Salient Features of Indian Society and the Diversity of India

What the official syllabus says

UPSC Civil Services (Main) Examination, Paper II: General Studies I.

Salient features of Indian Society, Diversity of India.

Topics in detail

Salient features of Indian society

• Coexistence of tradition and modernity; continuity and change
• Pluralism: many religions, languages, ethnic groups and cultures
• Hierarchy: caste, class and gender
• The joint family, kinship and marriage; changes in the family
• The village community and the agrarian base; the rural–urban continuum
• Patriarchy and its changing forms
• Spirituality, tolerance and syncretic traditions

Caste

• Varna and jati; features of the caste system
• Theories of the origin of caste
• Concepts: Sanskritisation and the dominant caste (M.N. Srinivas), Westernisation
• Changes in caste: effects of education, urbanisation, democracy and reservations
• Caste in politics; caste-based discrimination and untouchability

Tribes

• Scheduled Tribes and their distribution; Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups
• Tribal society and culture; integration versus isolation debates
• Constitutional safeguards: the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, PESA (1996), the Forest Rights Act (2006)

Forms of diversity

• Racial and ethnic diversity
• Linguistic diversity: the language families (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman); the languages of the Eighth Schedule
• Religious diversity: the major religions and their regional spread
• Regional and cultural diversity: food, dress, festivals, art
• Geographical diversity and its influence on ways of life

Family, marriage and kinship

• Types of family: nuclear, joint, extended; the shift towards nuclear families
• Marriage rules: endogamy, exogamy, hypergamy; arranged, inter-caste and inter-religious marriage
• Kinship systems in north and south India; patrilineal and matrilineal communities
• Changes: smaller families, later marriage, divorce, single-person households, care of the elderly

Class, village and town

• Agrarian classes: landowners, tenants, landless labourers
• The growth of the middle class and of the urban working class
• Rural society: the jajmani system and its decline; the changing village
• Urban society: neighbourhoods, migration, new forms of community

Unity in diversity

• Bonds of unity: geography, shared history and culture, pilgrimage, the Constitution, a common market
• Threats to unity: casteism, communalism, regionalism, linguism
• Measures for national integration

Overlaps

• The other pages of this paper on society build on this one; General Studies II covers the welfare of vulnerable sections and the constitutional safeguards in detail.