Social Institutions: Continuity and Change

Chapter 2 counted India's people; this chapter asks how they are organised. A population is a society made of distinct but interlinked classes and communities, sustained and regulated by social institutions. NCERT studies three that are central to Indian society: caste, tribe and family. Chapter 1 called them the ‘basic building blocks’ that later chapters presuppose. The book's own guidance warns that this material is sensitive and should be discussed without embarrassing any group — while asking everyone, including those from dominant groups, to question their common sense. This page follows that approach: concepts, evidence and named scholarly positions side by side.

• Pairs with live chapters: Themes in Indian History I, Theme 3 Kinship, Caste and Class (varna, jati, gotra and marriage in early texts — the historical side of this chapter's ‘caste in the past’); Political Theory, Chapter 3 Equality (reservations and affirmative action); Themes III, Theme 1 Colonialism and the Countryside (Santhals and Paharias).
• Leads into Chapter 5 (untouchability, caste and tribal movements, exclusion) and Chapter 6 (community identity, regionalism).
• UPSC: Prelims has asked about Sanskritisation (1983), varna and jati (1984), caste hierarchy (1990), the Satyashodhak Samaj (1993, 2016), the Self-Respect Movement (2025) and tribal population (1979, 1986, 2005). GS1 asks whether caste has lost relevance (2020), why caste is fluid and static (2023), whether caste is disappearing in cities (2026), inter-caste marriage (2024), tribes as a category (2022), the joint family (2014), work-from-home and the family (2022) and continuity in social values (2021).

• Varna = four all-India categories (with ‘panchamas’ outside); jati = hundreds of local castes. Six textbook features: birth, endogamy, food rules, hierarchy, segmental organisation, hereditary occupation — prescriptions, not always practice.
• Two principles: separation and hierarchy, ranked by purity and pollution; castes complementary and non-competing — a division of labour without mobility.
• Colonialism changed caste: the census (regular from 1881), Risley's 1901 ranking and the petitions it triggered; the 1935 Act's schedules → ‘Scheduled Castes’.
• Today: weakened in work and cities, resilient in endogamy, recruitment and politics; Srinivas's Sanskritisation and dominant caste; caste ‘invisible’ for the privileged, all too visible for SCs, STs and OBCs.
• Tribes: 85% in middle India, 11% in the north-east; 8.6% of India (2011). The tribe–caste continuum vs distinct debate; definitions failed by the 1970s; development dispossessed; identity built on resistance and a new middle class (Xaxa).
• Family: nuclear or extended, male- or female-headed, patri- or matrilineal, patri- or matrilocal; ‘joint family’ not a native term (I.P. Desai); matriarchy has no evidence — matriliny does.

Caste is an institution uniquely associated with the Indian subcontinent; similar arrangements exist elsewhere, but not this exact form. Though characteristic of Hindu society, it has spread to major non-Hindu communities, especially Muslims, Christians and Sikhs. The English word comes from the Portuguese casta (‘pure breed’). Indian languages use two terms. Varna, literally ‘colour’, is the four-fold division into brahmana, kshatriya, vaishya and shudra, which excludes a large population — ‘outcastes’, foreigners, slaves, conquered peoples — sometimes called panchamas (the fifth). Jati means ‘kind’ or ‘species’ of anything, and is the everyday word for caste. The most common interpretation treats varna as an all-India aggregative classification and jati as regional or local sub-classifications — hundreds or thousands of castes and sub-castes whose ranking varies by region.

Scholars disagree about caste's age. The four-varna classification is generally agreed to be about 3,000 years old, but ‘caste system’ meant different things at different times. NCERT says that in the late Vedic period (about 900–500 BC) it was really a varna system of four divisions that were not elaborate, rigid or birth-determined, with movement common; caste became rigid only in the post-Vedic period.

NCERT stresses that these are prescribed rules from scriptural texts; since they were not always practised, we cannot say how far they shaped people's actual lives. Most are prohibitions. Historical evidence also shows caste was very unequal: some castes gained greatly, others were condemned to endless labour and subordination; and once caste was fixed by birth, a person could not, in principle, change their life circumstances.

Theoretically, NCERT explains, the caste system combines two sets of principles. One is difference and separation: each caste is distinct and strictly separated from others, so many scriptural rules — on marriage, food-sharing, social interaction and occupation — prevent mixing. The other is wholism and hierarchy: separated castes have no individual existence; they exist only in relation to the whole, which is hierarchical, each caste holding an ordered rank on a ladder.

The ranking rests on the distinction between purity (closer to the sacred) and pollution (distant from or opposed to it): ritually pure castes have high status, impure ones low status. As in all societies, material power — economic or military — goes with status, and historians believe the defeated in war were often assigned low caste status. Finally, castes are supposed to be complementary and non-competing: each has a place no other can take, so caste works as a social division of labour that, in principle, allows no mobility.

Scholars agree that caste underwent major changes in the colonial period (about 1800–1947); some argue that what we know as caste today is more a product of colonialism than of ancient tradition. Not all changes were deliberate. British administrators tried to understand caste in order to govern efficiently, producing methodical surveys of the ‘customs and manners’ of castes and tribes; many officials were amateur ethnologists. The most important effort was the census, begun in the 1860s and held every ten years from 1881. The 1901 Census under Herbert Risley tried to record the social order of precedence — each caste's rank in each region. This had a huge effect: hundreds of petitions reached the Census Commissioner from castes claiming higher places, citing history and scripture. Scholars feel that counting and recording caste changed the institution itself: identities that had been more fluid took on a new, more rigid life.

The administration also took an interest in the welfare of the ‘depressed classes’. The Government of India Act, 1935 gave legal recognition to lists or ‘schedules’ of castes and tribes marked for special treatment — the origin of the terms ‘Scheduled Castes’ and ‘Scheduled Tribes’. Castes at the bottom of the hierarchy that suffered severe discrimination, including all the so-called ‘untouchable’ castes, were included among the Scheduled Castes.

Independence in 1947 was a big but only partial break with the colonial past. Efforts to organise the ‘depressed classes’, especially the ‘untouchable’ castes, began in the second half of the nineteenth century — before the nationalist movement — from both ends of the caste spectrum: upper-caste progressive reformers, and leaders from the lower castes such as Jotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar in western India and Ayyankali, Sri Narayana Guru, Iyotheedass and Periyar in the south. Gandhi and Ambedkar both organised protests against untouchability from the 1920s. By Independence there was broad agreement in the nationalist movement to abolish caste distinctions; the dominant view treated caste as a social evil and a colonial ploy to divide Indians. NCERT notes that the nationalist leadership, above all Gandhi, worked for the lower castes and against untouchability while also reassuring landowning upper castes that their interests would be protected.

The state's contradictions. The post-Independence state was committed to abolishing caste and wrote this into the Constitution; but it was, NCERT says, both unable and unwilling to push through radical reforms that would have undermined caste inequality's economic basis; and it assumed that acting in a caste-blind way would automatically erode caste privilege. Government appointments ignored caste, leaving well-educated upper castes and ill-educated or illiterate lower castes to compete on ‘equal’ terms — with the sole exception of reservations for SCs and STs.

Economic change. State development and private industry speeded up change. Modern industry created new jobs with no caste rules; urban collective living made segregated interaction hard to sustain; educated Indians drawn to individualism and meritocracy abandoned the more extreme practices. Yet caste proved remarkably resilient: recruitment to factories — the textile mills of Mumbai, the jute mills of Kolkata — ran along caste and kinship lines, as middlemen recruited from their own caste and region, so departments and shop floors were dominated by particular castes; prejudice against ‘untouchables’ persisted, less extreme in the city than in the village.

Culture, the home and politics. Caste has been strongest in the cultural and domestic spheres. Endogamy was largely unaffected by modernisation: most marriages are still within caste, though inter-caste marriages are more common; some boundaries have become porous, but those between castes of similar socio-economic status are ‘still heavily patrolled’. The most eventful change has been in politics: democratic politics has been deeply conditioned by caste, which remains central to elections, with explicitly caste-based parties since the 1980s; but as parties all used the same ‘caste calculus’, outcomes grew complex and hard to predict.

Sociologists coined many concepts to understand these changes; the best known — Sanskritisation and dominant caste — came from M.N. Srinivas (1916–1999), and both have been widely discussed and criticised. Sanskritisation is the process by which members of a (usually middle or lower) caste try to raise their social status by adopting the ritual, domestic and social practices of a higher caste or castes.

Dominant caste, in NCERT's account, refers to castes with a large population that were granted land rights by the partial land reforms after Independence. The reforms took rights from upper-caste absentee landlords — rent-claimants who played no part in farming and often lived in towns — and vested them in the next layer: castes that managed agriculture but did not themselves till, depending on the labour of lower castes, especially ‘untouchable’ castes. With land came economic power; with numbers, under universal adult franchise, came political power. These intermediate castes became ‘dominant’ in the countryside and decisive in regional politics and the agrarian economy. NCERT's examples: the Yadavs of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Vokkaligas of Karnataka, the Reddys and Khammas of Andhra Pradesh, the Marathas of Maharashtra, the Jats of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, and the Patidars of Gujarat.

NCERT calls this one of the most significant yet paradoxical changes. For the upper-caste, urban middle and upper classes, who benefited most from post-colonial development, caste seems to have declined in significance precisely because it has done its job so well. Their caste status gave them the economic and educational resources to take full advantage of development: subsidised public education, especially professional education in science, technology, medicine and management, and the expanding public-sector jobs of the early decades — with little serious competition at first. By the second and third generations they came to believe their advancement had little to do with caste; for the third generation, economic and educational capital alone secure the best life chances, and caste seems confined to religious practice, marriage and kinship. NCERT adds a caution: the privileged are overwhelmingly upper caste, but not all upper-caste people are privileged; some are poor.

For Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and backward castes the opposite happened: caste became all too visible, often eclipsing other identities. Without inherited educational and social capital, and competing against an entrenched group, they cannot abandon caste identity, which is one of their few collective assets; they also continue to face discrimination. Reservation and other protective policies, adopted in response to political pressure, are their ‘lifelines’ — but using them makes caste the all-important, often the only, identity the world recognises.

‘Tribe’ is a modern term for communities that are very old — among the oldest inhabitants of the subcontinent. Tribes have generally been defined by what they were not: they did not practise a religion with a written text, did not have a state or political form of the usual kind, and did not have sharp class divisions. Positive classifications use permanent traits (region, language, physical characteristics, ecological habitat) and acquired traits (mode of livelihood, and extent of incorporation into Hindu society).

Region. About 85% of tribal people live in ‘middle India’ — a band from Gujarat and Rajasthan to West Bengal and Odisha, with Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and parts of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh at its heart; over 11% live in the north-eastern States, and a little over 3% elsewhere. As a share of State population, the north-east has the highest concentrations — over 30% in every State except Assam, and over 60% (up to 95%) in Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland. Habitats include hills, forests, rural plains and urban industrial areas. Language: of four families, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian are shared with other Indians (tribals are about 1% and 3% of their speakers); Austric is spoken entirely, and Tibeto-Burman over 80%, by tribal people. Size: tribes range from about seven million people to Andamanese groups of fewer than a hundred; the largest — Gonds, Bhils, Santhals, Oraons, Minas, Bodos, Mundas — each number at least a million. Tribal people were 8.2% of India (about 84 million) in 2001 and 8.6% (about 104 million) in 2011.

Acquired traits. By livelihood, tribes are classified as fishers, food gatherers and hunters, shifting cultivators, peasants, and plantation and industrial workers. But the dominant classification, in academic sociology and in politics, is the degree of assimilation into Hindu society. From the tribes' point of view, attitude towards Hindu society matters too — some tribes are positively inclined, others resist; from the mainstream point of view, tribes are seen by the status given them in Hindu society, high for a few and low for most.

In the 1960s scholars debated whether tribes were one end of a continuum with caste-based (Hindu) peasant society, or a different kind of community altogether. The continuum view saw tribes as merely less stratified and with more community-based resource ownership. Its opponents argued tribes were wholly different because they had no notion of purity and pollution, central to caste. The case for distinction thus rested on an assumed cultural difference between Hindu castes, with purity, pollution and hierarchical integration, and ‘animist’ tribes with more egalitarian, kinship-based organisation.

By the 1970s all the major definitions had been shown to be faulty: the tribe–peasant distinction did not hold on size, isolation, religion or livelihood. Some ‘tribes’ — Santhals, Gonds, Bhils — are very large and widespread; Mundas, Hos and others long ago took to settled farming; even hunting-gathering Birhors of Bihar have specialised households making baskets or pressing oil; and non-tribal ‘castes’ have sometimes turned to hunting and gathering.

A large literature examined how tribes were absorbed into Hindu society over the ages — through Sanskritisation, entry into the Shudra fold after conquest, acculturation — as their lands were colonised and forests cut down. This has been read as natural (like the absorption of groups into Hinduism as sects) or as exploitative; early anthropologists emphasised the cultural aspects, later writers the exploitative and political nature of incorporation. Some scholars argue there is no basis for treating tribes as ‘pristine’ societies; tribes should be seen as ‘secondary’ phenomena arising from exploitative contact between states and non-state groups, contact that itself creates an ideology of ‘tribalism’ as groups define themselves against others.

The image of tribes as stone-age societies untouched by time is still common but has long been untrue. Adivasis were not always oppressed: there were several Gond kingdoms in central India, such as Garha Mandla and Chanda; many so-called Rajput kingdoms of central and western India emerged through stratification among adivasi communities; adivasis dominated plains people through raids and as local militias; and they held trade niches in forest produce, salt and elephants. The capitalist drive for forest resources, minerals and cheap labour brought tribes into contact with mainstream society long ago.

The imperatives of ‘development’ shaped state attitudes and policies. National development, especially in the Nehruvian era, meant large dams, factories and mines; because tribal areas lay in mineral-rich, forest-covered regions, tribal people paid a disproportionate price for the development of the rest of society, and dispossession of their land was a by-product of mining and hydroelectric projects. The loss of forests, systematically exploited from British times and after independence, was a major blow; private property in land disadvantaged community-based collective ownership. Heavy in-migration of non-tribals threatens to overwhelm tribal communities: industrial Jharkhand saw the tribal share diluted, and in the north-east Tripura's tribal share was halved ‘within a single decade’, making tribes a minority; Arunachal Pradesh feels similar pressure.

Tribal identity today is formed by this interaction rather than by primordial traits; because interaction has been on unfavourable terms, many identities centre on resistance to the non-tribal world. Successes — statehood for Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh after long struggles — are moderated by continuing problems: several north-eastern States have lived for decades under special laws that limit civil liberties. Another development is an educated tribal middle class, most visible in the north-east and now among larger tribes elsewhere, which, with reservations, is producing an urban professional class. As tribal societies become internally differentiated, the bases of identity assertion multiply. Two sets of issues drive tribal movements: control over land and especially forests, and ethnic-cultural identity; they often go together but may diverge, since middle-class tribals and poor, uneducated tribals may join movements for different reasons.

Each of us is born into a family and most of us spend long years in it; we feel strongly about it, resenting its interference yet missing it when away. It is a space of great warmth and care, and also of bitter conflict, injustice and violence — female infanticide, violent disputes between brothers over property, ugly legal battles — alongside compassion, sacrifice and care. The family can be studied as an institution in itself — nuclear or extended, male- or female-headed, matrilineal or patrilineal — and in its links with political, economic, cultural and educational structures: the ‘private’ sphere is tied to the ‘public’.

We take the family for granted and assume others' families are like ours; but families differ and change. Change can be accidental (war, migration for work) or purposeful (young people choosing their own spouses; same-sex love expressed openly). Cultural ideas, norms and values change too, though not easily: history and the present show that changes in family and marriage norms are often resisted violently. Discussion in India has mostly revolved around the nuclear and extended family.

A nuclear family is one set of parents and their children. An extended (‘joint’) family has more than one couple and often more than two generations living together — brothers with their families, or an elderly couple with sons, grandsons and their families. The extended family is often seen as typically Indian, yet it was never the dominant form, being confined to certain sections and regions. The sociologist I.P. Desai (1964) pointed out that ‘joint family’ is not a translation of any Indian word; the terms used in most Indian languages are themselves translations of the English phrase.

Diverse forms. By residence, some societies are matrilocal (the couple lives with the woman's parents), others patrilocal (with the man's). By inheritance, matrilineal societies pass property from mother to daughter, patrilineal ones from father to son. A patriarchal family is one where men exercise authority; matriarchy would be the reverse — but, unlike patriarchy, it is a theoretical, not empirical, concept: there is no historical or anthropological evidence of societies where women dominate. Matrilineal societies do exist, but there women inherit property from their mothers without controlling it, and are not the decision-makers in public affairs.

NCERT's guidance says this chapter is deliberately light on activities so that teachers can handle sensitive material carefully. These questions arise from its boxes and illustrations.

Try each question yourself first, then open the outline.

Numbers

One-liners

• Varna is four and all-India; jati is many and local.
• Caste = separation + hierarchy, ranked by purity and pollution.
• Textbook rules were prescriptions, not always practice.
• Counting caste in the census changed caste itself.
• Caste weakened at work and in cities, persisted in marriage, networks and politics.
• Sanskritisation changes a caste's position, not the hierarchy.
• Caste is ‘invisible’ for the privileged because it has done its job so well.
• Every definition separating tribe from caste has been challenged.
• Tribal identity today is formed by interaction and resistance, not primordial traits.
• Matriliny exists; matriarchy has never been found.

Traps to avoid

• Varna = 4, jati = many (UPSC 1984) — do not reverse.
• Sanskritisation and dominant caste are Srinivas's; Homo Hierarchicus is Dumont's; Caste and Race in India is Ghurye's.
• The Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) was Phule's anti-caste movement in Maharashtra — not a tribal or temple-entry movement.
• Ayyankali died in 1941; NCERT's ‘1863–1914’ is a misprint.
• ‘Scheduled Tribes’ was formally defined by the Constitution (Articles 342, 366(25)); the 1935 Act and the 1936 Order created the Scheduled Castes list.
• The north-east has about 11% of India's tribal people, not half (UPSC 2005).
• NCERT's ‘under 12% in all States except Odisha and MP’ is wrong for 2011 — Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand are far higher.
• Matriliny is a rule of descent; matriarchy (women's dominance) has no evidence.
• ‘Joint family’ is not a native Indian category (I.P. Desai); it was never the dominant form.
• Not all upper-caste people are privileged — NCERT's own caveat to the invisibility argument.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Concepts: Sanskritisation (1983), varna versus jati (1984), the classical caste system as a vertical hierarchy (1990). Learn scholar–concept pairs: Srinivas, Dumont, Ghurye, Ambedkar.
• Reformers: the Satyashodhak Samaj's programme (1993, 2016); the founder of the Self-Respect Movement (2025). Learn the five portrait boxes with dates (and the Ayyankali correction).
• Tribes: the largest tribe (1979), the State with the largest ST population (1986), the north-east's share (2005). Pair with Article 342, the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, PESA 1996 and FRA 2006.
• Caste and the Constitution: why the Constitution does not recognise the caste system (1986 — loosely framed; the keyed ‘all of the above’ is debatable, since the Constitution does use caste lists for protection).

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• Caste today (GS1): new identities and associational forms (2018), lost relevance? (2020), fluid and static (2023), inter-caste marriage among castes of similar status (2024) — NCERT says borders between such castes are ‘still heavily patrolled’ — and caste in urban India (2026). Use the weakened/persisted frame, Sanskritisation and dominant caste, and the invisibility argument, each attributed.
• Reform (GS1): Phule's writings and the subaltern classes (2025) — the portrait boxes plus Beyond NCERT dates.
• Tribes (GS1, GS3): why ‘Scheduled Tribes’ and their constitutional provisions (2016); when diverse tribes form a single category (2022); development, displacement and rehabilitation (2025), tribal development policy and equity (2026), industry isolating tribal people (GS3 2015). Use the ‘career of a concept’ debate, national versus tribal development, and Xaxa's middle class.
• Family (GS1): the joint family's life cycle and economic factors (2014), work-from-home and family relationships (2022), marriage as a sacrament (2023), continuity of traditional values (2021). Use NCERT's link between the public sphere and family structure, I.P. Desai, matriliny versus matriarchy, and bare legal facts.
• Answer frame: define with NCERT → historical layer (texts and their limits; colonial census) → present (what weakened, what persists) → attributed scholarly positions side by side → constitutional and legal facts, stated barely → balanced conclusion without a one-line verdict.

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

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.