Social Institutions: Continuity and Change — Class 12 Sociology

This chapter examines three institutions central to Indian society — caste, tribe and family. Caste, derived from the Portuguese casta, refers to the institution expressed in Indian languages by the terms varna (a four-fold all-India classification) and jati (regional sub-classifications running into hundreds). Caste in the past was determined by birth, endogamous, tied to rules of food-sharing and occupation, and arranged hierarchically on the principle of purity and pollution. Colonialism reshaped caste — through surveys, the census (notably Risley's 1901 Census) and the schedules of the 1935 Act that produced the terms Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes — making fluid identities more rigid. In independent India caste persists strongly in marriage and politics; concepts like M.N. Srinivas' 'sanskritisation' and 'dominant caste' explain its changing forms, while caste has become 'invisible' for privileged upper castes but all too 'visible' for the disadvantaged. Tribes are communities defined largely by what they were not — without a written-text religion, state or sharp class divisions — and classified by permanent traits (region, language, race, habitat) and acquired traits (livelihood, assimilation into Hindu society). National development has often dispossessed tribals, and tribal identity today is shaped by resistance and an emerging middle class. The family, finally, can be nuclear or extended, matrilineal or patrilineal, matrilocal or patrilocal; matriliny exists but matriarchy does not, and family forms change with wider social and economic change.