Structural Change

This is the opening chapter of Social Change and Development in India, the second of the two Class 12 sociology books (the first, Indian Society, describes the structure; this one describes change). In the rationalised reprint it runs 14 pages and has two numbered sections: 1.1 Understanding Colonialism and 1.2 Urbanisation and Industrialisation, with seven boxes, three activities, two charts and four end-of-chapter questions. It looks at structural change — the large, lasting arrangements of economy, settlement and work. The next chapter, Cultural Change, looks at social reform, Sanskritisation, westernisation, modernisation and secularisation; NCERT warns that the two cannot be strictly separated.

• Leads into this book's Chapter 2 (cultural change under colonialism), Chapter 3 (the Constitution — the nation state and democratic rights), Chapter 5 (industrial society after 1947 and liberalisation) and Chapter 6 (globalisation).
• Pairs with live chapters: Themes in Indian History III, Theme 9 Colonialism and the Countryside (lehs301 — Permanent Settlement, ryotwari, the Deccan cotton boom); Indian Economic Development, Chapter 1 Indian Economy on the Eve of Independence (keec101 — deindustrialisation, drain, the colonial economy); Indian Society, Chapter 1 Introducing Indian Society (lesy101 — how sociology looks at society); Political Theory, Chapter 8 Secularism (keps108).
• UPSC: Mains GS1 asks about the decline of artisanal industry (2017), indentured labour (2018), urbanisation's social problems (2013) and segregation in metropolises (2023), smart cities and villages (2015), Britain's industrial revolution compared with India (2015) and planning against colonial regional imbalances (2026). Old Prelims papers asked why India industrialised slowly under British rule (1980) and linked colonialism to the industrial revolution (1988).

• Colonial modernity was paradoxical: liberal ideas under illiberal rule; English both opens doors (global jobs, Dalit mobility) and marks privilege.
• Pre-capitalist conquerors took tribute and left the economic base alone; capitalist colonialism restructured it — land laws, crops, manufacturing, forests (Alavi and Shanin, 1982).
• Colonialism moved people: Jharkhand → Assam tea gardens; Bengal and Madras middle class across India; indentured labour to Mauritius 1834–1920 (mostly from Bihar).
• Capitalism (economic) and the nation state (political) are the two forms of modernity; colonial rule contradicted nationalism → demand for swaraj.
• Britain: industrialisation → urbanisation (under 20% urban in 1800 → 74% in 1900). India: deindustrialisation, decline of Surat, Masulipatnam, Dhaka, Murshidabad, and artisans pushed into agriculture (Census 1911).
• Port cities (Bombay, Calcutta, Madras) linked core and periphery; dual European and native towns. After 1947: state-led industry, new towns (Bhilai, Rourkela, Durgapur, Bokaro); M.S.A. Rao's three urban impacts; urban share 17.29% (1951) → 31.16% (2011).

NCERT begins with a simple claim: understanding the present usually needs some grasp of the past. India's ancient and medieval past matters, but its colonial experience is ‘particularly significant’ for understanding modern India — not only because many modern ideas and institutions arrived through colonialism, but because that exposure was contradictory or paradoxical. Indians read about western liberalism and freedom while living under a western rule that denied them liberty. Such contradictions, NCERT says, shaped the structural and cultural changes of the first two chapters — and the social reform and nationalist movements, laws, political life, Constitution, industry, agriculture, cities and villages discussed in the rest of the book.

The traces are everywhere: a parliamentary, legal, police and educational system built largely on the British model; driving on the left; ‘bread-omelette’ and ‘cutlets’ in roadside canteens; a well-known biscuit brand named after Britain; neck-ties in school uniforms. NCERT adds a sharp line: we often admire the West and as often resent it.

The chapter's chosen example is English. Its impact is ‘many sided and paradoxical’. Indians have produced an impressive body of literature in English, and English has given them an edge in the global market. Yet English remains a mark of privilege, and not knowing it is a handicap in the job market. At the same time, for groups long denied formal education, such as Dalits, English can open doors that were once closed.

At one level colonialism simply means rule by one country over another. India's past saw many groups arrive and rule parts of what is now India. Why, then, is colonial rule singled out? Because its changes were far-reaching and deep. NCERT draws on Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin (1982): there is a ‘vital difference’ between the empire-building of pre-capitalist times and that of capitalist times. Pre-capitalist conquerors, apart from outright plunder, lived off a continuous flow of tribute skimmed from the surplus that the conquered lands produced in their traditional way; on the whole they did not interfere with the economic base.

British colonialism, based on capitalism, directly interfered to secure the greatest profit for British capitalism. It changed the laws of the land and land ownership; decided which crops should and should not be grown; meddled with manufacturing; altered how goods were produced and distributed; entered the forests, cleared trees and started tea plantations; and passed Forest Acts that kept pastoralists out of forests that had fed their cattle.

Colonialism led to considerable movement of people. Inside India, people from present-day Jharkhand went to work on the tea plantations of Assam. A new middle class, especially from the Presidency regions of Bengal and Madras, moved across the country as government employees and as professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Overseas, people were carried by ship to work in other colonised lands in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Many died on the way; most never returned. Their descendants are today known as people of Indian origin.

NCERT also notes that colonial changes were partly deliberate and partly unintended. Its example: western education was introduced to produce Indians who would help run the colonial system — instead it helped grow a nationalist, anti-colonial consciousness. (NCERT says ‘we saw’ this earlier; in the rationalised reprint that discussion is not in this book — see the trap box.)

To grasp the depth of colonial change, NCERT asks us to understand capitalism: an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and organised to accumulate profit within a market. Western capitalism grew out of European exploration of the world, its plunder of wealth and resources, and an unprecedented growth of science and technology harnessed to industry and agriculture. From the start it was marked by dynamism — the drive to grow, expand, innovate and use technology and labour for maximum profit — and by its global nature. Western colonialism was ‘inextricably connected’ to western capitalism, and this shaped how capitalism developed in a colony like India.

If capitalism became the dominant economic system, the nation state became the dominant political form. Living in nation states with a nationality seems natural now, but before the First World War passports were not widely used and few people had one. A nation state is a particular, modern kind of state: a government with sovereign power over a defined territory, whose people are citizens of a single nation. It is closely tied to nationalism — the principle that any people has a right to be free and sovereign — which is part of the rise of democratic ideas (taken further in Chapter 3).

Here lies a contradiction. Colonialism meant foreign rule; nationalism meant that the people of India, like any people, had an equal right to be sovereign. Indian nationalist leaders were quick to grasp the irony: they declared swaraj their birthright and fought for both political and economic freedom.

NCERT defines industrialisation as the emergence of machine production based on inanimate power such as steam or electricity. Standard western sociology textbooks say that even in the most advanced traditional civilisations most people worked on the land, because low technology could free only a small minority from farm work. In industrial societies, by contrast, a large majority of the employed work in factories, offices or shops, and over 90 per cent of people in the West live in towns and cities, where most jobs are created. So we usually link urbanisation with industrialisation — they often occur together, but not always.

Britain, the first society to industrialise, was also the first to become predominantly urban. NCERT quotes Anthony Giddens (2001): in 1800, well under 20 per cent of Britain's population lived in towns or cities of more than 10,000 people; by 1900 the proportion was 74 per cent. London grew from about 1.1 million people in 1800 to over 7 million by the start of the twentieth century — then the largest city the world had seen, a manufacturing, commercial and financial centre at the heart of an expanding empire.

In India, NCERT says, the very same British industrialisation led to deindustrialisation in some sectors and the decline of old urban centres. As manufacturing boomed in Britain, India's traditional exports of cotton and silk goods declined before Manchester competition. Old cities such as Surat and Masulipatnam declined further while Bombay and Madras grew. When the British took over Indian states, towns like Thanjavur, Dhaka and Murshidabad lost their royal courts — and with them some of their artisans and court gentry. Only from the end of the 19th century did mechanised factories make some towns much more populous.

NCERT quotes the historian Sumit Sarkar (1983): urban luxury crafts such as the fine silks and cottons of Dhaka or Murshidabad were probably hit first, by the near-simultaneous loss of court demand at home and of the export market; village crafts in the interior, especially outside eastern India where British penetration was earliest and deepest, probably survived longer and were seriously affected only when railways spread. Unlike Britain, where industrialisation moved people into towns, in India its initial impact moved more people into agriculture — what scholars call ‘ruralisation’ (Beyond NCERT term) — and the Census of 1911 shows this.

Cities had a key role in the economics of empire. Coastal cities — Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai — were favoured because primary commodities could be exported easily and manufactured goods imported cheaply. Colonial cities were the prime link between the economic centre or core in Britain and the periphery or margins in colonised India: ‘the concrete expression of global capitalism’. Bombay was planned and redeveloped so that by 1900 over three-quarters of India's raw cotton was shipped through it; Calcutta exported jute to Dundee; Madras sent coffee, sugar, indigo dyes and cotton to Britain.

Colonial urbanisation thus meant both the decline of some older centres and the emergence of new colonial cities. Kolkata was one of the first. NCERT tells the story: in 1690 the English merchant Job Charnock arranged to lease three villages — Kolikata, Gobindapur and Sutanuti — on the Hugli to set up a trading post; in 1698 Fort William was set up by the river for defence, and a large open space, the Maidan, was cleared round it for military purposes. Fort and Maidan formed the core of a city that grew rapidly.

NCERT stresses that India's industrialisation and urbanisation differed from Britain's ‘not because we began industrialisation late’ but because early industrialisation and urbanisation were governed by colonial interests. Its example is the tea industry. Official reports show that the colonial government often used unfair means to hire and forcibly keep labourers and clearly acted on behalf of British planters. Colonial administrators were clear that harsh measures were taken against labourers for the planters' benefit — and fully aware that laws in a colony did not have to follow the democratic norms that bound government in Britain. Fiction and other accounts show how the planters lived.

The colonial state shaped how industrialisation and urbanisation happened; the independent Indian state played an active role in promoting industrialisation, partly in response to colonialism's impact on Indian industry. For Indian nationalists, economic exploitation under colonial rule was central. Images of India's fabled pre-colonial riches were set against the poverty of British India. The Swadeshi movement strengthened loyalty to the national economy, and modern ideas made people realise that poverty was preventable. Nationalists saw rapid industrialisation as the path to both growth and social equity: heavy and machine-making industries, an expanding public sector and a large cooperative sector were considered very important. (Chapter 5 continues the story to liberalisation after 1990.)

Urbanisation has accelerated with globalisation, and NCERT notes the government's Smart City scheme as part of fast 21st-century urbanisation. It then turns to a sociological account by M.S.A. Rao, writing on the first two decades after Independence: villages all over India were increasingly subject to urban influences, but the nature of urban impact varied with the kind of relation a village had with a city or town. He described three situations.

• Villages that send migrants to far-off cities: men work in the city while families stay in the natal village. In Madhopur, a village in north central India, 77 of 298 households had migrants; a little under half the migrants worked in Bombay and Calcutta; about 75% sent money regularly and 83% visited from four or five times a year to once in two years. Overseas migrants from Gujarat villages in African and British towns built fashionable houses at home, invested in land and industry and endowed schools and trusts.
• Villages near an industrial town, such as Bhilai: some villages are uprooted entirely, others lose part of their land; the latter receive immigrant workers, which creates demand for housing and a market — and problems in ordering relations between native residents and immigrants.
• Villages around a growing metropolis: a few are absorbed completely; many lose their land to urban development while their inhabited area remains — the ‘urban village’.

NCERT then gives Census figures. In 1951, 17.29% of India's population — 62.44 million people — lived in 2,843 towns; in 2011, 31.16% — 377.10 million people — lived in 7,935 towns. Absolute numbers, the number of towns and urban agglomerations, and the urban share all rose steadily. The decennial growth rate of the urban population, however, fell during 1981–2001 and rose marginally in 2011: 41.42% in 1951 and 31.80% in 2011. And for the first time since Independence, the absolute increase in population was larger in urban than in rural areas — because rural growth fell sharply while urban growth stayed almost the same.

The chapter has three activities and several questions built into its text. Short outlines follow.

The chapter ends with four questions. Try each first, then open the outline.

Numbers

One-liners

• Colonial modernity was paradoxical: liberty taught under a rule that denied it.
• English opens doors (global jobs, Dalit mobility) and marks privilege.
• Pre-capitalist empires took tribute; capitalist colonialism remade the economic base.
• Capitalism is the dominant economic system; the nation state the dominant political form.
• Colonial rule contradicted nationalism — hence swaraj as a birthright.
• In Britain industry pulled people into towns; in India it pushed artisans into farming.
• Port cities linked the British core to the Indian periphery; colonial cities were dual cities.
• The tea industry shows the colonial state supplying planters with coerced labour.
• After 1947: heavy industry, public sector, cooperatives — and new industrial towns.
• M.S.A. Rao: urban impact depends on a village's relation to the city.
• Urbanism is ‘a way of life’ (Wirth, 1938), not just density.

Traps to avoid

• The tribute-versus-transformation distinction is Alavi and Shanin's (1982), quoted by NCERT.
• India's ‘initial’ response to British industrialisation was more people into agriculture — not into towns.
• Declining towns: Surat, Masulipatnam (trade), Thanjavur, Dhaka, Murshidabad (courts); growing: Bombay, Madras.
• Box 1.2 is from the colonial Census of 1911 — an official source.
• NCERT dates the tea industry to 1851; the Assam Company dates from 1839.
• Box 1.1's indenture is to Mauritius, 1834–1920, from Bihar districts — not Fiji or the Caribbean.
• Urban decennial growth fell from 41.42% (1951) to 31.80% (2011) while the urban share rose from 17.29% to 31.16%.
• ‘First time since Independence’ (2011) refers to the absolute urban increase exceeding the rural one.
• The charts' headings say ‘selected metropolitan cities’, but they show all-India urban data.
• Box 1.6 is fiction — Mitra Phukan's novel The Collector's Wife (2005), cited as ‘Phukun’.
• Durgapur steel plant: built with British collaboration; Bhilai — USSR; Rourkela — West Germany.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Older papers tested this chapter's core ideas: why India industrialised only gradually under British rule (1980 — key: cottage industries crippled), colonialism as an outcome of the industrial revolution's need for markets (1988, assertion–reason), and the Nehru model's stress on rapid, heavy industrialisation (1982).
• Fact pairs from the activities: steel plants and their partners (1980: Durgapur — Britain); keep Bhilai — USSR, Rourkela — West Germany, Bokaro — USSR together.
• Census urban figures (17.29% → 31.16%; 2,843 → 7,935 towns; statutory vs census towns) and city–commodity pairs (Bombay cotton, Calcutta jute to Dundee) are safe statement material.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• Colonial economy and society (GS1): decline of artisanal industry crippling the rural economy (2017) — use section 6: Manchester competition, lost court demand, railways, ruralisation (Census 1911), and the scholarly debate; indentured labour and cultural identity (2018) — Box 1.1 and the girmitiya story.
• Urbanisation (GS1): social problems of rapid urbanisation (2013) and segregation and marginalisation of the poor in metropolises (2023) — start from the dual colonial city (Box 1.4) and Wirth's ‘way of life’, then bring in Census data and Rao's urban villages; smart cities and smart villages (2015) — Rao's three urban impacts and the rural–urban continuum.
• Comparative industrialisation: Britain's industrial revolution and quality of life compared with India (2015) — Giddens's figures and NCERT's contrast; planning to address colonial regional imbalances (2026) — section 9 (heavy industry, public sector, new industrial towns in backward regions).
• Answer frame: define → colonial mechanism (capitalist interference) → Indian evidence (official and scholarly) → attributed debate → post-1947 continuity and change. Keep colonial-era claims attributed (Naoroji, Dutt, Morris, Bagchi, Roy) and avoid present-day political commentary.

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.