(a) Highlight the significant features of A.R. Desai's 'Dialectical Perspective' to study Indian Society. (10 marks) (b) "The…

(a) A.R. Desai's dialectical perspective

A.R. Desai (Social Background of Indian Nationalism, 1948; State and Society in India, 1975) applied Marxist historical and dialectical materialism to Indian society. Its main features are these. Society is seen as a changing totality in which the mode of production and class relations form the base; caste, religion and politics are analysed in that light. Change arises from contradictions, so colonial rule, by introducing capitalist property relations, the market, railways and modern education, created new classes, dislocated the peasantry and unintentionally created the social basis of nationalism. The state is treated as an instrument of class rule, and Desai tests the welfare claims of the post-colonial state against the fate of workers and peasants. He criticises structural-functionalism and Sanskritisation-centred village studies for ignoring conflict and exploitation, and his Peasant Struggles in India (1979) records resistance. The approach is valuable for linking caste, class and colonialism, though critics find it economically reductionist.

(b) The 1950s as the golden period of village studies

The 1950s saw village studies flourish because the new state wanted empirical knowledge of rural society for planning and the Community Development Programme, which began in 1952. Sociology was also seeking an Indian field of its own. The Planning Commission's Research Programmes Committee (1953) funded studies, and Cornell and Chicago links brought ethnographic training. Srinivas's Rampura work and the 1955 volume India's Villages, S.C. Dube's Indian Village (Shamirpet), McKim Marriott's Kishan Garhi, F.G. Bailey's Bisipara and Oscar Lewis's Rani Khera produced detailed accounts of caste, kinship, land, jajmani relations and local power. They gave concepts such as dominant caste and Sanskritisation and established fieldwork as the discipline's method. Later critics, beginning with Dumont and Pocock (1957), said the village was too small a unit for studying caste, and later studies moved toward wider themes.

(c) Attributional and interactional approaches to caste

The attributional approach defines caste by its attributes: birth and endogamy, hereditary occupation, hierarchy of purity and pollution, and commensal restrictions (Ghurye's six features; Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus, 1966). It treats caste as a fixed, all-India system with a religious basis and asks what caste is. The interactional approach (McKim Marriott, F.G. Bailey, Srinivas's field-view) studies caste as a set of relations between groups: exchange of food and services, patronage and jajmani ties, dominance and rank negotiated through transactions; Marriott's 1959 article distinguished the two. It asks how caste works in a village and treats ranking as variable and contested, with scope for mobility. Attributional analysis stresses structure and ideology; interactional analysis stresses process, power and local variation. The two complement each other: one explains how hierarchy is conceived, the other how it is enacted and changed.

(d) Tradition and modernity

They are not simply antithetical. Early modernisation theory (Lerner, Rostow) saw a linear shift from traditional to modern, with tradition as an obstacle. Indian sociology challenges this. Milton Singer found traditions adapting in Madras industrial life; the Rudolphs' Modernity of Tradition (1967) showed caste associations working as instruments of democratic mobilisation; Yogendra Singh's Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973) described how tradition itself changes. Sanskritisation and Westernisation show selective borrowing, and professionals in the IT sector combine modern work with family rituals, caste marriage and festivals. The Green Revolution, reservations and mass media have modernised society without erasing caste. Yet tensions exist: where tradition shapes inequality, as in caste hierarchy and patriarchy, modern law and constitutional values challenge it. Tradition and modernity are therefore interacting and mutually reshaping, producing multiple modernities.

(e) Land reforms in post-independence India

Land reforms aimed at removing intermediaries, protecting cultivators and reducing inequality. Main features were: abolition of zamindari and other intermediaries (by about 1956, protected by the Ninth Schedule after the First Amendment, 1951); tenancy reform, securing tenure and regulating rent; ceilings on holdings, with surplus land redistributed to the landless (laws of 1961-72 and revised guidelines of 1972); consolidation of holdings; and abolishing serfdom and bonded labour. The voluntary Bhoodan-Gramdan movement added little. Success was uneven. West Bengal's Operation Barga (1978) registered sharecroppers and Kerala's 1969 Act ended landlordism, but most states had loopholes, benami transfers, weak records and dominant-caste resistance, so ceiling surplus was small. Consequently, agrarian inequality persisted, and the focus has shifted to record digitisation, tenancy leasing and forest rights.