Class 12 Sociology Book 2 Chapter 2 Cultural Change Notes in English

1 From Structural Change to Cultural Change

The previous chapter, Structural Change, showed how colonialism altered the structure of Indian society: industrialisation and urbanisation replaced fields with factories and villages with cities as places of work and living. This chapter is about something related but different: culture, not structure. Sociologists define culture as socially established norms or patterns of behaviour (Definition 2 below). The changes this chapter describes took place in culture, ways of life, norms, values, fashions and even body language.

This chapter looks at two related developments, both products of colonial rule’s impact on India:

2 The Social Reform Movements

2.1 Old Evils, a New Context

By the 19th century, Indian society faced widely recognised “social evils”: sati, child marriage, the ban on widow remarriage, and caste discrimination. The book is careful to point out that resistance to social discrimination was not new: it was central to Buddhism, the Bhakti movement and Sufi movements well before colonial rule.

What marked the 19th-century reform attempts was the modern context and the mix of ideas that reformers brought to fighting them: a creative combination of modern Western liberalism with a fresh look at India’s own traditional literature.

2.2 The Mix of Ideas: Four Reformers

The book’s own Box 2.1 gives four examples of this mixed approach. Learn the reformer, the issue, and exactly how each one combined modern and traditional appeals.

New education itself carried this same mix: its humanities and social science content was drawn from the European Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, and its themes were humanistic, secular and liberal, even while reformers argued using India’s own texts.

2.3 Saberwal’s Three Aspects of Change

Sociologist Satish Saberwal sketched three aspects of the modern framework of change in colonial India: modes of communication, forms of organisation, and the nature of ideas.

2.4 The Debate Over Female Education

The idea of female education was intensely debated. It was the reformer Jotiba Phule who opened the first school for women in Pune. Some reformers argued that women were educated in pre-modern India; others contested this, saying it was true only for a privileged few. Reformers also disagreed about which past to be proud of: Jotiba Phule recalled the glory of the pre-Aryan age, while Bal Gangadhar Tilak emphasised the glory of the Aryan period. Both used tradition to argue for reform, but pointed to different traditions.

2.5 Not One Reform Movement, But Many

The reform movements shared common themes, but the book is explicit that there were also significant differences among them. Four distinct positions existed side by side; keep them as four separate points, not one blended view.

2.6 Muslim Reform Debates

Among Muslim reformers, the meaning of polygamy and purdah was actively debated. Jahanara Shah Nawas proposed a resolution against polygamy at the All India Muslim Ladies Conference, arguing that the kind of polygamy practised by certain Muslim sections was against the true spirit of the Quran, and that it was the duty of educated women to use their influence to end the practice. The resolution caused considerable debate in the Muslim press: Tahsib-e-Niswan, the leading women’s journal in Punjab, supported the resolve, while others disapproved.

The book’s Activity 2.1 also asks you to find out about Dayanand Saraswati and Sri Narayan Guru, along with Viresalingam, Pandita Ramabai, Vidyasagar, Jotiba Phule and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan; the text itself gives no further detail on the first two.

Debate happened within communities too, not just between them. Sati was opposed by the Brahmo Samaj, but orthodox members of the Hindu community in Bengal formed the Dharma Sabha, which petitioned the British, arguing that reformers had no right to interpret sacred texts.

3 Culture Is Living: It Overlaps and Changes Unevenly

Before looking at the four processes one by one, the book makes an important point: Sanskritisation, Modernisation, Secularisation and Westernisation overlap and co-exist. The same person can be modern in some ways and traditional in another. This co-existence is often treated as natural to India and other non-Western countries. But that is not a full explanation: a sociologist still has to ask why this overlap happens and how it works in practice.

Colonial modernity itself had its own paradoxes. The Western-educated Indian middle class read Enlightenment thinkers and liberal-democratic philosophers, dreaming of a liberal, progressive India, yet, humiliated by colonial rule, this same class also asserted pride in traditional learning and scholarship. Modernity, in other words, meant not just new ideas but a rethinking and reinterpretation of tradition. Culture and tradition are living things: people learn them, and in turn modify them.

India’s structural and cultural diversity means these four processes affect different regions, classes, castes, and even men and women within the same group, quite differently. The book gives A.K. Ramanujan’s description of his own father as an example of “the mix and match of the traditional and modern” (Activity 2.3 asks you to find other instances): a South Indian Brahmin gentleman with a Sri Vaishnava caste mark and white turbans, who nonetheless wore Tootal ties and Kromentz buttons (Western brand names for ties and shirt buttons) and English serge jackets over the muslin dhotis he draped in the traditional Brahmin style.

4 Sanskritisation

Its impact is many-sided: it shows up in language, literature, ideology, music, dance, drama, style of life and ritual. It is primarily a process within the Hindu space, though Srinivas himself argued it was visible even in sects and religious groups outside Hinduism.

4.1 Regional Variation

Where a dominant caste was highly Sanskritised	Where non-Sanskritic castes were dominant
The entire region’s culture underwent a degree of Sanskritisation	Their influence was stronger instead: a process the book calls de-Sanskritisation

The book notes other regional variations too. In Punjab, Sanskritic influence was never very strong culturally, and for many centuries, until the third quarter of the 19th century, Persian influence was the dominant one instead.

A proselytising sect is simply a religious group that actively seeks new converts; a pilgrim centre or a monastery gives a group the same kind of link to the wider “Great Tradition” of Hinduism.

In a highly unequal society such as India, easy adoption of upper-caste customs by lower castes faced real obstacles: traditionally, the dominant caste punished lower castes audacious enough to attempt it.

The book adds a general point: Sanskritisation suggests a process in which people try to improve their status by adopting the names and customs of culturally high-placed groups. The “reference model” is usually financially better off, and the aspiration to be like the higher-placed group arises only when people become wealthier.

4.2 Five Criticisms of Sanskritisation

The book lists five separate criticisms of Sanskritisation as a concept. Learn all five, each as its own point.

With the growth of the anti-Brahminical movement and 20th-century regional self-consciousness, several Indian languages saw deliberate attempts to drop Sanskrit words and phrases. A crucial result of the Backward Classes Movement was to emphasise the role of secular factors in the upward mobility of caste groups and individuals. Dominant castes stopped wanting to “pass” as Vaishya, Kshatriya or Brahmin; being a member of the dominant caste itself became prestigious. In recent years, Dalits have instead asserted pride in their own identity as Dalits.

5 Westernisation

5.1 Kinds of Westernisation

The book says there were different kinds of Westernisation. Two are described:

The book’s Activity 2.5 gives two examples of this contradiction: Western-educated people who still hold very prejudiced views about particular ethnic or religious communities, and a family that adopts Western home interiors but keeps very conservative ideas about women’s role. It adds female foeticide, which combines a discriminatory attitude towards women with very modern technology. The activity also asks whether this contradiction is only true of Indians and non-Western societies, or whether racist and discriminatory attitudes exist in Western societies too.

5.2 Westernisation in Art

The West also influenced Indian art and literature. Artists Raja Ravi Varma, Abanindranath Tagore, Chandu Menon and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay were all grappling with the colonial encounter.

5.3 Was Westernisation Only for “Upper Castes”?

Srinivas suggested that while “lower castes” sought to be Sanskritised, “upper castes” sought to be Westernised. In a country as diverse as India, this generalisation is hard to maintain: studies of the Thiyyas in Kerala, who are by no means considered an “upper caste”, show conscious efforts to Westernise. Elite Thiyyas appropriated British culture as a way to lead a more cosmopolitan life that also critiqued caste.

Western education also opened up new opportunities for groups in the North-East. In the book’s Box 2.4 (Ao 2005), a Naga writer recalls a grandfather who, like most Nagas in close contact with Europeans, was convinced that education was the only way to get ahead in life. He sent the writer’s mother to school first in neighbouring Assam and then as far as Shimla; she was encouraged by an educated man of her village who pointed to Vijaylakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister, who had represented India at the UN. By his own intelligence and hard work, the writer’s father put himself through the local mission school and college in Shillong. For a generation of Nagas, English became both a gateway to upward mobility and a shared language, since tribes living barely 20 km apart could speak completely different languages; those educated in English became the voice of their people and made English the official state language.

5.4 Westernisation and the Generation Gap

The book’s Box 2.3 gives an Assamese mother’s account of how westernisation can sharpen generational difference: she says her children sometimes seem like total strangers to her, with nothing in common in their ways of thinking or the way they dress up, talk or behave (Whitney Houston’s pop songs against her own Meera-Bhajans, a guitar against her Bargeet, the traditional Assamese devotional songs she grew up with) while she still loves them completely. The book itself then asks the harder question directly: is Westernisation the only reason for such generational conflicts, and are such conflicts necessarily bad? Treat this as an open discussion point in your answers, not a settled fact.

6 Modernisation and Secularisation

The book studies these two processes together, because they are linked and both belong to the same set of modern ideas.

6.1 Modernisation

India’s own story of modernisation and secularisation is distinct from the West’s, because the beginnings of capitalism in India took place within the colonial context, unlike in the West.

In simpler terms: a modern person is influenced by universal, not just local, contexts. What job you do is a matter of your own choice, not your parent’s occupation. Your standing depends on what you achieve, not simply on who you are born as. A scientific attitude gains ground over custom.

6.2 Secularisation

Rituals also have secular dimensions, distinct from secular goals. They give people occasions to socialise with peers and superiors and to show off family wealth, clothing and jewellery. In recent decades, the book notes, the economic, political and status dimensions of ritual have become more conspicuous: the number of cars lined up outside a wedding house, and which VIPs attended, now index a household’s standing in the local community. (Activity 2.7 asks you to collect festival advertisements and note what their messages are about.)

6.3 Secularisation of Caste

In traditional India, the caste system operated within a religious framework: beliefs of purity and pollution were central to its practice. Today it often functions instead as political pressure groups; contemporary India has seen caste associations and caste-based political parties press their demands upon the state. This changed role, from a religious framework to a political one, is what the book calls the secularisation of caste. (Activity 2.6 asks you to study matrimonial columns: if caste is mentioned often, has its role stayed the same or changed?)

7 Conclusion: What This Chapter Actually Argues

The colonial experience had lasting consequences for Indian culture, and many of them were unintended and paradoxical. Western ideas of modernity shaped how Indian nationalists imagined their own future. Some of them took a fresh look at traditional texts because of this. Others rejected those texts altogether. Western cultural forms found their place in spheres ranging from how families lived to the codes of conduct men, women and children were to follow, and to artistic expression. The ideas of equality and democracy made a huge impact too, visible in both the reform movements and the nationalist movement. The net result, in the book’s own words, was not just the adoption of Western ideas, but an active questioning and reinterpretation of tradition.