Social Movements

This is Chapter 8, the last chapter of Social Change and Development in India. It runs 19 pages (109–127, with the conclusion and questions on 127) in eight numbered sections — 8.1 features; 8.2 sociology and social movements; 8.3 types (including old and new); 8.4 ecological movements; 8.5 class-based movements (peasants, workers); 8.6 caste-based movements (Dalit, backward classes); 8.7 tribal movements (Jharkhand, the North East); 8.8 the women's movement — with eight boxes, five activities and five end questions. It is a survey: each movement gets a page or two. We keep NCERT's order, add attributed scholarly views and dates (marked Beyond NCERT), and flag the chapter's several factual slips.

• Builds on Chapter 2 (lesy202 — 19th-century reform movements), Chapter 3 (lesy203 — how the national movement shaped the Constitution, and pressure groups), Chapter 4 (lesy204 — agrarian structure, Bhoodan), Chapter 5 (lesy205 — industry and labour) and Chapter 7 (lesy207 — media and campaigns).
• Pairs with live chapters: Indian Society Chapters 3 (lesy103 — caste and tribe), 5 (lesy105 — patterns of social inequality and exclusion: Dalit, tribal and women's movements) and 6 (lesy106 — civil society); Colonialism and the Countryside (lehs301 — indigo, Deccan riots, Santhals); Mahatma Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement (lehs303 — Champaran, Bardoli, Ahmedabad); Regional Aspirations (leps207); Environment and Natural Resources (leps106 — Chipko).
• UPSC: GS1 asked whether Dalit identity movements work towards annihilation of caste (2015), whether the women's movement ignored lower-strata women (2018), and how the national movement gained ideological strands after the 1920s (2020); GS2 on social movements and pluralist democracy (2026) and environmental pressure groups (2025). Prelims: Chipko (1979), Champaran (1979), the first trade union (1989), Jharkhand (1991), indigo disturbances (1994), a chronology (1999), the Textile Labour Association (2009), Tebhaga (2013) and Ulgulan (2020).

• A social movement = sustained collective action + organisation (leadership, structure) + shared objectives and ideology; it campaigns, lobbies and invents modes of protest; it meets counter-movements (Dharma Sabha against the anti-sati campaign).
• Sociology: Durkheim — protest as a threat to order; Marx-influenced historian E.P. Thompson — the crowd's ‘moral economy’. Social change is continuous; movements have specific goals.
• Types: redemptive (Ezhavas, Narayana Guru), reformist (linguistic states, RTI), revolutionary (Bolshevik, Naxalite); most mix. Old (class, party) vs new (identity, environment, cross-class); Rajni Kothari: non-party formations.
• Chipko: villagers, many women, hug trees; subsistence vs profit, floods and landslides, a distant government — ‘red’ and ‘green’ issues together (Guha, Unquiet Woods; Gaura Devi at Reni).
• Peasants: indigo revolt, Deccan riots, Champaran 1917, Bardoli 1928, Kisan Sabhas (1929, 1936), Tebhaga (1946–47: two-thirds share), Telangana (1946–51); new farmers' movements (1970s: prices, non-party). Workers: first union 1918 (B.P. Wadia), AITUC 1920, INTUC 1947.
• Dalit movements: a struggle for recognition — ‘to be touched’; backward-class mobilisation; Jharkhand (Birsa Munda; dikus; State in 2000); North East (autonomy); women's movement: WIA, NCWI, AIWC, renewal in the mid-1970s.

A social movement needs sustained collective action over time, often directed against the state and demanding changes in its policy or practice. Spontaneous, disorganised protest is not a movement: there must be some organisation — leadership and a structure defining how members relate, decide and act. Participants share objectives and ideologies and a general orientation to bring about (or prevent) change. These features are not fixed; they change over a movement's life. Movements usually take up public issues — such as tribal people's right to use forests or displaced people's right to resettlement and compensation.

Movements meet counter-movements defending the status quo. When Rammohun Roy campaigned against sati and founded the Brahmo Samaj, defenders of sati formed the Dharma Sabha and petitioned the British not to legislate; girls' education was called a disaster; widow-remarriage reformers were boycotted; some families withdrew ‘upper caste’ children when ‘lower caste’ children enrolled; peasant movements were often brutally suppressed; Dalit movements have met retaliation; proposals to extend reservation in education have produced opposing movements. Change is slow because movements confront entrenched interests and values — but over time change does come.

Protest is only the most visible activity. Activists hold meetings to build shared understanding and consensus; they run campaigns that lobby government, media and opinion-makers (Chapter 3); and they develop distinct modes of protest — candle and torch processions, black cloth, street theatre, songs and poetry. Gandhi's ahimsa, satyagraha, the charkha, picketing and the defiance of the salt law are classic examples. Finally, social change is continuous, the sum of countless actions; a social movement is directed at specific goals through long, sustained effort — so sanskritisation and westernisation (Chapter 2) are social changes, while 19th-century reform efforts were social movements.

Sociology has been interested in movements from the beginning. The French Revolution was the violent culmination of movements to overthrow monarchy for ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’; Britain's industrial revolution brought upheaval as labourers and artisans who moved to cities protested inhuman conditions, and food riots were suppressed. Elites saw these as threats to order, and that anxiety is reflected in Émile Durkheim, whose writing on the division of labour, religious life and suicide asks how social structures secure integration; movements appeared as forces of disorder.

Scholars influenced by Karl Marx read collective violence differently. The historian E.P. Thompson showed that the ‘crowd’ or ‘mob’ were not anarchic hooligans but had a ‘moral economy’ — a shared understanding of right and wrong that guided their actions. The urban poor had good reasons to protest and often did so publicly because they had no other way to express anger at deprivation.

NCERT classifies movements as redemptive (or transformatory), reformist and revolutionary. A redemptive movement changes the personal consciousness and actions of its members — the Ezhava community of Kerala, led by Narayana Guru, changing its social practices. A reformist movement changes existing social and political arrangements through gradual steps — the movement for reorganising States on linguistic lines and the Right to Information campaign. A revolutionary movement tries to transform social relations radically, often by capturing state power — the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and, in NCERT's description, the Naxalite movement, which seeks to remove oppressive landlords and state officials.

Most movements mix these elements, and their orientation can shift — from revolutionary to reformist, or from mass mobilisation to institutionalisation, which scholars of movement life cycles call the move towards ‘social movement organisations’. Classification is also a matter of interpretation: what the British called the 1857 ‘mutiny’ or ‘rebellion’ — defiance of supposedly legitimate authority — nationalists called the ‘first war of Independence’ — a challenge to the legitimacy of British rule itself.

Old social movements — the working-class movements of the capitalist West that won better wages, conditions, social security, schooling and health care, and the socialist movements that built new states — saw the reorganisation of power relations as central and worked through political parties: the Indian National Congress led the national movement; the Communist Party of China led the Chinese revolution. Some believe class-based action by unions and workers' parties is declining; others argued that in the affluent welfare-state West, class exploitation was no longer central. So new social movements were said to be about quality of life — a clean environment — rather than the distribution of power.

In India, political scientist Rajni Kothari attributed the surge of movements in the 1970s to growing dissatisfaction with parliamentary democracy: elites had captured state institutions, so electoral representation no longer gave the poor a voice; those left out joined movements or non-party political formations to press the state from outside. The broader term civil society now covers both old movements (parties, unions) and new NGOs, women's groups, environmental groups and tribal activists. Globalisation — transnational firms, binding international rules such as the WTO's, and global environmental, health and nuclear risks — makes many new movements international; old and new movements now work together in alliances such as the World Social Forum. New movements are not only about economic inequality nor organised only on class lines: identity politics, cultural anxieties and aspirations matter, and participants cross class lines — the women's movement includes urban middle-class feminists and poor peasant women; statehood movements unite people of different classes.

Modern development has emphasised growth while critics worried about unchecked use of resources, new needs that demand still more exploitation, and the assumption that everyone benefits: big dams displace people; industries displace cultivators; pollution adds its own harm. NCERT takes one example. In the Chipko movement in the Himalayan foothills, according to Ramachandra Guha's Unquiet Woods, villagers rallied to save the oak and rhododendron forests near their villages; when government forest contractors came, villagers — many of them women — hugged the trees to stop the felling.

At stake was subsistence: firewood, fodder and daily necessities. The conflict set the villagers' livelihood against the government's wish for timber revenue — an economy of subsistence against an economy of profit. Chipko also raised ecological sustainability: felling natural forests had caused devastating floods and landslides. For villagers these ‘red’ (economic justice) and ‘green’ (ecological) issues were linked; they also valued the forest for its own sake. And Chipko voiced hill villagers' resentment of a distant government in the plains. Economy, ecology and political representation all underlay it. NCERT adds that since 2014 the government has pursued the Namami Gange (Integrated Ganga Conservation) mission and Swachh Bharat Abhiyan for a cleaner environment.

Agrarian struggles go back to pre-colonial times. Between 1858 and 1914 they stayed localised, disjointed and tied to particular grievances — the Bengal indigo revolt against the plantation system and the ‘Deccan riots’ against moneylenders. Some issues continued and, under Gandhi, became partly linked to the national movement: the Champaran Satyagraha (1917–18) against indigo plantations and the Bardoli Satyagraha (1928, Surat district), a no-tax campaign refusing land revenue. In the 1920s there were also protests against the forest policies of the British and local rulers.

Between 1920 and 1940 peasant organisations arose — NCERT names the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (1929) as the first, and the All India Kisan Sabha (1936) — demanding freedom from exploitation for peasants, workers and all exploited classes. Around Independence came two ‘classical’ cases: the Tebhaga movement (1946–47), in which sharecroppers in Bengal demanded two-thirds of their produce instead of the customary half, backed by the Kisan Sabha and the CPI; and the Telangana movement (1946–51) against feudal conditions in the princely state of Hyderabad, led by the CPI. Boxes 8.5 and 8.6 describe the later Naxalbari and Srikakulam uprisings.

New farmers' movements began in the 1970s in Punjab and Tamil Nadu. They were regionally organised and non-party, and involved farmers — market-involved as both sellers and buyers — rather than peasants. Their ideology was strongly anti-state and anti-urban; their demands concerned prices — procurement and remunerative prices, input prices, taxation, non-repayment of loans; their methods included blocking roads and railways and refusing politicians and bureaucrats entry to villages. Some argue they have broadened to environmental and women's issues and so belong among the worldwide ‘new social movements’.

Factory production began, NCERT says, in the early 1860s. Under the colonial trade pattern, raw materials went out and British manufactures came in, so factories rose in the port towns of Calcutta and Bombay, later Madras; tea plantations in Assam date from 1839. Labour was cheap because wages and conditions were unregulated (Chapter 1). Workers protested before unions existed, though their actions were more spontaneous than sustained, and nationalist leaders drew workers into the anti-colonial movement.

The First World War expanded industry but brought food shortages and soaring prices: about 30 strikes in Bombay mills in September–October 1917; jute workers struck in Calcutta; Madras workers of the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills (Binny's) struck for higher wages; Ahmedabad textile workers demanded a 50% rise (Bhowmik 2004). The first trade union was formed in April 1918 in Madras by B.P. Wadia, a social worker and theosophist; the same year, NCERT says, Gandhi founded the Textile Labour Association. In 1920 the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) was formed in Bombay — a broad body of communists (S.A. Dange, M.N. Roy), moderates (N.M. Joshi, V.V. Giri) and nationalists (Lala Lajpat Rai, Jawaharlal Nehru).

As communists gained control of the AITUC late in British rule, the Congress formed the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) in May 1947; the split opened the way to further unions on party lines, and regional parties formed their own unions from the late 1960s. The 1966–67 recession cut production and jobs and caused unrest; the 1974 railway strike marked an acute confrontation between state and unions, and the workers' movement became part of a wider struggle for civil liberties.

Dalit movements cannot be explained by economic exploitation or political oppression alone, important though these are. They are a struggle for recognition as fellow human beings, for self-confidence and self-determination, and for an end to the stigma of untouchability — it has been called ‘a struggle to be touched’. The word Dalit, common in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and other languages for the poor and oppressed, was first used in its new sense in Marathi by neo-Buddhist followers of B.R. Ambedkar in the early 1970s; it means those deliberately broken or ground down by those above them, and in itself denies pollution, karma and a justified caste hierarchy.

There has never been a single Dalit movement; different movements have raised different issues with different ideologies, but all assert a Dalit identity and share a quest for equality, self-dignity and the eradication of untouchability (Shah 2001): the Satnami movement of the Chamars of the Chhattisgarh plains, the Adi Dharm movement in Punjab, the Mahar movement in Maharashtra, the mobilisation of the Jatavs of Agra, and the anti-Brahman movement in south India. Today the Dalit movement has a place in the public sphere that cannot be ignored, together with a growing Dalit literature that insists on its own imagery and experience, calls for social and cultural revolt, and ranges from the cultural struggle for dignity to structural and economic critique. Sociologists find Dalit movements fit all three types.

Backward-class mobilisation developed in both colonial and post-colonial contexts. Because the colonial state distributed patronage by caste, people stayed within caste for social and political identity, and similarly placed castes united in a ‘horizontal stretch’; caste lost ritual content and became secularised for political mobilisation (Chapter 2). The term ‘Backward Classes’ was used in the Madras Presidency from 1872, Mysore from 1918 and the Bombay Presidency from 1925; from the 1920s caste-based organisations such as the United Provinces Hindu Backward Classes League, the All-India Backward Classes Federation and the All India Backward Classes League emerged; 88 organisations worked for the Backward Classes by 1954.

Tribal groups share some issues but differ significantly. Many movements are in middle India's ‘tribal belt’ — the Santhals, Hos, Oraons and Mundas of Chota Nagpur and the Santhal Parganas, the core of what became Jharkhand. NCERT takes Jharkhand as an example and touches briefly on the North East, admitting it cannot cover the differences within that region.

Jharkhand was carved out of south Bihar in 2000, after more than a century of resistance. Its charismatic icon is Birsa Munda, an adivasi who led a major uprising against the British; stories and songs about him are found across the region. Christian missionaries spread literacy; literate adivasis researched and wrote about their history, myths and customs, creating a unified ethnic consciousness and a shared Jharkhandi identity. Literacy also brought government jobs and, over time, a middle-class adivasi intellectual leadership that formulated the demand for a separate state and lobbied in India and abroad. Adivasis shared hatred of dikus — migrant traders and moneylenders who had grabbed the region's wealth; most benefits of mining and industry went to dikus while adivasi land was alienated. Leaders agitated against land acquisition for large irrigation projects and firing ranges, resisted survey and settlement operations and the collection of loans, rent and cooperative dues, and boycotted the nationalisation of forest produce.

In the North East, the state formation that followed Independence unsettled the hill districts: tribes conscious of their distinct identity and traditional autonomy were wary of incorporation into Assam's administration. Drawing on Tiplut Nongbri (2003), NCERT reads ethnicity there as a response to contact with a powerful alien system after long isolation, and notes a shift from secessionism to a search for autonomy within the Constitution. Across regions, alienation from forest land binds tribal movements: ecological issues are central to them, as are identity and inequality — another sign that old and new movements blur in India.

The 19th-century reform movements raised women's issues (Chapter 2). The early 20th century saw women's organisations at national and local level — the Women's India Association (1917), the National Council for Women in India (1925) and the All India Women's Conference (1926). Their scope widened over time: the AIWC began by treating ‘women's welfare’ and ‘politics’ as separate, but a few years later a presidential address asked how anyone could be free if India was a slave (Chaudhuri 1993). Was this a social movement? NCERT says it can be argued either way — it had organisations, ideology, leadership, shared understanding and aims on a public issue — and it made the women's question impossible to ignore.

Part of the struggle has been to recover forgotten history: women took part in rural and tribal revolts — Tebhaga in Bengal, the Telangana armed struggle against the Nizam, and the Warli revolt against bondage in Maharashtra. After 1947 there was a lull, explained by activists' turn to nation-building, or by the trauma of Partition. The mid-1970s brought renewal — the ‘second phase’ — with changes in organisation and ideology and new issues such as violence against women: campaigns, legal changes, the mother's name on school forms, and struggles over land rights and employment alongside rights against sexual harassment and dowry.

The movement has also recognised that women are not equally disadvantaged: an educated middle-class woman's concerns differ from a peasant woman's, and a Dalit woman's from an ‘upper caste’ woman's. And men too are constrained by dominant gender identities — expected to be strong and successful, not to show emotion; a gender-just society would free both. NCERT links that ideal to educated women with multiple roles and an improved sex ratio, citing the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao scheme. Its conclusion to the book: movements best show the dialectic between individual and society — people seeking to change their conditions change both themselves and society.

Numbers

One-liners

• No organisation, no sustained action — no social movement.
• Every movement meets a counter-movement.
• Social change is continuous; a movement has goals.
• Durkheim feared disorder; Thompson found a moral economy.
• Most movements are part redemptive, part reformist, part revolutionary.
• Old movements fought over power; new ones over identity and quality of life — in India they blur.
• Kothari: when parties fail the poor, non-party formations press from outside.
• Chipko was red and green at once.
• Peasants fought over the crop share; farmers fight over prices.
• Indian unions grew along party lines.
• The Dalit movement is a struggle for recognition — ‘to be touched’.
• Jharkhand's identity was written, sung and organised into a State.
• Not all women are disadvantaged alike — and men are constrained too.

Traps to avoid

• Deccan riots: 1875, not NCERT's 1857.
• Bardoli (1928) was not part of Non-Cooperation (1920–22).
• Tebhaga was in Bengal, not ‘North Bihar’; its demand was two-thirds for the sharecropper.
• The U.P. Kisan Sabha (1918) predates NCERT's ‘first’ Kisan Sabha (Bihar, 1929).
• N.M. Joshi, not ‘M. Joshi’; Buckingham, not ‘Buchingham’.
• ‘Moral economy’ is E.P. Thompson's, not Durkheim's.
• The main linguistic reorganisation was in 1956, not the 1960s.
• AIWC: text 1926, caption 1920; first session 1927.
• ‘Gufiallo of the North Cedar Hills’ is very likely Rani Gaidinliu of the North Cachar Hills.
• Junagadh is in Gujarat — the Chipko-era photo caption's ‘Himachal Pradesh’ is doubtful.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Straight from this chapter: Chipko = preventing the felling of green trees (1979); Champaran = indigo (1979); first trade union = Madras Labour Union (1989); Jharkhand movement areas (1991); indigo disturbances right after 1857 (1994); Textile Labour Association = Gandhi (2009); Tebhaga = landlord's share cut to one-third (2013).
• Dates NCERT gets wrong matter: the chronology Santhal (1855) → Mutiny (1857) → Indigo (1859) → Deccan riots (1875) (1999); Ulgulan = Birsa Munda's revolt of 1899–1900 (2020). Related questions on other chapters: Mandal (1984), Satyashodhak Samaj (2016), Self-Respect Movement (2025), U.P. Kisan Sabha (2005).

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 caste: do Dalit identity movements work towards annihilation of caste (2015)? Use the ‘struggle for recognition’, the plurality of movements, Box 8.7's ‘on the whole reformist’ assessment, and attributed views (Shah, Omvedt, Lynch, Rege) — both mobilising along caste lines and challenging hierarchy.
• GS1 gender: has the women's movement ignored women of lower strata (2018)? Use NCERT's recognition of difference, women in Tebhaga, Telangana and Warli revolts, and Rege's Dalit feminist standpoint, balanced with campaigns on land, work and dowry that reached poor women.
• GS1 history: ideological strands in the national movement after the 1920s (2020) — Kisan Sabhas (1929, 1936), AITUC (1920) with communist, moderate and nationalist strands, the 1930s Left (collage, page 115).
• GS2: social movements and pluralist democracy (2026) — Kothari's non-party formations, civil society, counter-movements; environmental pressure groups (2025) — Chipko's local organisation, media and networks (Box 8.4). Keep all views attributed; avoid present-day political commentary.

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