Sociology and Society

This is the first chapter of Introducing Sociology, the first of NCERT's two Class 11 sociology books; the second, Understanding Society, covers social structure, change and the major Western and Indian sociologists. The chapter answers three first questions: what sociology looks at (the link between individual lives and society), how it differs from other ways of knowing (philosophy, religion and common sense), and where it came from (18th–19th-century Europe, and its different career in colonial and independent India). It ends by placing sociology among the social sciences. It is longer than the Class 12 opening chapter and has ten activities and four exercise questions.

• Leads into Chapter 2 (terms and concepts: social group, status, role, stratification), Chapter 3 (institutions), Chapter 4 (culture and socialisation) and Chapter 5 (research methods — survey, fieldwork, the two traditions this chapter mentions). Understanding Society, Chapters 4 and 5, introduce Marx, Durkheim and Weber, and Ghurye, D.P. Mukerji, A.R. Desai and Srinivas.
• Pairs with live chapters: Class 12 Indian Society, Chapter 1 Introducing Indian Society (common sense, unlearning, Mills — the same ideas, briefer); Social Change and Development in India, Chapter 1 Structural Change (colonialism, industrialisation, urbanisation) and Chapter 5 Change and Development in Industrial Society; Indian Economic Development, Chapter 1 Indian Economy on the Eve of Independence (the decline of handicrafts).
• UPSC: Prelims has asked, more than once, about the impact of Britain's Industrial Revolution on India — the ruin of handicrafts (1980, 2020) and colonialism as a search for markets (1988). Mains GS1 has asked why the Industrial Revolution began in England and what life was like during it (2015), how far it caused the decline of Indian handicrafts (2024), why indentured labour was taken abroad and whether migrants kept their culture (2018), and why suicide among young women is rising (2023) — a ‘personal trouble’ that is a public issue.

• Sociological imagination (C. Wright Mills, 1959): link ‘personal troubles of the milieu’ to ‘public issues of social structure’ — e.g. a student's subject choice.
• We belong to more than one society — nation, language, religion, caste or tribe — and societies are unequal (Amartya Sen).
• Sociology vs philosophy/religion: studies norms and values as they function, not as they ought to be; Berger: the sociologist reports like an unbiased spy.
• Sociology vs common sense: common sense is naturalistic, individualistic and unreflective; sociology follows rules of evidence and asks ‘is this really so?’
• Roots: Enlightenment, science, Darwinian evolution + industrial capitalism, degraded labour, industrial cities, clock-time; Comte ‘founder of sociology’.
• In India: colonialism ruined handicrafts; the ‘unchanging village’ was a myth; no rigid divide between sociology and social anthropology — ‘the other’ is next door (Srinivas).

NCERT opens with four kinds of advice given to students: (1) study hard and you will do well; (2) choose subjects that improve your chances in the job market; (3) ‘as a boy’ or ‘as a girl’, is this choice suitable?; (4) your family needs you to earn soon, or you will join the family business. The first puts the onus on the individual; the other three bring in the job market, gender and family or social background. NCERT's conclusion: individual effort matters a great deal but does not necessarily define outcomes. The job market reflects the needs of the economy, which are shaped by government economic and political policies; a student's chances are affected both by these broad measures and by family background. Even ‘a good job’ is not universal — is it judged by money, respect, social recognition or satisfaction? That depends on culture and norms.

This gives a first sense of how sociology studies society as an interconnected whole, and how the individual and society interact — the individual is constrained by institutions but can change them to an extent. NCERT calls the link dialectical. The worry over choosing subjects is a personal problem; that it is also a public issue affecting students as a collective is self-evident. Unravelling this connection is, NCERT says, one of the tasks of sociology.

C. Wright Mills built his idea of the sociological imagination on exactly this. In NCERT's extract from The Sociological Imagination (1959), the sociological imagination lets us grasp history and biography and the relations between them. Its most fruitful distinction is between ‘the personal troubles of the milieu’ — matters within a person's character and immediate relations — and ‘the public issues of social structure’, which go beyond these local settings. Mills's examples: when a society industrialises, a peasant becomes a worker; when classes rise or fall, a man is employed or unemployed; when war comes, a store clerk becomes a radar operator, a wife lives alone, a child grows up without a father. Neither an individual's life nor a society's history can be understood without both.

A ‘good job’ means different things in different societies; its esteem depends on the culture of a person's ‘relevant society’. But which society is that — the neighbourhood, the community, the caste or tribe, the parents' professional circle, the nation? NCERT's answer: in the contemporary world we belong, in a sense, to more than one society. Among foreigners, ‘our society’ may mean Indian society; among fellow Indians it may mean a linguistic or ethnic community, or a religious, caste or tribal society. This diversity makes it hard to decide which society we are talking about.

NCERT shows the difficulty is not confined to sociologists. The film-maker Satyajit Ray, reflecting on what to put in his films, wondered whether to go to the village of grazing cows and a shepherd's flute, back to the epics, or to stay in the ‘monstrous, teeming, bewildering’ city. NCERT asks whether his picture of the village is romantic, and sets beside it a sociologist's account (James Freeman, 1978) of a Dalit man in a village who places his own glass and saucer on the road outside a tea shop — a silent signal that an ‘Untouchable’ wants tea. Then Amartya Sen (2005) lists the many kinds of inequality among Indians — in wealth, education, ease of life, political power, opportunity, and treatment by the police — each needing serious attention. Deciding what to focus on is central to sociology; and inequality is central to differences among societies.

Sociology is the study of human social life, groups and societies; its subject matter is our own behaviour as social beings. It is not the first to think about society — philosophers, religious teachers and legislators of every civilisation did, and all of us carry everyday notions about our own and others' lives. But sociology's observations differ from both philosophical reflection and common sense.

Philosophical and religious thinkers often discuss what is moral or immoral, the desirable way of living and the good society. Sociology also concerns itself with norms and values, but not as they ought to be — rather, as they function in actual societies. (Chapter 3 shows how the sociology of religion differs from theology.) Empirical study is central. This does not mean sociology ignores values; it means the sociologist is willing to observe and record findings even when they are not to her or his liking.

Peter Berger makes the point with an unusual comparison: intelligence captured from an enemy is valuable only because good intelligence is free of bias; a spy who reports what superiors want to hear is useless to both sides. The sociologist is ‘a spy’ in the same sense — the job is to report a terrain as accurately as possible. Does the sociologist then have no social responsibility? NCERT says she or he has, like any citizen — but that asking is not sociological asking, just as a biologist whose knowledge can heal or kill bears responsibility for its use, though that is not a biological question.

From its beginnings sociology has understood itself as a science, bound by scientific canons of procedure: its statements must be reached by observing rules of evidence that let others check, repeat or develop the findings. NCERT notes the long debates over natural versus human science and quantitative versus qualitative research, but sets them aside; what matters is that sociological observation follows rules that others can check.

Common-sense explanations are generally ‘naturalistic’ and/or individualistic: they assume behaviour has ‘natural’ reasons rooted in people's nature or traits. NCERT's example is poverty: the naturalistic explanation says people are poor because they are afraid of work, come from ‘problem families’, cannot budget, have low intelligence or are shiftless; the sociological explanation says contemporary poverty is caused by the structure of inequality in class society and is experienced by those who suffer chronic irregularity of work and low wages.

Sociology thus breaks away from both common sense and philosophy. It does not often produce spectacular results, but meaningful and unsuspected connections can be found only by sifting through masses of connections; advances are mostly incremental, rarely dramatic. Sociology has a body of concepts, methods and data, however loosely coordinated, that common sense cannot replace. Common sense is unreflective: it does not question its own origins or ask, ‘Why do I hold this view?’ The sociologist must be ready to ask of any belief — however cherished — ‘is this really so?’ This systematic, questioning approach comes from the wider tradition of scientific investigation.

Influenced by scientific theories of natural evolution and by the reports of early travellers and colonial administrators on pre-modern societies, sociologists and social anthropologists tried to classify societies into types and to distinguish stages of social development. These features reappear in 19th-century works of Auguste Comte, Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer: pre-modern types (hunters and gatherers, pastoral and agrarian, agrarian and non-industrial civilisations) and modern types (industrialised societies).

Such an evolutionary vision assumed the West was necessarily the most advanced and civilised; non-western societies were often seen as barbaric and less developed. India's colonial experience must be seen in this light. NCERT quotes Yogendra Singh (2004) that the tensions in Indian sociology go back to British colonialism and the intellectual and ideological response to it, and notes (citing Maitrayee Chaudhuri, 2003) that perhaps for this reason Indian sociology has been particularly thoughtful and reflexive about its own practice.

Darwin's ideas about organic evolution were a dominant influence: society was compared to a living organism and traced through stages like organic life. This view of society as a system of parts, each with a function, shaped the study of institutions such as the family and the school, and structures such as stratification. The Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries, emphasised reason and individualism, alongside great scientific advance and a conviction that the methods of natural science could be extended to human affairs. Poverty, for instance, earlier seen as a ‘natural phenomenon’, came to be seen as a ‘social problem’ caused by human ignorance or exploitation — something that could be studied and redressed, for example through the social survey, based on the belief that human phenomena can be classified and measured (Chapter 5). Thinkers of the early modern era believed that progress in knowledge would solve social ills; Auguste Comte, the French scholar considered the founder of sociology, believed sociology would contribute to human welfare.

The Industrial Revolution rested on a new, dynamic economic form — capitalism — which drove industrial manufacturing. It brought new attitudes and institutions: entrepreneurs pursued profit systematically; markets became the key instrument of productive life; and goods, services and labour became commodities used according to rational calculation. England was its centre. Before industrialisation, most British people lived in villages, working in agriculture and textiles, with peasants and landlords, smiths, weavers, potters and shepherds — much like Indian villages. Society was small, hierarchical (status and class clearly defined) and marked by close interaction. Industrialisation changed each of these.

• Degradation of labour: work was wrenched from the protective contexts of guild, village and family; both radical and conservative thinkers were appalled at the decline in the status of the labourer and the skilled craftsman.
• Industrial cities: cities were not new, but industrial cities were a new urban world of factory soot and grime, overcrowded working-class slums, bad sanitation and squalor — and new kinds of social interaction.
• The factory: its mechanical division of labour was often seen as an attempt to destroy the peasant, the artisan, the family and the local community — economic regimentation previously known only in barracks and prisons. For Marx, the factory was oppressive yet potentially liberating, because there workers learnt to act collectively for better conditions.
• Clock-time: in the 18th and 19th centuries the tempo of work came to be set by clock and calendar. Earlier rhythms followed daylight, breaks between tasks and social duties; factory production demanded synchronised labour — punctual starts, a steady pace, set hours and days. For employer and employee, ‘time is now money: it is not passed but spent’.

Most of sociology's issues — urbanisation, factory production — date back to Europe's tumultuous 18th and 19th centuries and are pertinent to all modern societies, though their features vary. Indian society, with its colonial past and great diversity, is distinct, and Indian sociology reflects this. Why then begin with Europe? Because Indians' past is closely linked to the history of British capitalism and colonialism; western capitalism entailed a worldwide expansion, and colonialism was an essential part of modern capitalism and industrialisation. So western writings on capitalism are relevant to social change in India — but the impact of industrialisation in India was not the same as in the West.

Karl Marx's comment on the East India Company (1853, cited in Desai 1975) brings out the contrast: India, ‘the great workshop of cotton manufacture for the world’, was flooded with English cotton goods admitted at nominal duty, while its own products were excluded from England or admitted only on cruel terms — to the ruin of its celebrated native fabrics. Sociology in India also had to deal with western ideas about Indian society that were not always correct, in the accounts of colonial officials and western scholars who saw India as a contrast to the West. NCERT's example: the Indian village was portrayed as unchanging — in keeping with Victorian evolutionary ideas, a survival from ‘the infancy of society’, India's present standing for Europe's past.

Another sign of the colonial heritage is the distinction between sociology and social anthropology. A standard western definition (Giddens, 2001) makes sociology the study of human groups and societies with emphasis on the industrialised world; social anthropology was the study of simple, non-western, ‘other’ cultures. In India the story differs. M.N. Srinivas wrote (1966) that in a country of India's size and diversity — regional, linguistic, religious, sectarian, ethnic (including caste), rural and urban — there are myriad ‘others’, and ‘the other’ can be met literally next door. Indian social anthropology moved from ‘primitive people’ to peasants, ethnic groups, classes, ancient civilisations and modern industrial society. No rigid divide exists between the two subjects in India.

The scope of sociology is extremely wide. It can study meaningful interactions between individuals — a shopkeeper and a customer, teachers and students, friends or family members; national issues such as unemployment, caste conflict, the effect of state policy on tribal forest rights, or rural indebtedness; and global processes such as flexible labour rules, electronic media and the young, or foreign universities. What defines sociology is therefore not just what it studies but how. It belongs to the social sciences with anthropology, economics, political science and history; their divisions are not clear-cut and are ‘to some extent arbitrary’. Feminist theories show the need for interdisciplinary work: how could economists or political scientists study gender roles without a sociology of the family or the gender division of labour?

Economics gains precision from its narrow focus, and sociologists ‘often envy’ its exact measures and policy influence; yet economists' predictions often suffer from neglect of individual behaviour, cultural norms and institutional resistance. Sociology usually does not give technical solutions but encourages a questioning, critical perspective — about the social desirability of a goal, not just the means to it — and provides a clearer understanding of a situation, either factual or theoretical.

This section is not in NCERT's chapter; it introduces the names and approaches that the next chapters and Understanding Society develop, and that GS answers often cite. Positions are attributed and set side by side; none is presented as the correct one.

The chapter has ten activities, two ‘discuss the visuals’ prompts and a box asking for examples. Short outlines follow.

The four questions at the end of the chapter (page 22). Try each first, then open the outline.

Numbers

One-liners

• Individual effort matters, but does not necessarily define outcomes.
• The sociological imagination links biography and history — personal troubles and public issues.
• In modern times we belong to more than one society, and societies are unequal.
• Sociology studies norms and values as they function, not as they ought to be.
• The sociologist is like a spy whose report is useful only if free of bias (Berger).
• Common sense is naturalistic, individualistic and unreflective; sociology asks ‘is this really so?’
• Sociology was born of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
• In India, industrialisation ruined handicrafts and pushed artisans into agriculture.
• In India ‘the other’ is next door — no rigid divide between sociology and social anthropology.
• What defines sociology is not just what it studies but how.

Traps to avoid

• Comte's birth year is 1798, not NCERT's printed 1789.
• Mills's pair is ‘personal troubles of the milieu’ and ‘public issues of social structure’ — not ‘social problems’.
• NCERT does not say sociology ignores values; it studies how they function and reports unwelcome findings.
• ‘Naturalistic’ means explaining behaviour by people's supposed natural traits — not ‘about nature’.
• The ‘unchanging Indian village’ is a colonial misreading NCERT criticises, not NCERT's own view.
• No rigid divide between sociology and social anthropology is the Indian pattern; the rigid divide is western.
• In India industrialisation did not mainly urbanise people; it pushed ruined artisans into agriculture (Desai).
• Social psychology, not sociology, is the bridge between psychology and sociology in NCERT's account.
• Indentured migrants in NCERT's box went to Surinam, the West Indies and Fiji; Mauritius is in Laxman's quotation.
• Comte, Marx and Spencer are NCERT's named 19th-century classifiers of societies; Darwin's influence was the organism analogy.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• The chapter's Prelims value is in colonial economic history. Prelims has asked about the impact of Britain's Industrial Revolution on India — the ruin of handicrafts (1980, 2020), why India industrialised only gradually under British rule (1980) and colonialism as industrial Britain's need for markets (1988, Assertion–Reason). Desai's and Marx's quotations in this chapter are the sociological version of those answers.
• Scholar–work pairs occasionally help: Mills (1959), Berger (1963), Comte as founder of sociology (1798–1857), Durkheim's Suicide (1897), A.R. Desai (1948). Do not reproduce NCERT's misprinted ‘1789’ for Comte.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• World history (GS1): why the Industrial Revolution first occurred in England and what life was like during it, compared with India today (2015) — use section 6: capitalism, degradation of labour, industrial cities and slums, clock-time; then contrast with Indian urbanisation.
• Modern India (GS1): how far the Industrial Revolution caused the decline of Indian handicrafts (2024) — Marx (1853) and Desai on ruined artisans moving to agriculture, then the revisionist debate (Morris, Roy) for a balanced ‘how far’. Why indentured labour was taken abroad and whether migrants kept their culture (2018) — NCERT's box on plantations in Surinam, the West Indies and Fiji, and Laxman's Mauritius Tamil who lost his language.
• Society (GS1): why suicide among young women is increasing (2023) — Mills's personal troubles and public issues, and Durkheim's use of suicide rates by social group; bring data from later chapters.
• Answer frame for any GS1 society question: personal trouble → pattern across groups → structural causes (economy, policy, gender, caste, region) → naturalistic vs sociological explanation → attributed scholarly views → collective or policy response.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

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