Social Movements

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: GS1 asks about the women's movement, Dalit assertion and tribal responses to colonial rule, and GS2 about civil society; this chapter, the last in the book, is NCERT's survey of all of them. It defines a social movement, explains why movements arise (in the 2021-22 text, through three theories), classifies them as redemptive, reformist or revolutionary and as "old" or "new", and walks through ecological, peasant, workers', Dalit, backward-class, tribal and women's movements. Mains has asked whether the women's movement ignored lower-strata women, whether Dalit assertion works towards annihilating caste, how tribals responded to colonial oppression, and whether civil society can offer an alternative model of public service. The 2026-27 reprint drops the theories and some boxes (listed below).

Contemporary hook: NCERT names the Right to Information campaign as a reformist movement, and its law has just changed. The Right to Information Act, won after a campaign that began with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan in Rajasthan in 1990, came into force on 12 October 2005. Section 44(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 substitutes the RTI Act's personal-information exemption with a blanket one for "information which relates to personal information", and the Government notified the DPDP Rules on 14 November 2025, "marking the full operationalisation of the DPDP Act" (PIB). Movements win laws; laws change; movements respond.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

A social movement is sustained, organised, collective action for (or against) change. A one-off protest that flares and dies, such as a crowd attacking a bus after an accident, is not a social movement. A movement needs action over time, some organisation and leadership, shared objectives and ideology, and a general orientation towards change, often directed at the state. Movements provoke counter-movements: the Dharma Sabha against Rammohun Roy's campaign on sati, families withdrawing upper-caste children from schools that admitted lower-caste children, protests against extending reservation.

Movements are how rights were won. The weekend, the eight-hour day, equal pay and pensions, the vote itself: "these and many other rights were gained through social movements". The Chartists in England collected 3.25 million signatures in 1842, yet all men over 21 and some women got the vote only in 1918. Sociology studies movements to understand how individuals and groups change both themselves and society.

Indian movements blur the line between "old" and "new". Old movements were class-based or anti-colonial and worked through parties; new ones, after the 1960s, centred on identities and quality of life. In India, peasant, Dalit, tribal, environmental and women's movements combine inequality and identity, economy and ecology, which is why NCERT asks students to test the distinction rather than simply apply it.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

Theories of Social Movements (2021-22 print only)

Types of Social Movements (NCERT)

Old and New Social Movements

What the 2026-27 Reprint Dropped

The whole theory section (relative deprivation, Olson, McCarthy and Zald, James Scott and Box 8.4); Gail Omvedt's argument on old and new movements in India; in Box 8.13, the Anti-Price Rise movement, Jayaprakash Narayan's "Total Revolution" and the Mathura (1978) and Maya Tyagi (1980) custodial rape cases; the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha in Activity 8.5; and the 1922 Factories Act sentence. Kept: features and types of movements, Chartism, Durkheim and E.P. Thompson, old and new movements with Kothari, Chipko, peasant, workers', Dalit, backward-class, tribal and women's movements, and the five exercise questions.

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

Features of a Social Movement

Movements shape the world we live in. NCERT's Box 8.1 traces the vote: in Britain voting was once limited to property-owning men; the Chartist movement collected over 1.25 million signatures in 1839 and 3.25 million in 1842 for universal male suffrage, the secret ballot and the right to stand without owning property, yet only in 1918 did all men over 21, married women, women householders and women graduates over 30 get the vote, and the suffragettes campaigning for all adult women were "bitterly opposed and their movement violently crushed". India's universal adult franchise was "a radical departure" from colonial rule.

A movement requires sustained collective action over time, often directed against the state and demanding changes in policy or practice; some degree of organisation, with a leadership and a structure for decisions; shared objectives and ideologies; and a general orientation to bring about (or prevent) change. These features can change over a movement's life. Movements often take up public issues, such as tribal rights to forests or compensation for the displaced, and they meet counter-movements defending the status quo.

Protest is the most visible form, but movements also hold meetings to build shared understanding, run campaigns that lobby government, media and opinion-makers, and develop distinctive modes of protest: candle and torch processions, black cloth, street theatre, songs and poetry. Gandhi's ahimsa, satyagraha and charkha, picketing, and defying the salt ban are NCERT's examples; Box 8.2 notes how he turned cloth and salt, items of everyday mass consumption, into symbols of resistance.

Social change and social movements differ. Social change is continuous and ongoing, the sum of countless individual and collective actions; a social movement is directed towards specific goals through long, continuous effort. Sanskritisation and westernisation are social change; the nineteenth-century reformers' efforts were social movements.

Sociology and Social Movements

Sociology has always studied movements: the French Revolution culminated several movements for "liberty, equality and fraternity", and Britain's industrial revolution brought protests by poor labourers and artisans that elites saw as threats to order. Émile Durkheim's concern with social integration (the division of labour, religion, suicide) reflected that anxiety; movements were seen as forces of disorder. Scholars influenced by Marx took a different view: the historian E.P. Thompson showed that the crowd was not "anarchic hooligans" but had a "moral economy", a shared sense of right and wrong; the urban poor protested publicly because they had no other way to express anger at deprivation. NCERT's Box 8.3 gives a voice from the Pardhi community, skilled hunters whom society treats only as criminals: "It is this society that is responsible for turning us into thieves."

The 2021-22 print then sets out three theories (see the table in Part 1). Relative deprivation stresses psychological factors but is "not a sufficient reason" on its own. Mancur Olson sees rational individuals joining only when gains exceed risks. McCarthy and Zald's resource mobilisation theory rejects Olson, holding that success depends on mobilising leadership, organisational capacity and communication within the available political opportunity structure; critics answer that poor people's movements can generate resources, new symbols and identities, through struggle. And James Scott showed in Weapons of the Weak that peasants and labourers in Malaysia resisted through small "everyday acts of resistance" such as working deliberately slowly.

Old and New Social Movements

For much of the twentieth century movements were class-based (workers' and peasants' movements) or anti-colonial. Workers' movements in Europe gave rise to the international communist movement, communist states in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, and, through political pressure, the welfare states of Western Europe; anti-colonial movements targeted both foreign rule and foreign capital. After the Second World War empires ended. Another wave came in the 1960s and early 1970s: the Vietnam war, the Paris students' movement with workers' parties, the US civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King followed by Black Power under Malcolm X, the anti-war movement of drafted students, and the women's and environmental movements. Their members shared identities as students, women, blacks or environmentalists rather than a class: the "new social movements".

The contexts differed: old movements sought to reorganise power relations and functioned within political parties, while new ones, in affluent welfare states, focused on quality-of-life issues. Political scientist Rajni Kothari attributes the surge of Indian movements in the 1970s to growing dissatisfaction with parliamentary democracy: state institutions had been captured by elites, so the poor joined movements or non-party formations to press the state from outside. Civil society now covers both old movements (parties, unions) and new NGOs, women's groups, environmental groups and tribal activists. Because firms, rules (such as the WTO's) and risks are global, many new movements are international, and old and new work together in alliances such as the World Social Forum (Box 8.6 notes that the Seattle protests against the WTO were organised partly through the internet).

Can India use the distinction? The 2021-22 print cites Gail Omvedt (Reinventing Revolution): concerns about inequality and resources remain central (peasants seek better prices and oppose subsidy cuts; Dalit labourers resist exploitation; the women's movement fights discrimination at work and home), yet these movements are not about economic inequality alone, and often unite participants across classes (urban feminists and poor peasant women; regional statehood movements). NCERT's exercise asks students to discuss why "it is difficult to make a clear distinction between the old and new social movements" in India.

Ecological Movements: Chipko

The modern emphasis on development has raised concern about unchecked use of natural resources, and about a model that assumes everyone benefits: big dams displace people, industries displace farmers, pollution harms others. NCERT's single example is Chipko, in the Himalayan foothills. According to Ramachandra Guha (Unquiet Woods), villagers rallied to save the oak and rhododendron forests near their villages; when government forest contractors came to cut the trees, villagers, including many women, stepped forward to hug them. At stake was subsistence (firewood, fodder, daily necessities) against the government's desire for revenue from timber: "the economy of subsistence was pitted against the economy of profit". Chipko also raised ecological sustainability, since felling had caused devastating floods and landslides; for villagers these "red" and "green" issues were linked, and they valued the forest for itself. It also expressed hill villagers' resentment of a distant government in the plains. So "concerns about economy, ecology and political representation underlay the Chipko Movement".

Box 8.5 (Guha) gives the story: the unusually heavy monsoon of 1970 caused the most devastating flood in living memory in the Alaknanda valley, and villagers began to see the links between deforestation, landslides and floods. The Dashauli Gram Swaraj Sangh (DGSS), a cooperative in Chamoli district, took up their cause. When the government auctioned the Reni forest, contractors' men skirted Reni village to reach it; a small girl alerted Gaura Devi, head of the village Mahila Mandal, who mobilised the women, and when they refused to budge, the men were forced to retire. NCERT's Politics in India since Independence adds that the protests began in early 1973 in villages of present-day Uttarakhand, when the forest department refused villagers permission to fell ash trees for agricultural tools but allotted the same patch to a sports goods manufacturer. NCERT also mentions the government's Namami Gange (integrated Ganga conservation) and Swachh Bharat missions as efforts for environmental balance.

Class-Based Movements

Peasant movements. Agrarian struggles go back to pre-colonial days. Between 1858 and 1914 they were localised and disjointed: the Bengal revolt of 1859-62 against the indigo plantation system and the Deccan riots against moneylenders (NCERT's text says "1857", but NCERT's Themes in Indian History III dates the revolt to May 1875, beginning at Supa in Poona district). Under Gandhi some became linked to the national movement: the Champaran Satyagraha (1917-18) against indigo plantations and the Bardoli Satyagraha (1928, Surat district), a refusal to pay land revenue. Peasant organisations arose: the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (1929) and the All India Kisan Sabha (1936), demanding freedom from economic exploitation. At independence came the two classic cases: the Tebhaga movement (1946-47) of sharecroppers in Bengal demanding two-thirds of the produce instead of the customary half, supported by the Kisan Sabha and the CPI, and the Telangana movement (1946-51) against feudal conditions in the princely state of Hyderabad, led by the CPI.

After 1947 two movements dominated. The Naxalite movement began at Naxalbari (1967) in Bengal, around land: Box 8.7 describes peasants' committees in the Siliguri subdivision occupying land and burning land records, and Box 8.8 the guerrilla actions of November 1968 near Boddapadu and in the Parvatipuram Agency area, where about 250 Girijans armed with bows, arrows and spears raided a landlord-moneylender's house. The "new farmers' movements" began in the 1970s in Punjab and Tamil Nadu: regionally organised, non-party, of market-involved farmers rather than peasants, strongly anti-state and anti-urban, focused on "price and related issues" (procurement and remunerative prices, input prices, taxation, loans), using road and rail blockades and barring politicians and officials from villages. Having broadened to environment and women's issues, they can be seen as part of the worldwide new social movements. NCERT's exercise asks students to analyse the farmers' protests of 2020-21 on Delhi's borders against three farm laws. (Those laws were repealed by the Farm Laws Repeal Act, 2021, Act 40 of 2021, dated 30 November 2021.)

Workers' movements. Factory production began in India in the early 1860s, in the port towns of Calcutta and Bombay and later Madras. (NCERT here dates Assam's tea plantations to 1839; its Chapter 1 says the tea industry began in 1851.) Labour was cheap and unregulated, and early protests were spontaneous. The First World War expanded industry but brought shortages and price rises: there were about 30 recorded strikes in Bombay textile mills in September-October 1917, and strikes by Calcutta jute workers, Madras's Buckingham and Carnatic Mills workers and Ahmedabad textile workers demanding a 50 per cent raise (Bhowmick 2004). The first trade union was established in April 1918 in Madras by B.P. Wadia, a social worker and Theosophist; the same year Gandhi founded the Textile Labour Association (TLA). In 1920 the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) was formed in Bombay, with communists (S.A. Dange, M.N. Roy), moderates (N.M. Joshi, V.V. Giri) and nationalists (Lala Lajpat Rai, Jawaharlal Nehru). The colonial government responded with concessions: in 1922 (2021-22 print) the fourth Factories Act cut the working day to ten hours, and the Trade Unions Act, 1926 provided for registration of unions; by the mid-1920s about 200 unions with some 250,000 members were affiliated to the AITUC. As communists gained control of the AITUC, the Congress formed the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) in May 1947, and unions split along party lines, with regional parties forming their own from the late 1960s. The 1966-67 recession brought unrest, the 1974 railway strike sharpened confrontation, and the Emergency of 1975-77 curbed union activity; the workers' movement was part of the wider struggle for civil liberties.

Caste-Based Movements

The Dalit movement. Dalit movements cannot be explained by economic exploitation or political oppression alone: they are "a struggle for recognition as fellow human beings", for self-confidence and self-determination, for abolishing the stigma of untouchability. It has been called "a struggle to be touched". The word Dalit, common in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and other languages for the poor and oppressed, was first used in the new context in Marathi by neo-Buddhist followers of Ambedkar in the early 1970s; it means those "broken, ground down by those above them in a deliberate way", and carries an "inherent denial of pollution, karma and justified caste hierarchy". There has never been one unified Dalit movement, but there is a common quest for equality, dignity and the eradication of untouchability (Shah 2001): the Satnami movement of the Chamars in the Chhattisgarh plains, the Adi Dharma movement in Punjab, the Mahar movement in Maharashtra, the mobilisation of the Jatavs of Agra, and the anti-Brahman movement in south India. Politics in India since Independence adds that the Dalit Panthers, a militant organisation of Dalit youth, were formed in Maharashtra in 1972. A growing Dalit literature, opposed to the chaturvarna system and insisting on its own imagery and experience, calls for social and cultural revolt. Box 8.10 argues that the movement has had all three characters (revolutionary for society and redemptive for individuals at its best, from Phule through the non-Brahmin movements to Ambedkar) but "on the whole … has been a reformist movement", achieving real but limited gains, especially for educated Dalits.

Backward class and caste movements. Backward castes emerged as political entities in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Because the colonial state distributed patronage by caste, similarly placed castes united in a "horizontal stretch", and caste lost ritual content and became secularised for political mobilisation (Chapter 2). The term "Backward Classes" was used in Madras Presidency from 1872, Mysore from 1918 and Bombay Presidency from 1925; organisations such as the United Provinces Hindu Backward Classes League and the All-India Backward Classes Federation followed, and 88 organisations were counted in 1954.

The upper-caste response. The visibility of Dalits and OBCs has made sections of upper castes feel neglected because they are numerically small; sociologists must ask how far this is grounded in fact. Satish Deshpande (Box 8.12) explains why caste seemed "archaic" to upper-caste urban professionals in Nehruvian India: their milieu was so dominated by upper castes that "caste identity is unlikely to be an issue", much as being Indian goes unnoticed in India. Though all groups are better off than before independence, "the overwhelming majority of those in the 'highest' or most preferred occupations are from the upper castes, while the vast majority of those in the menial and despised occupations belong to the lowest castes". Box 8.11 quotes G.B. Pant in the Constituent Assembly ("the strength of the chain is measured by the weakest link") and asks how the 10 per cent reservation for economically weaker sections introduced in 2019 differs. (The 103rd Amendment's Article 15(6), in force from 14 January 2019, covers economically weaker sections not covered by the existing SC, ST and OBC reservations.)

Tribal Movements

Tribal movements are concentrated in the "tribal belt" of middle India, among the Santhals, Hos, Oraons and Mundas of Chota Nagpur and the Santhal Parganas, the core of Jharkhand. Jharkhand, carved out of south Bihar in 2000, rests on more than a century of resistance. Its charismatic leader was Birsa Munda, who led a major uprising against the British and became an icon of the movement in songs and stories. Christian missionaries spread literacy, and literate adivasis researched and wrote their history, creating a shared Jharkhandi identity; a middle-class adivasi leadership emerged that demanded a separate state. Adivasis shared hatred of dikus, migrant traders and moneylenders who had grabbed the region's wealth, while the benefits of mining and industry went to outsiders and adivasi land was alienated. The movement agitated against land acquisition for irrigation projects and firing ranges, survey and settlement operations, the collection of loans, rents and cooperative dues, and the nationalisation of forest produce.

The North-East. State formation after independence unsettled the hill districts: conscious of their identity and traditional autonomy, the tribes were wary of incorporation into Assam's administration. Tiplut Nongbri explains the rise of ethnicity as a response to contact with "a powerful alien system", and notes that an early tendency towards secessionism "has been replaced by a search for autonomy within the framework of the Indian Constitution". The alienation of tribals from forest lands binds tribal movements across the country, so ecological issues are as central to them as identity and inequality, again blurring old and new.

The Women's Movement

Early organisations. After the nineteenth-century reformers, the early twentieth century saw national and local women's organisations: the Women's India Association (WIA, 1917), the National Council for Women in India (NCWI, 1925) and the All India Women's Conference (AIWC, 1926). Their scope widened: the AIWC began by treating women's welfare and politics as separate, but a later presidential address asked, "Can the Indian man or woman be free if India be a slave?" Whether this period was a social movement can be argued either way; it had organisations, ideology, leadership and shared aims, and it made the women's question impossible to ignore.

Agrarian struggles. Women took part with men in tribal and rural revolts in the colonial period: the Tebhaga movement in Bengal, the Telangana armed struggle against the Nizam's rule, and the Warli tribals' revolt against bondage in Maharashtra.

After 1947 there was a lull, explained by activists' turn to nation-building or by the trauma of Partition. In the mid-1970s the movement revived, the "second phase", with the growth of an autonomous women's movement, independent of political parties that tended to marginalise women's issues. New issues came to the fore, especially violence against women; campaigns brought legal changes, school forms that ask for the mother's name as well as the father's, and struggles over land rights, employment, sexual harassment and dowry. The 2021-22 print (Box 8.13, Ilina Sen) traces this ferment through the Anti-Price Rise movement in Mumbai and Gujarat in the late 1960s, the students' upsurge in Bihar behind Jayaprakash Narayan's call for "Total Revolution", and two custodial rape cases by police, Mathura (1978) and Maya Tyagi (1980), which led to nationwide protests.

Conclusion. The book ends where Class XI began, with the dialectic of individual and society: movements "arise because individuals and social groups seek to change their conditions. Thereby, they change both themselves and the society."

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

NCERT's Answers to Its Own Exercise Questions

Exam Strategy

For Prelims: Chartism (1839, 1842); E.P. Thompson's "moral economy"; Olson, McCarthy and Zald, James Scott; redemptive, reformist, revolutionary with NCERT's examples; Rajni Kothari on the 1970s; DGSS, Chamoli, Reni, Gaura Devi; Champaran 1917-18, Bardoli 1928, Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha 1929, All India Kisan Sabha 1936, Tebhaga 1946-47, Telangana 1946-51, Naxalbari 1967; B.P. Wadia's union (April 1918), TLA 1918, AITUC 1920, Trade Unions Act 1926, INTUC 1947; "Backward Classes" in Madras from 1872; WIA 1917, NCWI 1925, AIWC 1926; RTI Act in force 12 October 2005.

For Mains: define a movement with NCERT's features, classify it with the typology, and test old vs new. For women's movement questions, use Rege's caste analysis and the autonomous movement; for Dalit questions, "a struggle to be touched", the meaning of "Dalit", and Box 8.10's reformist verdict; for environment, Chipko's red and green.

Avoid: dating the Deccan riots to 1857 (they were in 1875); calling any protest a social movement; treating "new" movements as identity-only in India.

Practice Questions

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

Prelims:

1. Which of the following correctly matches NCERT's examples with the type of social movement?
   

   1. Narayana Guru and the Ezhavas : Redemptive
      
   2. Right to Information campaign : Reformist
      
   3. Naxalite movement : Revolutionary
      Select the correct answer using the code given below:
      (a) 1 and 2 only
      (b) 2 and 3 only
      (c) 1 and 3 only
      (d) 1, 2 and 3

2. The Tebhaga movement of 1946-47 was a struggle of sharecroppers in Bengal for:
   (a) abolition of the zamindari system
   (b) two-thirds of the produce instead of the customary half
   (c) remission of land revenue during famine
   (d) the right to form trade unions

3. The first trade union in India, established in Madras in April 1918, was founded by:
   (a) N.M. Joshi
   (b) B.P. Wadia
   (c) Mahatma Gandhi
   (d) S.A. Dange

4. In NCERT's account of the Chipko movement, the village whose women, led by Gaura Devi, stopped the felling of its forest was:
   (a) Gopeshwar
   (b) Reni
   (c) Saklana
   (d) Joshimath

Mains:

1. "In India it is difficult to make a clear distinction between the old and new social movements." Discuss. (250 words)
2. "Environmental movements often also contain economic and identity issues." Discuss with reference to Chipko. (150 words)
3. Distinguish between peasant movements and the new farmers' movements in India. (150 words)
4. Write a note on the women's movement in India, bringing out the differences among women that it has had to address. (250 words)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, Social Change and Development in India (Class XII), ch. 8 "Social Movements", Boxes 8.1-8.14 (2021-22 print and Reprint 2026-27): 2021 book archive, Wayback copy; 2026-27 book archive.
• NCERT, Politics in India since Independence (Class XII), ch. 7 "Rise of Popular Movements" (2021-22 print; Chipko, Dalit Panthers, anti-arrack, Narmada Bachao Andolan, right to information): Wayback copy.
• NCERT, Themes in Indian History III (Class XII), "Colonialism and the Countryside" (the Deccan riots, 1875), Reprint 2026-27: ncert.nic.in PDF.
• Supreme Court of India, Narmada Bachao Andolan v. Union of India, 18 October 2000: Indian Kanoon; PMO, "PM dedicates Sardar Sarovar Dam to the nation", 17 September 2017: pmindia.gov.in.
• Central Information Commission, report on the RTI Act (assent 15 June 2005; in force 12 October 2005): cic.gov.in PDF; The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, s. 44(3): meity.gov.in PDF; PIB, "Government notifies DPDP Rules", 14 November 2025: pib.gov.in.
• The Farm Laws Repeal Act, 2021 (Act 40 of 2021): Indian Kanoon; Constitution (One Hundred and Sixth Amendment) Act, 2023, commencement notification S.O. 1922(E), 16 April 2026: egazette PDF; Constitution of India, Art. 15(6): Legislative Department, Constitution of India.