikhism, 0.7 per cent Buddhism and 0.4 per cent Jainism. The population was about 1.21 billion. Only Indonesia and Pakistan have more Muslims than India. Because of the huge population, small percentages add up to large absolute numbers: 172 million Muslims, 27.8 million Christians, 21 million Sikhs, 8 million Buddhists and 4.5 million Jains.

The majority is not uniform either. Hindus are regionally specific, plural in beliefs and practices, and divided by caste and language; so are the other major religions, to differing extents. Religion is also regionally concentrated:

• Christians: Majorities in three North-Eastern States, Nagaland (88 per cent), Mizoram (87 per cent) and Meghalaya (74 per cent), with sizeable shares in Goa (25 per cent) and Kerala (18.4 per cent).
• Sikhs: A majority in Punjab (58 per cent).
• Muslims: A majority in Jammu and Kashmir, with sizeable pockets in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Rajasthan.
• Buddhists and Jains: The highest share of Buddhists is in Sikkim (27 per cent) and Arunachal Pradesh (12 per cent); the highest concentrations of Jains are in Maharashtra (1.3 per cent), Delhi and Gujarat (nearly 1 per cent each).

Minorities: Meaning and Constitutional Protection

A minority in the sociological sense is more than a smaller number. It is a group with a sense of relative disadvantage and a strong feeling of solidarity, a togetherness that grows from the experience of prejudice. This is why people who are left-handed or born on 29 February are statistical minorities but not minorities in the social sense, and why a very wealthy group, though small, is called a "privileged minority" rather than simply a minority. Religious minorities such as Parsis or Sikhs may be well off economically, yet remain disadvantaged culturally because of their small numbers beside an overwhelming majority.

This is why religious and cultural minorities need special protection in a democracy, where a numerical majority can become political power. The Constitution protects them through Articles 29 and 30, and Article 25 guarantees to all persons freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practise and propagate religion. Article 29 reaches further than minorities alone, because it speaks of "any section of citizens", which can include a majority. Article 30 is confined to minorities, and the Constitution does not define the word "minority".

Minorities exist everywhere, not only in India. In most nation-states one cultural, ethnic, racial or religious group dominates, and nowhere in the world is there a nation-state made up of a single homogeneous cultural group. The Indian approach is therefore to protect minority rights for the sake of a strong and united nation.

Secularism: The Indian Meaning and the Western Model

Secularism is among the most complex terms in social and political theory. In the West it means mainly the separation of church and state, tied to secularisation, the progressive retreat of religion from public life, and to the rise of science and rationality. The Indian meaning includes that sense but adds others. In everyday Indian speech, "secular" is the opposite of "communal": A secular person or state does not favour any particular religion over others. This implies equal respect for all religions instead of separation or distance, and the Indian state declares public holidays to mark the festivals of all religions.

The Constitution protects the freedom to profess, practise and propagate any religion (Article 25) and lets the state intervene to ensure equality within religions, as in banning untouchability. The word "secular" entered the Preamble through the Forty-second Amendment of 1976, and in the Bommai case of 1994 the Supreme Court held that India had been secular since the Republic began. Political theorist Rajeev Bhargava calls the Indian approach "principled distance": A state that has separated itself from religion but may support some religious practices and inhibit others, to reduce domination within and between religions.

The Indian approach has a built-in tension. Protecting minorities means giving them special consideration where the working of the political system disadvantages them, and that invites the charge of favouritism or "appeasement". Supporters answer that without such protection, secularism can become an excuse for imposing the majority's values on minorities.

Linguistic Diversity and the Eighth Schedule Languages

Language is one of the clearest markers of India's diversity. India's population speaks about 1,632 languages and dialects, and 22 of these are officially recognised and placed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, which guarantees their legal status.

The Eighth Schedule began with 14 languages in 1950 and grew by amendment. The Constitution links it to Articles 344(1) and 351, which deal with the Official Language Commission and the promotion of Hindi.

The 96th Amendment of 2011 renamed Oriya as Odia without adding a language.

Caste System in India: Features, Colonial Change and Constitutional Response

Varna and Jati: Meaning and Defining Features of Caste

The English word caste comes from the Portuguese casta, meaning pure breed. Indian languages use two terms for the same broad institution. Varna, literally colour, is the four-fold division of society into brahmana, kshatriya, vaishya and shudra, which leaves out a significant section of the population, the outcastes, foreigners, slaves and conquered peoples, sometimes called the panchamas or fifth category. Jati is a generic word for kinds of anything and is the word most often used for caste in daily life. The usual reading treats varna as a broad all-India classification and jati as a regional or local sub-classification of hundreds or even thousands of castes and sub-castes.

The four-varna classification is roughly three thousand years old, but the caste system stood for different things in different periods. In the late Vedic period, roughly 900 to 500 BC, it was really a varna system with four major divisions that were not very rigid and not determined by birth, and movement across them was quite common. Only after the Vedic period did caste become the rigid institution of the well-known definitions. The six defining features are these:

• Birth: A child is born into the caste of its parents; caste is never a matter of choice.
• Endogamy: Marriage is restricted to members of the group.
• Food rules: What may be eaten, and with whom food may be shared, is prescribed.
• Hierarchy: Castes are arranged in ranks, and the ranking rests on the distinction between purity and pollution.
• Segmental organisation: Castes have sub-castes, and sub-castes may have sub-sub-castes.
• Hereditary occupation: A person could pursue only the occupation of the caste, so the system worked as a division of labour that in principle allowed no mobility.

These are the rules of the scriptures, and they were not always practised. Caste combined two sets of principles: Difference and separation, which kept castes apart in marriage, food and occupation, and wholism and hierarchy, which placed every caste in a ladder-like order within the whole society.

Caste Under Colonialism: Census, Hardened Identities and the Schedules

Some scholars argue that caste as it is known today is more a product of colonialism than of ancient tradition. British administrators first tried to understand caste in order to govern efficiently, through methodical surveys of the customs and manners of tribes and castes. The most important official effort was the census, begun in the 1860s and a regular ten-yearly exercise from 1881. The 1901 Census, under Herbert Risley, tried to record the social order of precedence of castes, and hundreds of petitions reached the Census Commissioner from castes claiming a higher rank on historical and scriptural grounds.

The effect was to change the institution itself. Before such counting, caste identities were much more fluid and less rigid; once they were counted and recorded, caste took on a new life. The Government of India Act of 1935 then gave legal recognition to lists, or schedules, of castes and tribes marked out for special treatment by the state. This is how the terms Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes came into being. Castes at the bottom of the hierarchy that suffered severe discrimination, including the so-called untouchable castes, were included among the Scheduled Castes.

Reformers from both ends of the caste hierarchy, upper-caste progressives as well as members of the lower castes, attacked caste; among them were Jotirao Phule, who founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873, and Savitri Bai Phule, B. R. Ambedkar, Ayyankali, Sri Narayana Guru, Iyotheedass and Periyar. Gandhi and Ambedkar both began protests against untouchability from the 1920s onwards, and by Independence there was broad agreement across the nationalist movement to abolish caste distinctions.

Constitutional and Legal Provisions Against Caste Discrimination

Independence was only a partial break with the colonial past. The post-Independence state was committed to abolishing caste and wrote this into the Constitution, but it was unable and unwilling to push through radical reforms that would have undermined the economic basis of caste inequality. It assumed that acting in a caste-blind manner would undermine caste privilege on its own, with the only exception being reservation for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

The main provisions are these:

1. Article 15: The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and no citizen can be denied access to shops, restaurants, wells, tanks or places of public resort on those grounds. It permits special provision for women and children and for socially and educationally backward classes and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
2. Article 16: Equality of opportunity in public employment, with the State free to provide reservation of appointments or posts for any backward class not adequately represented in State services.
3. Article 17: Untouchability is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden; enforcing any disability arising out of it is an offence punishable in accordance with law. The Supreme Court has held that this right is available against private individuals, and the Untouchability (Offences) Act of 1955 was amended in 1976 and renamed the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955.
4. Article 46: A directive to promote the educational and economic interests of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other weaker sections and to protect them from social injustice and exploitation.
5. Article 335: The claims of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes to services and posts are to be considered consistently with the efficiency of administration.
6. Articles 341 and 342: The President may specify, by public notification after consulting the Governor where a State is concerned, the castes and tribes treated as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and Parliament may by law include or exclude any from the list.

The Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, makes it an offence to prevent anyone from entering a place of public worship, to deny access to any shop, hotel or place of public entertainment, to refuse admission to hospitals, educational institutions or hostels, and to justify untouchability on traditional, religious or philosophical grounds. Two commissions under Articles 338 and 338A, one for the Scheduled Castes and one for the Scheduled Tribes, oversee the safeguards.

Caste in the City: Industry, Urbanisation and Endogamy

Modern industry, cities and education loosened caste rules. Industry created new jobs for which there were no caste rules, and collective living in cities made caste-segregated patterns of interaction hard to sustain. Educated Indians attracted to individualism and meritocracy began to give up the more extreme practices. Yet caste proved remarkably resilient. Recruitment to the textile mills of Mumbai and the jute mills of Kolkata continued along caste and kinship lines, because the middlemen who recruited labour took people of their own caste and region. Prejudice against the untouchables was not absent from the city, though less extreme than in the village.

Caste has proved strongest in the cultural and domestic spheres. Endogamy remained largely unaffected by modernisation: Most marriages still take place within caste boundaries, although there are more inter-caste marriages, and the borders between groups of castes of similar socio-economic status are still heavily patrolled.

Caste in Politics: Dominant Castes and Invisible Privilege

Caste has also entered electoral and agrarian power, and it has changed in how different groups experience it.

• Politics: Democratic politics has been deeply conditioned by caste, and explicitly caste-based parties have emerged since the 1980s. It is less that politics becomes caste-ridden than that caste becomes politicised: Castes merge with neighbouring sub-castes, form coalitions, and new groupings such as backward and forward castes appear.
• Dominant caste: M. N. Srinivas used this term for numerous intermediate castes that gained land rights under the partial land reforms and then political power through numbers, such as the Yadavs of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Vokkaligas of Karnataka, the Reddys and Kammas of Andhra Pradesh, the Marathas of Maharashtra, the Jats of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh and the Patidars of Gujarat.
• Invisible and visible caste: For the upper-caste urban middle and upper classes caste seems to have declined, precisely because it has done its job of securing education and jobs; for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and backward castes it has become all too visible, since reservation, their lifeline, makes caste the aspect of identity the world recognises.
• Caste and economic status: Not all upper-caste people are privileged, since some are poor, while the privileged group as a whole is overwhelmingly upper caste.

Scheduled Castes made up about 16.6 per cent of India's population in the 2011 Census, and the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 lists 1,108 castes across 28 States. The state's main answer to caste disadvantage is reservation, and the Dalit movement carried the fight against caste discrimination into politics.

Why Caste Identity in India Is Both Fluid and Static

Caste is fluid in some senses and static in others. The fluid side begins with history: Before the colonial census, caste identities were much more fluid and less rigid, and in the late Vedic period movement across the four varnas was common. It continues today in politics, where caste coalitions and new groupings form, and in Sanskritisation, when a low caste or tribe takes over the customs of a high caste, usually after a rise in economic status.

The static side lies in what does not move. Birth fixes caste membership, and one can never change one's caste, leave it, or choose not to join it, although a person may be expelled from the caste. Endogamy keeps the boundaries firm. Castes at the bottom continue to meet discrimination, and the hierarchy of ranks, though it varies from region to region, never disappears. Reservation also keeps caste visible as an identity for the groups it supports.

Tribal Communities in India: Classification, Constitution and Identity

Scheduled Tribes: Meaning, Numbers and Distribution

Tribe is a modern term for communities that are very old, among the oldest inhabitants of the sub-continent. Tribes in India have generally been defined by what they were not: Communities without a religion based on a written text, without a state or political form of the normal kind, and without sharp class divisions. In the Constitution, Scheduled Tribes are those tribes or tribal communities that are deemed to be Scheduled Tribes under Article 342. The Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order, 1950 lists 744 tribes across 22 States in its First Schedule. In the 2011 Census Scheduled Tribes were 8.6 per cent of the population, about 104 million persons.

Tribal population is widely dispersed, with concentrations in certain regions:

• Middle India: About 85 per cent of the tribal population lives in a wide band from Gujarat and Rajasthan in the west to West Bengal and Odisha in the east, with Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and parts of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh at its heart.
• North-East: Over 11 per cent lives in the North-Eastern States, where all States except Assam have tribal shares above 30 per cent, and Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland above 60 per cent.
• Rest of India: A little over 3 per cent, with tribal shares below 12 per cent in all States except Odisha and Madhya Pradesh.
• Language: Tribes speak languages from four families. Indo-Aryan and Dravidian are shared with the rest of the population, with tribes only about 1 per cent and about 3 per cent of those speakers. Austric languages are spoken only by tribals, and tribes make up over 80 per cent of the speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages.
• Size: Tribes range from about seven million people to some Andamanese groups that may number fewer than a hundred. The Gonds, Bhils, Santhals, Oraons, Minas, Bodos and Mundas are each at least a million strong.

Classifying Tribes: Permanent Traits, Acquired Traits and PVTGs

Tribes are classified by permanent and acquired traits. Permanent traits include region, language, physical characteristics and ecological habitat, and tribes live in hills, forests, rural plains and urban industrial areas. Acquired traits use two criteria, mode of livelihood and extent of incorporation into Hindu society. By livelihood, tribes are fishermen, food gatherers and hunters, shifting cultivators, peasants, or plantation and industrial workers. The dominant classification, in academic sociology and in public affairs, is the degree of assimilation into Hindu society, seen from the tribes' own attitude towards Hinduism or from the status given to them in it.

Within the Scheduled Tribes the state recognises an especially vulnerable sub-group. The Dhebar Commission of 1960 to 1961 found that development was uneven among tribes, and in the Fourth Five-Year Plan the sub-category "primitive tribal group" was created for groups that were pre-agricultural, with hunting and gathering, with zero or negative population growth and extremely low literacy. In 2006 the name was changed to particularly vulnerable tribal group, or PVTG. In total 75 such groups were identified, the 75th being the Maram in Manipur in 1993 to 1994. PVTGs live in 18 States and one Union Territory. A PVTG remains a Scheduled Tribe: The label marks a sub-group, not a separate category.

Fifth and Sixth Schedules: Administration of Tribal Areas

Article 244 envisages a special system of administration for areas designated as scheduled areas and tribal areas. The Fifth Schedule deals with scheduled areas and Scheduled Tribes in every State except Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram; the Sixth Schedule deals with the tribal areas of those four North-Eastern States. The reason for the difference is that tribes elsewhere have more or less adopted the culture of the majority, whereas in the four North-Eastern States they still have their roots in their own culture, customs and civilisation, and so a sizeable amount of autonomy was given to them for self-government.

Under the Fifth Schedule the Governor's regulations may prohibit or restrict the transfer of land by or among members of the Scheduled Tribes, regulate the allotment of land to them and regulate money-lending business in relation to them. The Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, known as PESA, extends Part IX of the Constitution on panchayats to scheduled areas with modifications, to provide self-rule for the bulk of the tribal population. The President must appoint a commission on the administration of scheduled areas and the welfare of Scheduled Tribes; the Dhebar Commission reported in 1961, and the second commission, under Dilip Singh Bhuria, was appointed in 2002.

Tribe and Caste Debate, Displacement and Tribal Identity Today

In the 1960s scholars debated whether tribes were one end of a continuum with caste-based peasant society, or an altogether different kind of community, since tribes had no notion of purity and pollution. By the 1970s every major definition of tribe had been shown to be faulty: Santhals, Gonds and Bhils are very large and spread over extensive territory, and Mundas and Hos long ago turned to settled agriculture. Tribes were never simply isolated or primitive. There were Gond kingdoms in Central India, such as Garha Mandla and Chanda, and adivasis traded in forest produce, salt and elephants.

Tribals have paid a disproportionate price for national development. Their regions are rich in minerals and forest, so large dams, factories and mines took their land, and the loss of forests on which most tribal communities depended has been a major blow. The coming of private property in land hurt communities whose ownership was collective. Heavy in-migration of non-tribals followed: Jharkhand's industrial areas have seen a dilution of the tribal share, and Tripura had the tribal share of its population halved within a single decade, reducing tribes to a minority.

Tribal identity today is formed by this interaction with the mainstream, and many identities are centred on resistance to the non-tribal world. Statehood for Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh was won after a long struggle. An educated, urbanised middle class has grown among tribes, most visibly in the North-East, helped by education and reservation. Two broad sets of issues drive tribal movements: Control over land and especially forests, and ethnic-cultural identity.

Family, Kinship and Marriage in Indian Society

Nuclear and Joint Family in India: Forms and Change

Each person is born into a family, and the family is a space of great warmth and care, and also a site of conflict and injustice. A family can be studied as an institution in itself and in its link to other social institutions. A nuclear family consists of only one set of parents and their children. An extended family, commonly called the joint family, has more than one couple and often more than two generations living together, such as a set of brothers with their families or an elderly couple with their sons and grandsons and their families.

The joint family is often seen as typical of India, but it was never the dominant form, now or earlier. It was confined to certain sections and regions of the community, and nuclear families have always existed, particularly among deprived castes and classes. The expression "joint family" is not even a native category: In most Indian languages the word for it is a translation of the English term. The family also changes with the wider society:

• Longer lives: The sociologist A. M. Shah argued that the joint family has steadily increased in post-Independence India, because life expectancy has risen and the proportion of people aged sixty and above has grown, and most of the elderly live in joint households.
• New needs: When young parents work in the software industry, grandparents move in as care-givers to the grandchildren, and a joint household re-forms.
• Migration: When men migrate from the villages of the Himalayan region, an unusual proportion of households are headed by women, and among the Kolams of south-eastern Maharashtra and northern Andhra Pradesh a female-headed household is an accepted norm.
• Choice of spouse: Change is also deliberate, as when young people choose spouses instead of leaving the choice to elders, and changes in family and marriage norms are often resisted, sometimes violently.

Descent, Residence and Inheritance in Indian Families

Families differ in residence: In matrilocal societies a newly married couple lives with the woman's parents, in patrilocal ones with the man's. They differ in inheritance: Matrilineal societies pass property from mother to daughter, patrilineal ones from father to son. Most of India is patrilineal, but the Khasis of Meghalaya are still matrilineal, as the Nairs of Kerala used to be.

Matriliny is not matriarchy. A patriarchal family is one in which men exercise authority and dominance, and matriarchy, the mirror image where women are dominant, has been a theoretical rather than an empirical concept. There is no historical or anthropological evidence of a society in which women exercise dominance. In matrilineal societies women inherit property from their mothers but do not control it, nor are they the decision-makers in public affairs. The existence of matrilineal societies is itself an argument that gender inequality is social and not natural: If women were biologically unfit to be inheritors and heads of families, matrilineal societies could not have worked for centuries.

Patriarchy and the Status of Women

Gender inequality is often treated as natural because of the obvious biological differences between men and women, but scholars have shown that it is social. There is no biological reason why so few women are found in positions of public power, or why women generally receive a smaller or no share in family property. In most regions of India women are excluded from ownership of land by the patrilineal kinship system and mode of inheritance. By law they should have an equal share, but in reality they have limited rights and some access to land only as part of a household headed by a man.

The sex ratio shows the bias. India's overall sex ratio fell from 972 females per 1,000 males in 1901 to a low of 927 in 1991 and was 943 in the 2011 Census. The child sex ratio, for ages 0 to 6, dropped to 919 in 2011, and in some States it fell below 850. Female infanticide and female foeticide are the practices behind the fall, and the sharp fall in the child sex ratio and the bias against the girl child are among the new challenges of gender inequality.

The Constitution allows special provision for women and children under Article 15, with reservation of seats for women in local bodies as one example.

Rural and Urban India: Agrarian Society and the City

Landholding, Caste and Harvest Festivals in Village India

Indian society is primarily a rural society, though urbanisation is growing. Agriculture is not only a livelihood but a way of life, and the nature and practice of agriculture varies greatly across the country, which is reflected in regional cultures. Many New Year festivals, such as Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Bihu in Assam, Baisakhi in Punjab and Ugadi in Karnataka, celebrate the main harvest season and herald the beginning of a new agricultural season. Villages also had artisans such as potters, carpenters, weavers, ironsmiths and goldsmiths, whose numbers have been steadily lessening since the colonial period, and the diversity of rural occupations was reflected in the caste system.

The agrarian structure is the structure of landholding and the relationships around it:

• Unequal land: Landholding is highly unequal; in some areas as much as 40 to 50 per cent of families do not own any land and depend on agricultural labour or other work.
• Caste and class: Because land is the most important productive resource, access to it shapes the rural class structure, and it often overlaps with caste; dominant landowning groups are usually middle or high-ranked castes, such as the Jats and Rajputs of Uttar Pradesh, the Vokkaligas and Lingayats of Karnataka, the Reddys and Kammas of Andhra Pradesh, and Jat Sikhs in Punjab, while most marginal farmers and landless workers belong to lower castes.
• Globalisation of agriculture: The liberalisation policy followed since the late 1980s opened Indian farming to competition from the global market after decades of state support and protected markets.

Urban India and Changing Social Life

In 1951, 17.29 per cent of India's population lived in 2,843 towns. In 2011, 31.16 per cent lived in 7,935 towns, about 377.10 million people. The share of the urban population has risen steadily, and for the first time since Independence the absolute increase in population was larger in urban areas than in rural areas, because the growth rate in rural areas fell sharply.

Cities change social life by bringing together people of many castes, regions and religions, yet they do not end caste. Migrants arrive through caste and kinship networks, and those networks continue to shape work, marriage and politics in the city.

Social Change in Indian Society: Continuity and Change

Sanskritisation, Westernisation, Modernisation and Secularisation

Sociologists describe four processes of cultural change in India. Sanskritisation pre-dates colonial rule; the other three are complex responses of Indians to the changes that colonialism brought. They overlap and co-exist, and it is not surprising to find the same person modern in some ways and traditional in others.

Sanskritisation has been criticised: It brings positional change for some groups but no structural change, it accepts the ways of the upper castes as superior, it justifies a model that rests on inequality, and it can lead to secluding girls and women and adopting dowry in place of bride-price. Srinivas suggested that lower castes sought to be Sanskritised and upper castes sought to be Westernised, but in a diverse country this generalisation is hard to maintain; the Thiyyas of Kerala, by no means upper caste, consciously Westernised.

Continuity and Change: How Indian Society Sustains Its Culture

Tradition in India is not fixed. Modernity spelt not merely new ideas but also rethinking and reinterpretation of tradition, and both culture and tradition are living entities that people learn and in turn modify. The poet A. K. Ramanujan described his father as a south Indian Brahmin who wore a Sri Vaisnava caste mark with Tootal ties and English serge jackets over a traditional dhoti. The standard way the modern middle-class woman wears a sari was a novel combination of the traditional unstitched cloth with the Western petticoat and blouse. English-educated Indians read the thinkers of Western enlightenment, and yet, humiliated by colonial rule, asserted their pride in traditional learning.

Several features explain why the culture sustains itself while changing:

• Syncretism: The Bhakti and Sufi movements left a shared devotional heritage, and a long tradition of religious pluralism ranges from peaceful co-existence to inter-mixing.
• Ritual adapts: A considerable part of ritual has direct reference to secular ends, such as showing off the family's wealth, and the economic, political and status dimensions of ritual have become more conspicuous in recent decades.
• Old institutions in new forms: Caste works through elections and associations, the joint family re-forms when grandparents are needed, and the sari combines old and new.
• Ascriptive identities: Family, caste and community give deep belonging, so people hold on to them while their content changes.

Globalisation and Cultural Diversity

Globalisation touches Indian diversity in two directions. Cultural uniformity is the threat: Westernisation has meant a general spread of Western cultural traits, in technology, dress and food, and it involves imitation of external forms, which does not necessarily mean adopting the democracy and equality of modern values. The liberalisation of the economy has also exposed Indian farmers to competition from the global market, and regional cultures are bound up with the agrarian way of life that this competition disturbs.

Resilience is the other side. Tradition is reinterpreted, not abandoned: Festivals such as Diwali, Durga Puja, Ganesh Puja, Dussehra, Karwa Chauth, Id and Christmas continue in new forms, and rituals acquire economic and status meanings. Linguistic States, federalism and minority rights provide the institutions through which plural identities are protected. Diversity is thus being reshaped more than erased.

Challenges to Unity in Diversity: Communalism, Casteism and Regionalism

Communalism and Its Roots

Cultural diversity becomes a challenge when communities compete for scarce resources such as river waters, jobs or government funds, and when cultural differences overlap with economic and social inequalities. Measures to address the injustices suffered by one community can provoke opposition from others. Of all aspects of cultural identity, religion-related issues are the most contentious, and they fall into two related groups: Secularism and communalism, and minority and majority.

In everyday language communalism refers to aggressive chauvinism based on religious identity. Chauvinism is an attitude that sees one's own group as the only legitimate or worthy group. Communalism is therefore an aggressive political ideology linked to religion, which is a peculiarly South Asian meaning, different from the neutral English sense of "relating to a community". Communalism is about politics, not about religion, and there is no necessary link between personal faith and communalism: A communalist may or may not be devout. Its characteristic claim is that religious identity overrides everything else, whether one is poor or rich, and whatever one's occupation or caste. This constructs large, diverse groups as singular and homogeneous.

India has a history of communal riots from pre-Independence times, often as a result of the divide-and-rule policy of colonial rulers, but colonialism did not invent inter-community conflicts and cannot be blamed for post-Independence riots. History offers both good and bad examples: A long tradition of religious pluralism and syncretism sits beside conflict.

Casteism, Regionalism and Regional Deprivation

Casteism is the belief that caste is the sole basis of social community, and it can divert attention from issues of poverty, development and corruption. Regionalism in India is rooted in the diversity of languages, cultures, tribes and religions. It is encouraged by the geographical concentration of these identity markers in particular regions, and fuelled by a sense of regional deprivation.

Regionalism is therefore managed rather than eliminated. The same accommodation that created linguistic States and the new States of 2000 gives regional movements a constitutional outlet, which is why most of them seek a State or more autonomy rather than separation.

Sources

• NCERT: Democratic Politics II (Class X), Gender, Religion and Caste
• NCERT: Introducing Sociology (Class XI), Understanding Social Institutions
• NCERT: Indian Society (Class XII), Introducing Indian Society
• NCERT: Indian Society (Class XII), The Demographic Structure of Indian Society
• NCERT: Indian Society (Class XII), Social Institutions: Continuity and Change
• NCERT: Indian Society (Class XII), Patterns of Social Inequality and Exclusion
• NCERT: Indian Society (Class XII), The Challenges of Cultural Diversity
• NCERT: Social Change and Development in India (Class XII), Structural Change
• NCERT: Social Change and Development in India (Class XII), Cultural Change
• NCERT: Social Change and Development in India (Class XII), Change and Development in Rural Society
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