UPSC Sociology 2026 — Paper II

(a) 'Analyse' requires the candidate to break Srinivas' village work into its structural component (the village as an interlocked system of caste, land and hereditary service statuses) and its functional component (institutions explained by the contribution they make to village integration), and to show 'in what respect' each perspective is visible in his actual studies. A purely descriptive account of Sanskritisation without linking it to structural-functionalism does not meet the demand. (b) An opinion question with a compulsory evidential burden: the candidate must pick ONE named social reform, identify the specific section of society it affected, and support the claim of long-lasting impact with a concrete, verifiable example. Any defensible choice is acceptable; the marks lie in specificity and in demonstrating durability of the effect. (c) 'Discuss in detail' a normative proposition: is matriarchy the need of the hour, read against women's movements and gender legislation? The candidate must first get the concepts right - matriarchy is not matriliny or matrifocality - then take and defend a position. The expected strong answer argues that the goal of movements and law has been substantive equality, not an inverted hierarchy. (d) 'Discuss the debates' means set out the rival positions, not describe Indian religion. The pivot is that the Western analytic category 'religion', built around belief and worship, fits Indian practice badly, where dharma is first of all duty; the answer must present the duty-centred readings, the worship/bhakti-centred readings, and what turns on the choice. (e) 'Analyse' how the Indian idea of 'secular' transcends any single religion in a plural society. The answer must show that Indian secularism is neither anti-religious nor a strict separation of church and state, but a distinctive arrangement - equal respect with principled distance - anchored in the Constitution, and must engage the critics of that arrangement.

• M. N. Srinivas
• Rampura village, Mysore (fieldwork 1948)
• The Remembered Village (1976)
• The Social System of a Mysore Village (1955), in Marriott's Village India
• Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (1952)
• dominant caste
• vertical (inter-caste) solidarity
• Radcliffe-Brown / Evans-Pritchard
• field view vs book view
• Sanskritisation and Westernisation
• Dumont and Pocock critique (1957)
• one named reform with leader and statute/year
• the specific social section affected
• at least one concrete illustrative example
• an acknowledgement of continuing limits
• matriarchy vs matriliny vs matrifocality
• Khasi / Garo / Nayar (marumakkathayam)
• Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (1861)
• Leela Dube and/or Irawati Karve
• Towards Equality (1974)
• at least two of: PWDVA 2005, POSH Act 2013, Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005, Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013
• a clear stated position
• dharma as duty vs religion as worship
• Weber, The Religion of India
• Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (purity and pollution)
• bhakti (at least one saint named)
• great tradition / little tradition - Redfield and Marriott
• Sanskritic vs local Hinduism (Srinivas)
• T. N. Madan or Ashis Nandy
• principled distance / sarva dharma sambhava
• 42nd Amendment, 1976 (Preamble)
• Articles 25-28; Article 44; Articles 29-30
• S. R. Bommai (1994) - secularism as basic structure
• citizenship as the ground of rights
• T. N. Madan and/or Ashis Nandy as critics; Rajeev Bhargava and/or Amartya Sen as defenders

(a) Two linked tasks. First, establish what the Indological approach is as Ghurye practised it - the study of Indian society through Indian classical texts. Second, and this is where most marks lie, 'comment in detail' on its transferability: how a textual-civilisational method could illuminate societies other than India, and where it would fail. A pure account of Ghurye without the extension answers only half the question. (b) 'Examine' the claim that Indian nationalism issued from the socio-cultural and political consciousness of the subcontinent as a whole. Examination means testing the claim, not asserting it: the candidate must weigh the civilisational-unity thesis against A. R. Desai's materialist account of nationalism as a modern product of colonial conditions, bring in the main rival explanations, and note that the 'Akhand Bharat' framing is itself contested. (c) 'Elucidate' Desai's reasoning, not merely his conclusion: show HOW he argues that Indian social classes cannot be understood as an indigenous evolution but only as products of the colonial transformation of production - the new land-tenure systems, de-industrialisation and commercialisation that generated a specific and distorted class structure.

• G. S. Ghurye
• Caste and Race in India (1932) and its six features of caste
• Indian Sadhus (1953) / The Scheduled Tribes (1959)
• at least two of: K. M. Kapadia, P. H. Prabhu, Irawati Karve, Louis Dumont, D. P. Mukerji
• book-view vs field-view
• Weber's comparative sociology of religion
• Said's Orientalism (1978)
• at least two non-Indian textual traditions named
• A. R. Desai, Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948)
• colonial economy, administrative unification, English education, press, railways
• at least three reform organisations with correct years
• Indian National Congress (1885)
• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983)
• at least one rival school (Cambridge School / Subaltern Studies / Partha Chatterjee)
• Partition 1947 as counter-evidence
• A. R. Desai
• Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948)
• relations to the means of production
• Permanent Settlement 1793 / ryotwari / mahalwari
• de-industrialisation and commercialisation of agriculture
• at least three colonial-era classes named
• a critique of Desai

(a) 'Examine the challenges' of scaling up: the candidate must show why findings from intensive single-village ethnography cannot be read straight off as an account of the macro-level village structure of Indian society. Required are the concrete village-study corpus, the specific epistemological and empirical obstacles to generalisation, and some indication of how sociologists have tried to bridge the gap. (b) Two explicit tasks: (i) explain HOW an agrarian middle class emerged in India - the causal chain of land reform, tenancy change and the Green Revolution; and (ii) set out the socio-structural implications of that emergence. An answer that narrates agrarian change without naming this class or without the second half is incomplete. (c) The premise is conceded - land reform was a paradigm shift - so the marks lie in the recommendation. The candidate must briefly establish what the first-generation reforms did and where they fell short, and then propose specific, defensible second-generation land reforms aimed at equity. Vague calls for 'better implementation' will not do.

• at least four village studies correctly attributed to their scholars
• Dumont and Pocock's critique of the village as a unit (1957)
• Epstein's Wangala and Dalena contrast
• problem of generalisation / external validity
• the village as part-society, not an isolate
• restudies and panel/comparative designs as a remedy
• zamindari abolition and tenancy reform
• Green Revolution (1966-67 onwards) and MSP/procurement
• Rudolph and Rudolph, 'bullock capitalists'
• at least three intermediate cultivating castes named
• decline of jajmani
• Mandal and the rise of intermediate-caste political power
• at least one farmers' movement with its leader
• agrarian distress / quota agitations by dominant castes
• the four components of land reform
• ceiling-surplus redistribution was marginal (under about 2 per cent of operated area)
• Operation Barga (1978) and/or Kerala Land Reforms Act 1969
• conclusive titling / land records modernisation
• women's land rights and the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005; Bina Agarwal
• recorded tenancy (Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act, 2016) and/or Forest Rights Act, 2006

(a) Two parts must both be answered. First, a factual account of how the Constitution promotes education - the specific articles, amendments and the statute they generated. Second, an argued position, with 'clarify' requiring a reasoned verdict, on whether education can be a major instrument of social change, tested against both the functionalist and the reproduction traditions and against Indian evidence. (b) An explicit two-part instruction: (i) DRAW India's current population pyramid - a labelled diagram is compulsory, not optional; and (ii) recommend policy measures on population dynamics to achieve sustainability. The drawing must reflect India's actual present age structure (a narrowing base with a working-age bulge), not a textbook expanding pyramid, and the policy half must address the dividend, the remaining high-fertility pockets and ageing together. (c) A straight comparison: set out Ghurye's Indological, textual-cum-empirical, culturological approach against Desai's Marxist historical-materialist approach, on explicit and common criteria - unit of analysis, sources of data, view of tradition and change, and stance towards the state - and note where they nonetheless converge.

• Article 21A and the 86th Amendment, 2002
• RTE Act, 2009
• Article 45, Article 51A(k), Article 46
• Articles 29-30; Article 15(5) / 93rd Amendment, 2005
• 42nd Amendment, 1976 - education to the Concurrent List
• Durkheim and/or Parsons; Bourdieu and/or Bowles and Gintis
• Phule, Ambedkar
• Kothari Commission (1964-66) and/or NEP 2020
• literacy 74.04 per cent (Census 2011)
• a labelled population pyramid, males left / females right, five-year cohorts
• narrowing base / barrel shape, working-age bulge
• TFR 2.0 (NFHS-5, 2019-21) below replacement 2.1
• demographic dividend window
• state-level fertility divergence (Bihar vs Kerala/Tamil Nadu)
• rights-based, non-coercive family planning; rejection of two-child norms
• ageing: 60-plus to reach roughly 20 per cent by 2050 (UNFPA India Ageing Report 2023)
• Indological / textual-cum-empirical (Ghurye) vs Marxist historical materialism (Desai)
• Caste and Race in India (1932)
• Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948)
• Ghurye's 'backward Hindus' thesis vs Verrier Elwin
• culture/tradition as unit vs class/mode of production as unit
• Bombay School; Desai's doctorate under Ghurye
• one criticism of each

(a) 'Discuss the challenges' faced by the aged in RECEIVING elder care - so the focus is on obstacles to access, not on ageing in general. The answer must cover the familial/structural, economic, health-system and rights-realisation dimensions, backed by Indian data, and should show why care is becoming scarcer even as the elderly population grows. (b) 'Examine' the transition from street-based to online mobilisation in twenty-first-century India. The strong answer resists the premise slightly - the shift is hybridisation rather than replacement - names concrete Indian movements on both sides, and weighs what digital repertoires gain against what they lose. (c) 'Clarify how' family planning has taken a political U-turn: the candidate must establish the original anti-natalist paradigm, show the demographic ground on which it has been reversed, and identify the specifically POLITICAL drivers of the reversal - above all the federal arithmetic of delimitation - while noting the contradictions that persist. (d) 'Explain' the difference in APPROACH - not merely in conclusions. Dumont's is a structuralist, text-and-ideology-based account of caste as a single encompassing value system; Beteille's is an empirical, Weberian, field-based account of caste as one of several dissociating dimensions of stratification. The contrast must be drawn on stated criteria. (e) 'Bring out the debates' means presenting the rival epistemological claims - that only a member can truly understand a society, and that only a non-member has the detachment to analyse it - and locating them concretely in the study of Indian society, including the sharper contemporary version raised by Dalit and feminist standpoint arguments.

• Census 2011: 60-plus about 8.6 per cent / 10.4 crore
• UNFPA India Ageing Report 2023 - about 20 per cent by 2050
• feminisation of ageing / widowhood
• nuclear family and out-migration of children
• Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007
• pension inadequacy (IGNOAPS/NSAP)
• absence of geriatric and long-term care capacity
• hybrid rather than wholly virtual movements
• at least three dated Indian examples (e.g. India Against Corruption 2011, Nirbhaya protests 2012, #MeToo 2018, anti-CAA/Shaheen Bagh 2019-20, farmers' protest 2020-21)
• Castells and/or Bennett and Segerberg's connective action
• Tufekci's critique of organisational fragility
• digital divide (NFHS-5 internet-use gender gap)
• slacktivism / state countermeasures
• India's national family planning programme, 1952 - the world's first
• Emergency sterilisation drive, 1975-77
• ICPD Cairo 1994 and the target-free approach (1996) / NPP 2000
• TFR 2.0 in NFHS-5, below replacement 2.1
• delimitation freeze - 84th Amendment, 2001, until the first census after 2026
• surviving two-child norms (Assam; Javed v. State of Haryana, 2003)
• female sterilisation as the dominant method
• Homo Hierarchicus (1966/1970)
• purity and pollution as the single encompassing principle; hierarchy as encompassing of the contrary
• disjunction of status and power
• Caste, Class and Power (1965), Sripuram, Thanjavur
• caste-class-power as distinct dimensions; cumulative to dispersed inequalities
• ideology/book-view versus fieldwork/empirical method
• Robert K. Merton, 'Insiders and Outsiders' (1972)
• Insider doctrine and Outsider doctrine
• at least two Indian insider scholars and two outsider scholars named
• making the familiar strange / going native
• emic and etic
• Gopal Guru's standpoint critique and/or the indigenisation debate

(a) Two explicit tasks. First, differentiate protest from social movement on clear criteria (duration, organisation, ideology, goal, collective identity). Second, discuss specific colonial-period movements that changed the fabric of Indian agrarian society - so named movements with dates, leaders, regions and consequences are required, not a general account of peasant discontent. (b) 'Synchronise' asks the candidate to pair India's development programmes with the social changes they produced, phase by phase, and then to describe those changes through two registers the question names: 'visible' experience (measurable, official, countable outputs) and 'lived' experience (how beneficiaries actually experience them). The gap between the two registers is where the analysis lies. (c) Two linked tasks: explain WHY the colonial state created a legal category of hereditary criminality, and then discuss the implications, which must extend past 1952 to the continuing condition of the Denotified and Nomadic Tribes. Naming the statute correctly is the minimum entry condition.

• protest as episodic and unorganised vs movement as sustained, organised and ideological
• M. S. A. Rao and/or Ghanshyam Shah on social movements in India
• at least four colonial agrarian movements with correct dates and regions
• Champaran 1917 and/or Bardoli 1928
• All India Kisan Sabha, 1936 (Sahajanand Saraswati)
• Tebhaga 1946-47 and/or Telangana 1946-51
• at least two pieces of resulting legislation (e.g. Bengal Tenancy Act 1885, Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act 1879, Chotanagpur Tenancy Act 1908, Champaran Agrarian Act 1918)
• Ranajit Guha and/or D. N. Dhanagare
• Community Development Programme, 1952; Balwantrai Mehta Committee, 1957; panchayati raj from 1959
• 73rd and 74th Amendments, 1992, with one-third reservation for women
• at least four named programmes with years (MGNREGA 2005, NRHM 2005, ICDS 1975, SBM 2014, Ujjwala 2016, NRLM 2011, PM-KISAN 2019)
• Yogendra Singh and/or Amartya Sen's capability approach
• the visible/lived distinction applied to at least two concrete cases
• sarpanch pati; toilets built vs used; MGNREGA wage delays
• James Scott and/or Escobar; Narmada Bachao Andolan
• Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 (consolidated 1924)
• hereditary criminality / criminality by birth
• control of nomadic and mobile populations; forest laws and sedentarisation
• repealed 1952; Denotified Tribes / Vimukta Jatis
• Habitual Offenders Acts reproducing the logic
• Renke (2008) and/or Idate Commission
• continuing stigma and police targeting

(a) The question supplies two technical characterisations - over-urbanisation and rural push - and asks the candidate to explain post-1947 Indian urbanisation through BOTH a demographic dimension (rates, town counts, migration streams, slum and informal-sector data) and a sociological dimension (urbanism as a way of life, the persistence of caste and kin, labour precarity, urban inequality). Both dimensions are required. (b) Two parts. First, a SOCIOLOGICAL explanation of violence against women - locating it in patriarchy as a structure and in its specifically Indian articulation with caste, kinship and the family - rather than a list of crimes. Second, concrete mitigation suggestions, which should be both institutional and structural-preventive. (c) 'Examine the process' means assess, not merely describe: set out what formalisation of the informal sector involves in India, identify the specific instruments, and then test whether registration actually safeguards marginalised workers or merely records them. A list of schemes without evaluation does not meet the directive.

• over-urbanisation (Davis and Golden, 1954) and Sovani's critique
• push-pull; Lewis and/or Todaro
• Census 2011 urban share 31.16 per cent; 7,935 towns; census towns tripling
• slum population about 6.55 crore (Census 2011)
• informal employment around 90 per cent of workers
• Wirth, 'Urbanism as a Way of Life' (1938) and the Indian qualification (caste and kin persist)
• Jan Breman, footloose labour / circular migration
• COVID-19 reverse migration, 2020
• NCRB Crime in India (2022) and NFHS-5 data
• patriarchy as structure - Sylvia Walby
• Uma Chakravarti's Brahmanical patriarchy; caste endogamy and honour
• the family as the primary site; dowry and son preference
• at least four dated statutes or judgments (Dowry Prohibition Act 1961; 498A 1983; PWDVA 2005; POSH Act 2013; Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013; PCPNDT 1994)
• intersectionality / caste-based sexual violence
• at least three concrete mitigation suggestions
• Keith Hart / ILO 1972 origin of 'informal sector'
• NCEUS (Arjun Sengupta, 2007) - about 92 per cent informal workforce
• informal sector vs informal employment
• e-Shram (2021); Code on Social Security, 2020 defining gig and platform workers
• Street Vendors Act, 2014
• the critique that registration without portable, funded social security is not protection
• caste, gender and religion structuring informality

(a) Two tasks of unequal type. First, an evidenced account of how colonial rule transformed Indian society - economic, administrative-legal, educational and, crucially, the transformation of caste and religious identity through colonial knowledge. Second, an explicitly COUNTERFACTUAL speculation about a non-colonised India, which must be flagged and argued as reasoned speculation rather than asserted as fact. (b) 'Discuss' how women's movements have made women visible and increased their participation across fields. The answer needs a phased account of the movements with named organisations, campaigns and dates; the legal and participatory gains they produced; and, to be a strong answer, the unfinished agenda and the internal Dalit-feminist critique of the movement itself. (c) 'Where would you locate the tribal community in the Varna system?' requires a reasoned position, not a slot. The expected answer is that tribes stand normatively outside varna, that many have nonetheless been absorbed at the lower end or have claimed Kshatriya status through Sanskritisation, and that contemporary Adivasi assertion rejects varna placement altogether - with the constitutional category deliberately being a non-varna one.

• Permanent Settlement 1793 and the other land-revenue systems
• de-industrialisation and the drain of wealth (Naoroji, R. C. Dutt)
• IPC 1860; Macaulay's Minute 1835; universities 1857; railways 1853
• the census (1871-72/1881) and Risley 1901; Cohn and Dirks on caste as colonial objectification
• Criminal Tribes Act 1871 and/or the Forest Acts alongside reform legislation
• an explicit flag that the second half is counterfactual speculation
• at least two counterfactual arguments, one on each side
• All India Women's Conference (1927) and/or Women's Indian Association (1917)
• 'Towards Equality' report, 1974
• SEWA (1972); Chipko (1973); anti-price-rise agitation
• Mathura case (Supreme Court judgment 1978; open letter 1979) and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1983
• Vishaka (1997) and the POSH Act, 2013
• 73rd/74th Amendments (1992) and the 106th Amendment (2023)
• Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005
• Dalit feminist critique (Sharmila Rege) and/or NGO-isation
• varna as fourfold plus avarna; tribes classically outside it
• Ghurye's 'backward Hindus' thesis
• N. K. Bose's Hindu method of tribal absorption and/or Sanskritisation of tribes
• Surajit Sinha on Kshatriya/Rajput claims by tribal chiefs
• tribe-caste continuum (Bailey) and/or Beteille on the relativity of the distinction
• Scheduled Tribe as a constitutional, non-varna category (Article 342; Census 2011: 8.6 per cent)
• contemporary Adivasi assertion (Sarna code / Jharkhand movement)