Salient Features of Indian Society and Diversity of India

What the official syllabus says

General Studies-I (Paper III), Main Written Examination:

• Salient features of Indian Society, Diversity of India.

Topics in detail

Salient features of Indian society

• Coexistence of tradition and modernity
• Pluralism and syncretism; tolerance and the composite culture
• Hierarchy: caste and class
• Patriarchy and the place of women
• Importance of religion, ritual and kinship
• The village community and the rural-urban continuum

Social institutions

• Family: joint and nuclear families, how they are changing
• Marriage: forms, rules (endogamy, exogamy), changing practices
• Kinship and descent
• Caste: varna and jati, features, the jajmani system, caste mobility (Sanskritisation, westernisation, the dominant caste, ideas from M.N. Srinivas)
• Class and its relation to caste
• Tribes: features, Scheduled Tribes, particularly vulnerable tribal groups, tribal-non-tribal interaction

Diversity of India

• Geographical diversity and its effect on ways of life
• Religious diversity: the major religions and their distribution
• Linguistic diversity: the language families (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman), the 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule
• Ethnic and racial diversity
• Cultural diversity: food, dress, festivals, arts
• Caste and regional diversity

Unity in diversity

• Bonds of unity: geography, pilgrimage and shared traditions, the freedom struggle, the Constitution, a common market and media
• Threats to unity: casteism, communalism, regionalism, linguism (see Social Empowerment, Communalism, Regionalism and Secularism)

Social change

• Agents of change: education, urbanisation, industrialisation, technology, law, media
• Social mobility and its limits

Weaker sections and minorities

• Scheduled Castes: untouchability and its abolition (Article 17), social mobility
• Scheduled Tribes: shifting cultivation, forest rights, displacement; the Fifth and Sixth Schedules
• Other Backward Classes and the backward classes commissions
• Religious and linguistic minorities and their cultural and educational rights (Articles 29 and 30)

Processes of change

• Modernisation, westernisation and secularisation of social life
• Individualism, nuclear families, changing gender roles
• Ageing, the care of the elderly, intergenerational relations
• Digital media and the digital divide
• Rising aspirations and the growth of the middle class

Overlaps

• Haryana’s society: Haryana: Society and Social Issues.
• Social themes also give material for the essays: HCS Mains: English and English Essay and HCS Mains: Hindi and Hindi Essay.