Social Structure in India

SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN INDIA

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The ethnic and linguistic diversity of India is proverbial and rivals the diversity of continental Europe which is not a single nation-State like India. India contains a large number of different regional, social, and economic groups, each with distinctive or dissimilar customs and cultural practices. Region-wise, differences between social structures of India’s north and south are marked, especially with respect to kinship systems and family relationships. Religious differences are pervasive through out the country. There is the Hindu majority and the large Muslim minority or “second majority”. 

There are other Indian groups—Buddhists, Christians, Jains, Jews, Parsis, Sikhs, and practitioners of tribal religions—and hundreds of sub-religions or religious communities within larger communities like the Arya Samajis, Sanatanis among the Hindus; Shias and Sunnis among the Muslims; Monas and Keshdharis among Sikhs and hundreds of other castes, sub-castes, communities, vegetarians and non-vegetarians from each religion. Each group is proud of its faith and very sure of its superiority over other faiths.

A highly noticeable feature of India’s social structure is highly inequitable division of the nation’s wealth. Access to wealth and power varies sharply. Extreme differences in socio-economic status are glaringly visible among the smallest village communities to metropolitan cities and mega-towns. The poor and the rich live side by side in urban and rural areas. Prosperous, well-fed, perfumed men or women in chauffeured luxury cars passing and even living in narrow streets with poor, starving, ill-nourished, ill-clad or even half-naked men, women, children dwelling on their pavements and bathing in dirty water of its flowing or even clogged drains are common sights. Contrasting extreme poverty and enormous wealth and obvious class distinctions are egregiously visible in almost every settlement in India.

Urban-rural differences too are immense. Over 70 per cent of India’s population lives in villages; agriculture still remains their mainstay. Mud houses, dusty lanes, grazing cattle, chirping and crying of birds at sunset and rising smell of dung and chulah-smoke are the usual settings for the social lives of most rural Indians. In India’s enlarging cities, millions of people live among roaring vehicles, surging crowds, overcrowded streets, busy commercial establishments, loudspeakers blaring movie tunes or religious recitations, factories and trucks and buses breathing poisonous pollution into unhealthy lungs.

Gender distinctions are highly pronounced. The behaviour norms of men and women are very different, more so in villages. Prescribed ideal gender roles are fast losing to new patterns of behaviour among both sexes. Individually, both men and women behave in one way and collectively in quite another way. Public behaviour of both men and women is rude and unhelpful, but the same people when in individual situation and relationship can be very different. People occupying public positions are extremely unhelpful and even normal actions done toward others as part of normal routine are projected as personal favours. Even senior citizens, retired persons, war widows do not get their pension approved for years! A clerk in a government office wields greater actual power than a decision-making executive and can withhold implementation of his superior’s orders for ever. If the victim of delay approaches the court, the litigant is in for a shock after shock as the case gets adjourned endlessly and after years of attending court hearings gets an unimaginably skewed judgment written in a highly ambiguous language. Litigants pay high fees to lawyers and bribes to court staff and even to judges.

Surprisingly, observers tend to bypass these all-pervading differences of region, language, wealth, status, religion, urbanity, gender and absence of the rule of law but pay most devoted attention to that special and peculiar feature of Indian society: “CASTE”. The most loved and recognized identity of Indians is their caste. And, there are thousands of castes and caste-like groups. These are hierarchically ordered and named groups into which members are born. Caste members, as far as possible, marry within the caste or sub-caste and follow caste rules with respect to diet, ritual and aspects of life.

Yet, no generalisation can be made because, increasingly, caste- discipline is loosening and every individual is free to decide her or his own social ways and such an indivi-dual will always find small or big support and a milieu to evolve a suitable mode of living in spite of turning her/his back on caste and caste-ridden society, though at times, this can be a harrowing experience, especially in sub-caste communities where inter-caste and widow marriage is equated with community honour leading to honour-killing of the perceived violator of caste-norms, especially if the violator is weak. However, underlying norms of life, though honesty of thought and action may not be among them, are widely accepted in India.

Indian city dwellers are often nostalgic about “simple village life”, but Indian villages have been losing both simplicity and gaiety of life and are boiling in the caste cauldron of petty rivalries. They are afflicted with addiction to all kinds of drugs like alcohol, opium and heroin. Roads, television and mobile phones are now changing the village scene though dirt, squalor and disease still vitiate rural India.

Indian village life is neither simple nor inviting. That is why no villager who has come to the city goes back. According to sociologists: “Each village is connected through a variety of crucial horizontal linkages with other villages and with urban areas both near and far. Most villages are characterized by a multiplicity of economic, caste, kinship, occupational, and even religious groups linked vertically within each settlement. Factionalism is a typical feature of village politics. In one of the first of the modern anthropologi-cal studies of Indian village life, anthropologist Oscar Lewis called this complexity “rural cosmopolitanism.”

Typical Indian villages have clustered dwelling patterns built very close to one another. Sociologists call them “nucleated settlements”, with small and narrow lanes for passage of people and sometimes carts. Village fields surround these settlements. On the hills of central, eastern, and far northern India, dwellings are more spread out. In wet States of West Bengal and Kerala, houses are a little dispersed; in Kerala, some villages merge into the next village and visitor are not able to see divisions between such villages.

In northern and central India, neighbourhood boundaries can be vague. Houses of Dalits are ordinarily situated on outskirts of nucleated settlements. Distinct Dalit hamlets, however, are rare. Contrastingly, in the south, where socio-economic divisions and caste pollution observances tend to be stronger than in the north, Dalit hamlets are set at a little distance from other caste neighbourhoods.

Bigger landowners do not cultivate lands but hire tenant farmers to do this work. Artisans in pottery, wood, cloth, metal, and leather, although diminishing, continue to eke out their existence in contemporary Indian villages like centuries past. Religious observances and weddings are occasions for members of various castes to provide customary ritual goods and services.

Accelerating urbanization is fast transforming Indian society. More than 26 per cent of the country’s population is urban. India’s larger cities have been growing at twice the rate of smaller towns and villages. About half of the increase is the result of rural-urban migration, as villagers seek better lives for themselves in the cities.

Most Indian cities are densely populated. New Delhi, for example, had 6,352 people per square kilometer in 1991. Congestion, noise, traffic jams, air pollution, grossly inadequate housing, transportation, sewerage, electric power, water supplies, schools, hospitals and major shortages of key necessities characterize urban life. Slums and pavement dwellers constantly multiply so also trucks, buses, cars, auto-rickshaws, motorcycles, and scooters, spewing uncontrolled fumes, all surging in haphazard patterns along with jaywalking pedestrians and cattle.

A recent phenomenon is illegal migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh and terrorists via Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan. They stalk all big cities and State capitals and strike at will. India’s city life is extremely insecure and crime-infested.

Once a sleepy land of docile people, India has become one of the 20 most dangerous countries of the world to live in.