(a) Give an account of the recent trends of marriage in the Indian context. How are these different from traditional practices?…

(a)

Recent trends in marriage:

• Later marriage:
• median age at first marriage for women has risen to about 19 years (NFHS-5, women aged 25–49), and is higher in cities and among the educated;
• the share of women aged 20–24 married before 18 fell from about 47% (NFHS-3, 2005–06) to about 23% (NFHS-5, 2019–21).
• More say for the couple: "arranged love marriages" and "semi-arranged" matches, in which parents and children negotiate (Patricia Uberoi; Henrike Donner). Matrimonial websites and apps widen choice but still filter by caste, religion and horoscope.
• Inter-caste and inter-religious marriages are rising but remain few (about 5–6% inter-caste, IHDS 2011–12). They meet resistance, including "honour" violence (Shakti Vahini, 2018) and state laws on religious conversion for marriage. The Special Marriage Act, 1954 allows civil marriage.
• Companionate ideals: emotional intimacy, dual-earner couples, nuclear residence in cities.
• Marriage squeeze and long-distance brides: skewed sex ratios lead to brides brought from other regions into Haryana and Punjab (Ravinder Kaur); there are also transnational NRI marriages.
• Legal change:
• the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 and compulsory registration;
• recognition of live-in relationships (Indra Sarma, 2013). Uttarakhand's Uniform Civil Code (2024) requires their registration;
• the Supreme Court declined to recognise same-sex marriage (Supriyo, 2023) and left the issue to Parliament.
• Dowry persists and has spread to communities that once paid bride-price; NCRB records about 6,500 dowry deaths a year.
• Divorce and singlehood are still low but rising in cities.

• How these differ from traditional practices:

• Choice: Traditional — Kin-arranged; alliance between families and lineages; Recent — Greater individual say; negotiated or self-arranged
• Age: Traditional — Child or early marriage; Recent — Later marriage, linked to education and careers
• Boundaries: Traditional — Strict caste endogamy, gotra and village exogamy, hypergamy; Recent — Endogamy weakening at the margins, but still the norm
• Regional pattern: Traditional — North: village exogamy and bans on cross-cousin marriage; South: cross-cousin and uncle–niece marriage (Irawati Karve, Kinship Organisation in India, 1953); Recent — Regional differences narrowing in cities
• Meaning: Traditional — Sacrament (samskara), indissoluble; Recent — Also a contract with rights; divorce possible
• Residence: Traditional — Patrilocal joint family; Recent — More nuclear and neolocal living in cities
• Exchange: Traditional — Dowry among upper castes; bride-price among many tribes and lower castes; Recent — Dowry more widespread and monetised

• Causes: education, especially of women; urbanisation and migration; women's employment; law; media and digital platforms; and falling fertility.

Assessment:

• the change is selective: the form of choice has modernised faster than the boundaries of caste and religion;
• rural–urban and class differences are large;
• Indian marriage shows continuity within change.

(b)

The three theorists:

• Vilfredo Pareto (Treatise on General Sociology, 1916);
• Gaetano Mosca (Elementi di scienza politica, 1896; translated as The Ruling Class, 1939);
• Robert Michels (Political Parties, 1911).

Similarities:

• every society is ruled by a minority; the elite–mass divide is universal and inevitable;
• they reject Marx's promise of a classless society and the classical idea of democracy as rule by the people;
• they explain power by organisation and personal qualities rather than by ownership of the means of production alone;
• they are realist: they look at how power actually works behind formal institutions.

• Differences:

• Source of elite power: Pareto — Psychological: superior qualities and "residues"; Mosca — Organisational: an organised minority beats a disorganised majority; Michels — Organisational necessity: large organisations need leaders, experts and bureaucracy
• Key concept: Pareto — Circulation of elites; "lions" (force, Class II residues) and "foxes" (cunning, Class I residues); Mosca — Ruling class, political formula (the legitimating ideology), and a sub-elite middle stratum; Michels — Iron law of oligarchy: "who says organisation says oligarchy"
• Change: Pareto — Elites decay and are replaced: "history is a graveyard of aristocracies"; Mosca — Gradual renewal from below; openness and "juridical defence" (rule of law) matter; Michels — Oligarchy re-forms even in socialist parties, as in his study of the German SPD
• View of democracy: Pareto — A cover for plutocracy; Mosca — Later saw representative government as the best available system; Michels — Democracy leads to oligarchy within organisations

Crucial issues they raise:

• Is democracy possible? Their answer led to democratic elitism: Schumpeter (1942) saw democracy as competition between elites for votes;
• Circulation versus closure: whether elites are open to talent determines stability;
• Legitimacy: Mosca's political formula anticipates Gramsci's hegemony;
• Organisation and bureaucracy: Michels links to Weber's worries about bureaucracy.

Critiques:

• the theories are tautological, since some minority always rules;
• they neglect class (Bottomore, Elites and Society, 1964) and the countervailing power of masses and movements;
• pluralists (Dahl) found competing elites rather than a single ruling one; Mills's power elite gave the idea an institutional basis.

India:

• dynastic parties and "high command" politics illustrate Michels;
• the rise of OBC and Dalit leaders since the 1990s (Jaffrelot's "silent revolution") illustrates Pareto's circulation;
• the bureaucratic and business elite fits Mosca's organised minority.

(c)

Concept:

• Keith Hart (Ghana study, 1971; published 1973) coined the term, and the ILO's Kenya report (1972) popularised it;
• informal employment (ILO, 2003) covers work without legal or social protection, including inside formal firms.

• Scale: informal work accounts for over 60% of employment worldwide and about 90% in India (NCEUS, 2007; PLFS).

Perspectives:

• Dualist (Arthur Lewis): a traditional residue that modern growth will absorb;
• Structuralist (Castells and Portes, 1989): informal work is subordinated to formal capital through subcontracting, lowering costs;
• Legalist (Hernando de Soto, The Other Path, 1989): informal workers are entrepreneurs blocked by bureaucracy and insecure property rights;
• Marxist: a reserve army of labour that subsidises accumulation.

Sociological significance:

• Survival and absorption: it absorbs labour pushed out of agriculture and cushions shocks, as in the 2020 lockdown, when it also collapsed.
• Social regulation: it runs on caste, kin, gender and religious networks for recruitment, credit and trust. Barbara Harriss-White (India Working, 2003) calls these social structures of accumulation.
• Segmentation:
• Dalits in sanitation and leather work;
• women in home-based and care work, where SEWA (Ela Bhatt, 1972) organised them;
• Muslims in self-employment and crafts (Sachar Committee, 2006);
• migrants in construction. Jan Breman calls them "wage hunters and gatherers".
• Precarity: no contracts, social security or safety; Guy Standing's "precariat", and gig work as new informality.
• Politics: vendors and slum dwellers negotiate with the state through "political society" (Partha Chatterjee) and clientelism rather than as rights-holders.

Critical judgement:

• the informal sector is not a transitional residue but a structural, lasting feature of developing capitalism;
• it provides livelihoods and entrepreneurship, but it reproduces inequality;
• policy should aim at protected informality moving towards formality: social security (the Code on Social Security, 2020, in force from November 2025), the Street Vendors Act, 2014, credit, and collective organisation.