Cultural Change

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: The four processes in this chapter, sanskritisation, westernisation, modernisation and secularisation, are the standard vocabulary for any GS1 answer on caste, tradition and change. Mains has asked how caste takes "new identities and associational forms", why caste identity is "both fluid and static", whether Dalit assertion works towards annihilating caste, and what the women's question meant in nineteenth-century reform. NCERT answers with precise definitions and named arguments, and its five criticisms of sanskritisation and its account of the "secularisation of caste" are the parts students most often skip. The 2026-27 reprint keeps all four processes but drops several boxes (listed below).

Contemporary hook: Rajni Kothari's argument in this chapter, that politics does not abolish caste but changes its form, is visible in policy. On 30 April 2025 the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs decided that Census 2027 will include caste enumeration; until 2011, censuses since independence had enumerated only Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (PIB, 25 April 2026). Caste groups pressing the state for recognition and counting is exactly what NCERT calls the secularisation of caste.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

Structure and culture change together, but they are not the same thing. NCERT defines social structure as "a continuing arrangement of persons in relationships defined or controlled by institutions" and culture as "socially established norms or patterns of behaviour". Chapter 1 traced how colonialism changed structures; this chapter traces the change in ways of life, norms, values, fashions and even body language that came with it.

Cultural change came in two forms. The first was deliberate: nineteenth-century reformers and early twentieth-century nationalists tried to change practices that discriminated against women and "lower" castes. The second was less deliberate "yet decisive": the four processes of sanskritisation, modernisation, secularisation and westernisation. Of these, sanskritisation pre-dates colonial rule; the other three are best understood as complex responses to the changes colonialism brought.

Tradition is not fixed, and modernity did not simply replace it. The same person can be modern in one way and traditional in another. NCERT warns against calling this a natural Indian "mix": colonial modernity was paradoxical, and both culture and tradition are "living entities" that people learn and modify. Reformers reinterpreted old texts; caste survived by changing its form in modern politics.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

The Four Processes (NCERT's Definitions)

Saberwal's Modern Framework of Change in Colonial India

Reformers and Debates in NCERT's Chapter

What the 2026-27 Reprint Dropped

Muktabai's 1852 poem; the box on purity and pollution among castes below the Goldsmiths; the two boxes on kinds of westernisation (Devaki's egg-cups in a Thiyya household; J.S. Mill's On Liberty in Indian colleges); the Naga education box and the Americanisation activity ("The new Raj"); the Arunachal festival committees box; the online puja box. The definitions, the five criticisms of sanskritisation, Ravi Varma, the Thiyyas, Rudolph and Rudolph, the secularisation of caste, Kothari's box and the three exercise questions remain.

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

Social Reform in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

The reform movements arose in response to the challenges colonial Indian society faced. The best-known issues were sati, child marriage, the ban on widow remarriage and caste discrimination. Fighting social discrimination was not new: it had been "central to Buddhism, to Bhakti and Sufi movements". What marked nineteenth-century reform was "the modern context and mix of ideas", a creative combination of western liberalism and "a new look on traditional literature".

The sociologist Satish Saberwal describes three aspects of the modern framework of change in colonial India: modes of communication, forms of organisation and the nature of ideas. New technology (the printing press, the telegraph, later the microphone, steamships and railways) moved ideas quickly; reformers from Punjab and Bengal exchanged ideas with those from Madras and Maharashtra; Keshav Chandra Sen of Bengal visited Madras in 1864, Pandita Ramabai travelled across India, and Christian missionaries reached remote parts of present-day Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya. New organisations appeared, such as the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal, the Arya Samaj in Punjab and, in 1914, the All-India Muslim Ladies Conference. Reformers debated through newspapers and journals as well as meetings, and their writings were translated between Indian languages.

Debates on women and education. New ideas of liberalism and freedom, of homemaking and marriage, of roles for mothers and daughters, and of self-conscious pride in culture emerged. Education was seen as vital for a nation to become modern while keeping its heritage, and female education was debated intensely. Jotiba Phule opened the first school for women in Pune. Some reformers claimed women had been educated in pre-modern India; others answered that only a privileged few had been. Phule recalled the glory of a pre-Aryan age, while others such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak emphasised the glory of the Aryan period. Reform "initiated a period of questioning, reinterpretations and both intellectual and social growth".

Differences within reform. For some reformers the concerns were those of upper-caste, middle-class women and men; for others, the injustices suffered by discriminated castes were central. Some believed social evils came from a decline of the true spirit of Hinduism; others held that caste and gender oppression were intrinsic to the religion. Muslim reformers debated polygamy and purdah: at the All India Muslim Ladies Conference, Jahanara Shah Nawas moved a resolution arguing that polygamy as practised by certain sections was "against the true spirit of the Quran". The resolution caused debate in the Muslim press; Tahsib-e-Niswan, the leading women's journal in Punjab, supported it, while others disapproved (Chaudhuri 1993). Debates within communities were common: the Brahmo Samaj opposed sati, while orthodox Hindus in Bengal formed the Dharma Sabha and petitioned the British that reformers had no right to interpret sacred texts.

A third view, increasingly voiced by Dalits, was "a complete rejection of the Hindu fold". In the 2021-22 print NCERT quotes Muktabai, a 13-year-old student in Phule's school, writing in 1852: "Let that religion / Where only one person is privileged / And the rest are deprived / Perish from this earth". NCERT's activity asks students to study Viresalingam, Pandita Ramabai, Vidyasagar, Dayanand Saraswati, Jyotiba Phule, Sri Narayan Guru and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan.

How to Approach the Four Processes

The four processes overlap and co-exist, and often operate very differently in different places. The same person can be modern in some ways and traditional in others. NCERT asks students not to rest content with calling this "natural" to India. Colonial modernity was paradoxical: the English-educated middle class read the thinkers of the western Enlightenment and dreamt of a liberal India, yet, humiliated by colonial rule, asserted pride in traditional learning. Modernity meant "not merely new ideas but also rethinking and reinterpretation of tradition".

NCERT's everyday example is the sari. Traditionally a loose, unstitched cloth worn differently in different regions, its standard modern middle-class form is "a novel combination of the traditional sari with the western 'petticoat' and 'blouse'". A.K. Ramanujan describes his father, a south Indian Brahmin who wore a white turban and a Sri Vaisnava caste mark with "Tootal ties, Kromentz buttons and collar studs" and an English serge jacket over a traditionally draped dhoti.

Sanskritisation

The term sanskritisation was coined by M.N. Srinivas. It is "the process by which a 'low' caste or tribe or other group takes over the customs, ritual, beliefs, ideology and style of life of a high and, in particular, a 'twice-born (dwija) caste'". Its influence reaches language, literature, ideology, music, dance, drama, style of life and ritual. It is primarily a process within the Hindu space, though Srinivas argued it was visible even in sects and religious groups outside Hinduism. (NCERT's Class XI Understanding Society records that Srinivas's Oxford doctoral dissertation, for the D.Phil. awarded in 1947, was published as Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India.)

It worked differently by region. Where a highly sanskritised caste was dominant, the culture of the whole region underwent some sanskritisation; where non-Sanskritic castes were dominant, their influence was stronger, a process termed de-Sanskritisation. In Punjab, Sanskritic influence was never very strong; for many centuries, until the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Persian influence dominated.

Srinivas argued that "the Sanskritisation of a group has usually the effect of improving its position in the local caste hierarchy. It normally presupposes either an improvement in the economic or political position of the group concerned or a higher group self-consciousness resulting from its contact with a source of the 'Great Tradition' of Hinduism such as a pilgrim centre or a monastery or a proselytising sect." NCERT adds that the "reference model" is usually better off financially and that the aspiration to be like the higher group "occurs only when people become wealthier". So sanskritisation is a route to higher status that follows economic or political gains; it is not a purely ritual process.

But in a highly unequal society there were obstacles. Traditionally the dominant caste punished low castes "audacious enough to attempt it". Kumud Pawade, a Dalit woman who became a Sanskrit teacher, tells in her autobiography how, as a student of Sanskrit, she met reactions that NCERT sums up as "ranging from surprise to hostility, from guarded acceptance to brutal rejection", and recalls the saying: "What comes by birth, but can't be cast off by dying - that is caste."

Beyond sanskritisation. With the anti-Brahminical movement and regional self-consciousness in the twentieth century, several Indian languages tried to drop Sanskrit words. A crucial result of the Backward Classes Movement was to emphasise secular factors in the upward mobility of castes and individuals: dominant castes no longer wished to pass for Vaisyas, Kshatriyas or Brahmins, because it was prestigious to belong to the dominant caste itself. Dalits now assert pride in their identity as Dalits; yet among the poorest Dalit groups, caste identity sometimes compensates for marginality elsewhere: they "have gained some pride and self-confidence but otherwise remain excluded and discriminated".

Westernisation

M.N. Srinivas defines westernisation as "the changes brought about in Indian society and culture as a result of over 150 years of British rule, the term subsuming changes occurring at different levels…technology, institutions, ideology and values". NCERT distinguishes two kinds:

1. A westernised sub-culture of a minority who first came into contact with western culture, including Indian intellectuals who adopted western ways of thinking and styles of life and supported their spread. Many early nineteenth-century reformers were of this kind. (The 2021-22 print illustrates "ways of thinking" with J.S. Mill's On Liberty, which became a text in Indian colleges soon after publication, and "ways of living" with a Thiyya household in Kerala that ate boiled eggs from egg-cups.)
2. The general spread of western cultural traits: new technology, dress, food, and habits. Across the country a very wide section of middle-class homes have a television, a fridge, some kind of sofa set and a dining table.

Westernisation "does involve the imitation of external forms of culture. It does not necessarily mean that people adopt modern values of democracy and equality." NCERT's examples: people who are western-educated but hold deeply prejudiced views of particular communities; families with western interiors but very conservative ideas about women; and female foeticide, which combines discrimination against women with very modern technology.

Art and literature. Ravi Varma, Abanindranath Tagore, Chandu Menon and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay were all "grappling with the colonial encounter". In 1870 Ravi Varma received his first paid commission, a portrait of the family of Kizhakke Palat Krishna Menon. The historian G. Arunima notes that it blends a flatter, two-dimensional water-colour style with the new oil techniques of perspective, and seats the figures like a nineteenth-century European bourgeois family, though most Nayars, Krishna Menon's matrilineal caste, would not then have lived in patrilocal nuclear families.

Who westernises? Srinivas suggested that lower castes sought to be sanskritised while upper castes sought to be westernised. NCERT says this generalisation "is difficult to maintain" in a country as diverse as India. Studies of the Thiyyas of Kerala, "by no means considered 'upper caste'", show conscious efforts to westernise: elite Thiyyas used British culture to move towards a cosmopolitan life that critiqued caste. In the North-East western education opened new opportunities; the 2021-22 print quotes a Naga writer whose parents' generation chose English education as a medium to communicate across languages and "made English the official state language" (Ao 2005). Westernisation also complicates relations between generations, as an Assamese short story in Box 2.5 shows (a mother who wore the mekhela-chador from twelve, and a daughter at Gauhati University in trousers). The 2021-22 print adds that westernisation is increasingly Americanisation, for instance in writing the date as "9/11" or "7/11".

Modernisation and Secularisation

Modernisation "has a long history". In the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries it came to stand for positive, desirable values; at first it meant better technology and production, later the path of development taken by western Europe and North America, which other societies were supposed to follow. In India capitalism began within the colonial context, so "the story of our modernisation and secularisation is, therefore, quite distinct from their growth in the west". NCERT takes its definition from Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967): modernity assumes that local ties give way to universal commitments; that utility, calculation and science take precedence over emotion and the sacred; that the individual, not the group, is the primary unit; that associations are based on "choice not birth"; that mastery replaces fatalism; that identity is "chosen and achieved, not ascribed"; and that work is separated from family and community in bureaucratic organisations.

Is this entirely true of India? NCERT answers no. A scavenger does not choose the job; we often marry within caste or community; religious belief still dominates many lives. Yet India also has a scientific tradition and a vibrant secular and democratic political system, side by side with caste and community mobilisation. It would be simplistic to call this "a mix of tradition and modernity", as though either were fixed: plurality and argument have long defined Indian traditions, which are constantly redefined. Jotiba Phule's letter to the Conference of Marathi Authors made the point sharply: upper-caste founders of organisations "pretend to be modernists" while in British service, and on retirement return to their "brahmanical 'touch-me-not attire'".

Secularisation. In the modern West, secularisation "has usually meant a process of decline in the influence of religion", and modernisation theorists assumed modern societies become increasingly secular. Its indicators were involvement with religious organisations (such as church attendance), their social and material influence, and the degree of religious belief. But recent years have seen "an unprecedented growth of religious consciousness and conflict world over", and even earlier, modern communication and organisation produced new religious reform organisations. In India, much ritual pursues secular ends, and rituals have secular dimensions: they are occasions for socialising and for showing off wealth, clothes and jewellery, and "the number of cars lined up outside a wedding house and the VIPs who attended the wedding" index a household's standing. (The 2021-22 print adds a report of online pujas offered in over 600 temples, and an Arunachal Pradesh account of festivals now run by celebration committees, with dates fixed on the government calendar, speeches and "Miss Festival" contests.)

Conclusion

The colonial experience had lasting, often unintended and paradoxical consequences. Western ideas of modernity shaped Indian nationalists' imagination, prompted some to look afresh at traditional texts and led others to reject them. Ideas of equality and democracy had a huge impact on both the reform and the nationalist movements, producing "not just adoption of western ideas, but also an active questioning and reinterpretation of tradition". The next chapter turns to how a Constitution built on equality and social justice worked in a deeply unequal society.

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

NCERT's Answers to Its Own Exercise Questions

Exam Strategy

For Prelims: sanskritisation coined by M.N. Srinivas; de-Sanskritisation; Srinivas's westernisation ("over 150 years of British rule"); Saberwal's three aspects; Keshav Chandra Sen's 1864 Madras visit; All-India Muslim Ladies Conference 1914; Dharma Sabha; Rudolph and Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition (1967); Rajni Kothari, "Caste and Modern Politics"; Ravi Varma's first paid commission (1870).

For Mains: for caste questions, combine sanskritisation (and its five criticisms), the Backward Classes Movement's secular routes, Dalit assertion, and the secularisation of caste with Kothari's argument. For reform questions, use Saberwal's three aspects and the "mix of ideas". For tradition and modernity, use Rudolph and Rudolph's definition and NCERT's caution against treating either as fixed.

Avoid: crediting Srinivas with phrases NCERT does not give him; calling sanskritisation a purely ritual change (NCERT ties it to economic and political gain); saying lower castes always sanskritise and upper castes westernise (NCERT says this is "difficult to maintain"); confusing secularisation with secularism.

Practice Questions

Practice (UPSC-pattern, not past papers). Mains questions 1 to 3 adapt NCERT's own exercises.

Prelims:

1. With reference to sanskritisation as defined by M.N. Srinivas, consider the following statements:
   

   1. It is a process that began only after the onset of colonial rule.
      
   2. It normally presupposes an improvement in the economic or political position of the group, or contact with a source of the "Great Tradition".
      
   3. In regions where non-Sanskritic castes were dominant, their influence was stronger, which is termed de-Sanskritisation.
      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

2. Satish Saberwal's three aspects of the modern framework of change in colonial India are:
   (a) modes of communication, forms of organisation and the nature of ideas
   (b) industrialisation, urbanisation and secularisation
   (c) technology, institutions and values
   (d) sanskritisation, westernisation and modernisation

3. The definition of modernity in which associations are based on "choice not birth" and identity is "chosen and achieved, not ascribed", as quoted in NCERT, is drawn from:
   (a) M.N. Srinivas
   (b) Rajni Kothari
   (c) Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph
   (d) Satish Saberwal

4. In NCERT's account, the "secularisation of caste" refers to:
   (a) the abolition of caste by the Constitution
   (b) the decline of caste in urban areas
   (c) caste functioning as a political pressure group through caste associations and parties
   (d) the adoption of upper-caste rituals by lower castes

Mains:

1. Write a critical essay on sanskritisation as a concept of social mobility. (250 words)
2. "Westernisation is often just about adoption of western attire and lifestyle." Are there other aspects to being westernised? Distinguish westernisation from modernisation. (150 words)
3. Explain the "secularisation of caste" with reference to Rajni Kothari's argument on caste and modern politics. (150 words)
4. Nineteenth-century social reform combined modern ideas with a reinterpretation of tradition. Illustrate with the debates on women and caste. (250 words)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, Social Change and Development in India (Class XII), ch. 2 "Cultural Change", Boxes 2.1-2.8 (2021-22 print and Reprint 2026-27): 2021 book archive, Wayback copy; 2026-27 book archive.
• NCERT, Indian Society (Class XII), ch. 3 (Satyashodhak Samaj, 1873) and ch. 5 (Brahmo Samaj, 1828), Reprint 2026-27: book archive.
• NCERT, Understanding Society (Class XI), ch. 5 "Indian Sociologists" (M.N. Srinivas), Reprint 2026-27: ncert.nic.in PDF.
• Constitution of India, Article 25 (as on 11 November 2025): Legislative Department, Constitution of India.
• Supreme Court of India, S.R. Bommai v. Union of India, 11 March 1994: Indian Kanoon.
• PIB, "Census 2027: India's First Digital Enumeration Exercise", 25 April 2026: static.pib.gov.in PDF.