Social Institutions: Continuity and Change

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: Caste, tribe and family are the three institutions GS1 returns to most. Mains has asked why caste identity is "both fluid and static", whether caste has lost its relevance, why caste keeps "assuming new identities and associational forms", why tribals are called Scheduled Tribes, in which contexts India's diverse tribes should be treated as one category, and whether the joint family's life cycle depends on economics rather than values. NCERT's chapter answers each with a historical argument: caste changed fundamentally under colonialism and after independence; "tribe" is a colonial-era category defined by what it was not; and the joint family was never the dominant form. The 2026-27 reprint keeps the chapter's structure and all ten exercise questions but shortens it by about a fifth, dropping among other things the isolation-versus-integration debate on tribes and the box on Khasi matriliny (details below).

Contemporary hook: Caste is about to be counted again. Independent India's censuses up to 2011 systematically enumerated only Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes; following a decision of the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs on 30 April 2025, Census 2027 will also undertake caste enumeration (PIB, April 2026). NCERT's account of the 1901 Census, which tried to rank every caste and drew hundreds of petitions from castes claiming higher places, is the historical background every answer on the caste census needs.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

The caste of the past and the caste of the present are not the same institution. NCERT asks how far "the one that is supposed to be part of India's past, and the one that is part of its present" are the same thing. Its answer: the four-fold varna order is roughly three thousand years old, but in the late Vedic period it was neither elaborate, rigid nor fixed by birth; the rigid birth-based institution came later; and colonial rule changed it again so deeply that some scholars call modern caste "more a product of colonialism than of ancient Indian tradition". After independence, development and democracy changed it once more: weaker in occupation and public life, still strong in marriage, and stronger than ever in politics.

"Tribe" is a modern category for very old communities, defined mainly by what they were not. Tribes were described as lacking a scriptural religion, a state, sharp class divisions and, above all, caste. By the 1970s every such definition had been shown to be faulty: some "tribes" are very large, many are settled farmers, and some castes hunt and gather. Tribal identity today is formed by interaction with the mainstream, often on unfavourable terms, rather than by anything primordial.

The family is both a private space and a product of public structures. Men's migration from Himalayan villages produces women-headed households; software work schedules bring grandparents in as carers. NCERT's two corrections to common sense: the extended or "joint" family "is by no means the dominant form now or earlier" (I.P. Desai notes that Indian languages have no native word for it), and matrilineal societies are not matriarchies, because there is "no historical or anthropological evidence" that women anywhere exercised such dominance.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

Six Defining Features of Caste (NCERT)

These are "the prescribed rules found in ancient scriptural texts"; NCERT warns that they were not always practised, so they do not tell us how far caste actually worked this way.

Caste in Three Periods

Tribes: Classifications (NCERT)

Scheduled Tribes were 8.2% of India's population (about 84 million) in 2001 and 8.6% (about 104 million) in 2011.

Family Forms

What the 2026-27 Reprint Dropped

The ancient-sources caveat ("our sources of knowledge about the past... are inadequate"); the land-revenue and Punjab irrigation paragraph; the inter-caste marriage example and the line on food sharing; the detail on sanskritisation (patterns of emulation, its link to economic rise, the "defiant claiming" revision); the closing sentence on the two groups' "juxtaposition"; "administrative convenience" as the reason for the term "tribe"; the section on mainstream attitudes to tribes (moneylenders, excluded areas, the isolation versus integration debate); the Narmada and private-property sentences; the North East "disturbed areas" and Jharkhand-Chhattisgarh paragraphs; Box 3.2 (Multani Lohars) and Box 3.3 (Khasi matriliny). All ten exercise questions remain, including Question 10 on matriliny and matriarchy.

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

Caste in the Past: Varna and Jati

Caste is "uniquely associated with the Indian sub-continent"; similar arrangements exist elsewhere, but not this exact form. Characteristic of Hindu society, it has spread to Muslims, Christians and Sikhs. The English word comes from the Portuguese casta ("pure breed"). Indian languages use two terms. Varna ("colour") is the four-fold division into brahmana, kshatriya, vaishya and shudra, which leaves out a large population of "outcastes", foreigners, slaves and conquered peoples, sometimes called panchamas (the fifth category). Jati, a general word for "kind" or "species", is the word most used for caste. The common interpretation: varna is a broad all-India classification; jati is a regional or local system of hundreds or thousands of castes and sub-castes whose ranks vary by region.

The four-varna order is roughly three thousand years old, but NCERT stresses that "it is misleading to think of the same system continuing for three thousand years". In the late Vedic period (about 900-500 BC) divisions were few, not rigid, and not determined by birth; caste became rigid only in the post-Vedic period.

Two Principles: Separation and Hierarchy

Theoretically, NCERT says, caste combines two sets of principles:

• Difference and separation. Each caste is different from every other and kept strictly apart, through rules on marriage, food, social interaction and occupation.
• Wholism and hierarchy. Separated castes cannot exist alone; they exist only within the whole, and the whole is hierarchical, a ladder from highest to lowest.

The ladder is ordered by purity and pollution: what is closer to the sacred is pure and high, what is distant from or opposed to it is polluting and low. Material power and ritual status go together, so the powerful tend to have high status, and historians believe the defeated in war were often given low status. Castes are also meant to be complementary and non-competing: each has a place no other can take, so the system works as a social division of labour that "in principle, allows no mobility". Caste was a deeply unequal institution: once status was fixed by birth, a person could never change their life circumstances.

Colonialism and Caste

Scholars agree that caste "underwent major changes during the colonial period", and some argue that caste as we know it is "more a product of colonialism than of ancient Indian tradition". NCERT describes four interventions:

1. Surveys and ethnography. To govern efficiently, British administrators, many of them amateur ethnologists, compiled reports on the "customs and manners" of tribes and castes.
2. The census. Begun in the 1860s and decennial from 1881, it was "by far the most important official effort to collect information on caste". The 1901 Census under Herbert Risley sought to record the social order of precedence of castes in each region. Hundreds of petitions reached the Census Commissioner from castes claiming higher positions with historical and scriptural evidence. Scholars feel that counting and recording caste "changed the institution itself": identities that had been "much more fluid and less rigid" took on a new life.
3. Land and irrigation. Land revenue settlements gave legal recognition to the customary rights of upper castes, making them landowners in the modern sense; the Punjab canal colonies settled populations along caste lines. (This paragraph is dropped in 2026-27.)
4. Welfare and the schedules. Late in the colonial period, the administration took an interest in the "depressed classes". The Government of India Act, 1935 gave legal recognition to lists or "schedules" of castes and tribes for special treatment; this is how the terms Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes came into being. The so-called untouchable castes were included among the Scheduled Castes.

NCERT's summary: "Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the institution of caste underwent fundamental changes during the colonial period", while the whole world was changing with capitalism and modernity.

Caste in the Present

Independence was "a big, but ultimately only partial break". Organising the depressed classes had begun in the second half of the nineteenth century, from both ends of the spectrum: upper-caste reformers and lower-caste leaders such as Jotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar in western India, and Ayyankali, Sri Narayana Guru, Iyotheedass and Periyar in the south. Gandhi and Ambedkar organised protests against untouchability from the 1920s. The nationalist mainstream treated caste as a social evil and a colonial ploy to divide Indians, and Gandhi in particular worked for the lower castes while reassuring landowning upper castes that their interests would be protected.

The post-independence state inherited this contradiction. It wrote the abolition of caste into the Constitution but was "both unable and unwilling" to push through the radical reforms that would undermine caste's economic basis. It assumed that caste-blind policies would erode caste privilege, so government jobs ignored caste and left the well-educated upper castes and the often illiterate lower castes to compete on "equal" terms; the one exception was reservation for SCs and STs.

Economic change cut both ways. Modern industry created jobs with no caste rules; city life made caste-segregated interaction hard to sustain; educated Indians drawn to individualism and meritocracy abandoned extreme caste practices. Yet caste proved "remarkably resilient". Recruitment to Bombay's textile mills and Calcutta's jute mills ran through caste and kinship, as middlemen recruited from their own caste and region. Caste stayed strongest in culture and the home: endogamy "remained largely unaffected by modernisation". Inter-caste marriages within the upper castes (brahmin, bania, rajput) may be more common now, but marriages between an upper caste and a backward or scheduled caste person "remain rare even today". The most eventful change has been in politics: caste has shaped democratic politics from the start, caste-based parties have emerged since the 1980s, and parties compete using the same "caste calculus".

Sanskritisation and Dominant Caste

M.N. Srinivas contributed the two most common concepts for these changes.

Sanskritisation is the process by which members of a (usually middle or lower) caste try to raise their status by adopting the ritual, domestic and social practices of higher castes, most often brahmins or kshatriyas: vegetarianism, the sacred thread, particular prayers and ceremonies. It pre-dates independence and perhaps colonial rule but has intensified recently, and usually accompanies or follows a rise in the caste's economic status. Later research suggested it may be "a defiant claiming of previously prohibited ritual/social privileges" (wearing the sacred thread once invited severe punishment) rather than "flattering imitation". (The 2026-27 reprint keeps the definition but drops these details.)

Dominant caste refers to castes with large populations that were granted land rights by the partial land reforms after independence. The reforms took rights from absentee upper-caste landlords who played no part in farming and often lived in towns, and vested them in the next layer, intermediate castes who managed agriculture but relied on lower-caste, especially "untouchable", labour. Land gave them economic power; numbers gave them political power under universal adult franchise. Examples: the Yadavs of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Vokkaligas of Karnataka, Reddys and Khammas of Andhra Pradesh, Marathas of Maharashtra, Jats of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, and Patidars of Gujarat.

Tribal Communities: A Category Defined by Negation

"Tribe" is a modern term for communities "among the oldest inhabitants of the sub-continent". Tribes were defined by what they were not: no religion with a written text, no state of the normal kind, no sharp class divisions, no caste, neither Hindu nor peasant. The term was introduced in the colonial era, and using one term for very different communities was, in the 2021-22 text's words, "more a matter of administrative convenience".

Positive classifications use permanent and acquired traits (table in Part 1). On region, about 85% of tribal people live in middle India, over 11% in the North East and a little over 3% elsewhere. In State populations the North East has the highest concentrations: all States except Assam above 30%, and Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland above 60% and up to 95%; elsewhere the share is under 12% except in Odisha and Madhya Pradesh. NCERT also reports an older "physical-racial" classification into Negrito, Australoid, Mongoloid, Dravidian and Aryan categories; NCERT's Class XI book notes that the racial theory behind such schemes "is no longer believed", so treat it as a historical classification, not a scientific one. Among acquired traits, the dominant classification in both sociology and politics has been the degree of assimilation into Hindu society, seen either from the tribes' side (including their attitude to Hinduism) or, more often, from the mainstream's (the status Hindu society accords them).

Tribe: The Career of a Concept

In the 1960s scholars debated whether tribes were one end of a continuum with caste-peasant society (merely less stratified and more community-based in owning resources) or a different kind of community altogether (lacking purity and pollution, more egalitarian and kinship-based). "By the 1970s all the major definitions of tribe were shown to be faulty." The tribe-peasant distinction failed on every criterion: size (Santhals, Gonds and Bhils are very large and widespread), isolation, religion and livelihood (Mundas and Hos have long been settled farmers; even the hunting-gathering Birhors of Bihar use specialised households for baskets and oil; some castes turned to hunting and gathering).

A large literature traces how tribes were absorbed into Hindu society over the centuries, through sanskritisation, acceptance into the Shudra fold after conquest, and acculturation, often as their lands were colonised and forests cut down. Earlier anthropologists stressed cultural absorption; later writers stressed its exploitative and political nature. Some scholars argue tribes are not "pristine" societies but "secondary" phenomena created by exploitative contact between states and non-state groups, contact that itself produced an ideology of "tribalism".

NCERT rejects the image of tribes as untouched stone-age communities with historical evidence. There were Gond kingdoms in central India (Garha Mandla, Chanda); many so-called Rajput kingdoms of central and western India emerged through stratification among adivasi communities; adivasis dominated plains people through raids and service as local militias, and traded forest produce, salt and elephants. The capitalist drive for forests, minerals and cheap labour brought them into contact with the mainstream long ago. This is NCERT's answer to its own Question 6.

Mainstream Attitudes and the Price of Development

The 2021-22 text explains how colonial rule had already transformed tribal life while anthropologists described tribes as isolated: moneylenders, loss of land to immigrant settlers, loss of forest access through forest reservation and mining. In these areas the colonial state's income came from appropriating forests and minerals rather than land rent. After tribal rebellions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it created "excluded" and "partially excluded" areas where non-tribal entry was prohibited or regulated, and ruled indirectly through local kings or headmen. The isolation versus integration debate of the 1940s followed: isolationists wanted tribes protected from traders, moneylenders and Hindu and Christian missionaries; integrationists (NCERT's Class XI book names G.S. Ghurye as the best-known) called tribals "backward Hindus" whose problems belonged with those of other backward classes. The Constituent Assembly settled on a compromise, welfare schemes for controlled integration, which later five-year plans, tribal sub-plans, tribal welfare blocks and multipurpose area schemes continued. NCERT's judgement: integration "has been on the terms of the mainstream society and for its own benefit".

National development versus tribal development. Nehruvian development meant dams, factories and mines, and because tribal areas are mineral-rich and forested, "tribals have paid a disproportionate price". Displacement for mines and hydroelectric sites, loss of forests (exploited systematically since British times), and private property in land, which disadvantaged collective ownership, all followed. The 2021-22 text cites the Narmada dams. In-migration of non-tribals has diluted tribal shares: Jharkhand's industrial areas, and in NCERT's most dramatic example, Tripura, whose tribal share was "halved within a single decade, reducing them to a minority".

Tribal Identity Today

Tribal identities "are formed by this interactional process rather than any primordial (original, ancient) characteristics". Because interaction has usually been on unfavourable terms, many identities centre on resistance. The 2021-22 text mentions both the success of statehood for Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh and continuing problems, including the North East's decades under special laws in areas declared "disturbed" (dropped in 2026-27).

A tribal middle class is emerging, most visibly in the North East and increasingly among the larger tribes, through education and reservation. As tribal societies differentiate internally, two sets of issues drive tribal movements: control over economic resources (land, especially forests) and ethnic-cultural identity. These can diverge: the middle class and poor, uneducated tribals may assert tribal identity for different reasons. Virginius Xaxa (Box 3.1) links the rise of tribal assertion to this middle class, whose demands include culture, tradition, livelihood, control over land and resources, and "a share in the benefits of the projects of modernity".

Family and Kinship

The family is "a space of great warmth and care" and also "a site of bitter conflicts, injustice and violence": female infanticide, violence between brothers over property and legal disputes are as much part of it as compassion and sacrifice. It can be studied in itself (nuclear or extended, male- or female-headed, matrilineal or patrilineal) and in relation to the economy, polity and culture. NCERT's examples: Himalayan villages with many women-headed households because men migrate, and grandparents moving in to care for children of software professionals. Some changes are accidental (war, migration), some deliberate (young people choosing spouses, same-sex love expressed openly), and changes in family and marriage norms are often "resisted violently".

Nuclear and extended family. The extended family "is often seen as symptomatic of India. Yet this is by no means the dominant form now or earlier. It was confined to certain sections and certain regions." I.P. Desai (1964) observes that "the expression 'joint family' is not the translation of any Indian word"; the Indian-language words are translations of the English term. The 2021-22 Box 3.2 (S.M. Akram Rizvi on the Multani Lohars of Delhi) shows a complex household of three married brothers splitting when a new workshop opportunity led the youngest to set up his own household: the family's form followed economic opportunity. This is the evidence for GS1's question on whether the joint family's life cycle depends on economic factors.

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

NCERT's Answers to the Big Questions

Exam Strategy

For Prelims: varna vs jati; casta (Portuguese); Risley and the 1901 Census; Government of India Act, 1935 and the term "Scheduled Castes"; Srinivas's two concepts; the dominant castes by State; tribal distribution (85% middle India, 11% North East); ST population 8.6% (2011); Austric and Tibeto-Burman as mainly tribal language groups; Garha Mandla and Chanda as Gond kingdoms; the Khasi as matrilineal; Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj (1873).

For Mains: build caste answers on NCERT's periodisation and the visibility paradox; tribal answers on the career of the concept and national versus tribal development; family answers on "never dominant" and economic drivers of household form.

Avoid: calling the joint family the traditional norm; saying matrilineal societies give women power; presenting caste as unchanged for three thousand years; presenting the racial classification of tribes as science.

Practice Questions

Practice (UPSC-pattern, not past papers). Mains questions 1 to 4 adapt NCERT's own exercises.

Prelims:

1. The terms "Scheduled Castes" and "Scheduled Tribes" came into being through:
   (a) the Indian Councils Act, 1909
   (b) the Government of India Act, 1919
   (c) the Government of India Act, 1935
   (d) the Constitution of India, 1950

2. The 1901 Census, which sought to record the social order of precedence of castes, was directed by:
   (a) James Mill
   (b) Herbert Risley
   (c) Max Müller
   (d) Verrier Elwin

3. Consider the following statements about tribes in India according to NCERT:
   

   1. About 85% of the tribal population lives in "middle India".
      
   2. The Austric language group is spoken almost entirely by tribal people.
      
   3. Scheduled Tribes were about 8.6% of India's population in 2011.
      Which of the statements given above are correct?
      (a) 1 and 2 only
      (b) 2 and 3 only
      (c) 1 and 3 only
      (d) 1, 2 and 3

4. In the Khasi matrilineal system described by NCERT, control over property passes from:
   (a) mother to daughter
   (b) father to son
   (c) mother's brother to sister's son
   (d) husband to wife

Mains:

1. What is the role of the ideas of separation and hierarchy in the caste system? (150 words)
2. What changes did colonialism bring about in the caste system? (250 words)
3. In what sense has caste become relatively "invisible" for the urban upper castes, and all too visible for others? (250 words)
4. What evidence would you offer against the view that tribes are primitive communities living isolated lives untouched by civilisation? (150 words)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, Indian Society (Class XII), ch. 3 "Social Institutions: Continuity and Change", Boxes 3.1-3.3 (2021-22 print and Reprint 2026-27): 2021 book archive, Wayback copy; 2026-27 book archive.
• NCERT, Understanding Society (Class XI), ch. 5 "Indian Sociologists" (Ghurye on caste, race and tribes), Reprint 2026-27: ncert.nic.in PDF.
• PIB, "Census 2027: India's First Digital Enumeration Exercise", 25 April 2026 (caste enumeration, CCPA decision of 30 April 2025): static.pib.gov.in PDF.
• Census of India 2011, Primary Census Abstract, India and States/UTs (Scheduled Tribe population): Census Digital Library catalogue.
• Supreme Court of India, Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma, 11 August 2020: Indian Kanoon.