Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. What is a social movement, in the book’s own sense?
Answer: A social movement is sustained collective action over time, often directed against the state, marked by some degree of organisation, with shared objectives and ideologies among participants.
Q. Name one counter movement mentioned against Raja Rammohun Roy’s campaign against sati.
Answer: The Dharma Sabha, formed by sati’s defenders, who petitioned the British not to legislate against sati.
Q. Who wrote Unquiet Woods, the book about the Chipko Movement?
Answer: Ramachandra Guha.
Q. Name the cooperative organisation that took up the villagers’ cause in the Chipko Movement.
Answer: The Dashauli Gram Swaraja Sangh (DGSS), based in Chamoli district.
Q. In which year was the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha founded?
Answer: 1929.
Q. Who established India’s first trade union, and in which city?
Answer: B.P. Wadia, in Madras, in April 1918.
Q. What does the word ‘Dalit’ mean, as commonly used across Indian languages?
Answer: Poor and oppressed persons.
Q. In which year was Jharkhand carved out of south Bihar?
Answer: 2000.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. Distinguish briefly between social change and a social movement.
Answer: Social change is continuous and ongoing, the sum total of countless individual and collective actions across time and space. A social movement, by contrast, is directed towards specific goals and involves long, continuous, organised social effort by people towards those goals.
Q. Give two examples of counter movements mentioned in the chapter.
Answer: (1) The Dharma Sabha, formed to defend sati against Raja Rammohun Roy’s reform campaign. (2) Social boycott of reformers who campaigned for widow remarriage. (Also acceptable: upper-caste families withdrawing children when lower-caste children enrolled in schools, or counter movements opposing reservation in education.)
Q. What did E. P. Thompson’s research show about the ‘crowd’ and the ‘mob’?
Answer: Thompson showed that the crowd and the mob were not anarchic hooligans out to destroy society; they had their own ‘moral economy’, a shared understanding of right and wrong that informed their actions, and had good reasons to protest against deprivation.
Q. What is meant by a movement becoming a ‘social movement organisation’?
Answer: It is when a movement moves from a phase of mass mobilisation and collective protest towards becoming more institutionalised, developing a settled organisational structure rather than remaining a wave of spontaneous mobilisation.
Q. What were the ‘red’ and ‘green’ issues in the Chipko Movement?
Answer: The ‘red’ issue was the economic conflict between villagers’ subsistence economy (dependent on the forest for firewood, fodder and daily necessities) and the government’s profit economy (wanting to sell timber). The ‘green’ issue was ecological sustainability: cutting down natural forests had resulted in devastating floods and landslides in the region.
Q. What did the Bardoli Satyagraha (1928) and the Champaran Satyagraha (1917-18) have in common?
Answer: Both were satyagrahas under Gandhi’s leadership linked to the freedom movement: Bardoli was a ‘non-tax’ campaign refusing to pay land revenue, part of the non-cooperation movement, while Champaran was directed against indigo plantations; both partially linked peasant grievances to the independence movement.
Q. What ideological groups made up the AITUC when it was formed in 1920?
Answer: The AITUC was a broad-based organisation: communists led by S.A. Dange and M.N. Roy, moderates led by M. Joshi and V.V. Giri, and nationalists including Lala Lajpat Rai and Jawaharlal Nehru.
Q. Why is the Dalit movement called ‘a struggle to be touched’?
Answer: Because it is fundamentally a struggle against the stigma of untouchability, for recognition as fellow human beings, self-confidence and self-determination, not just against economic exploitation or political oppression alone.
Q. What was the ‘horizontal stretch’ mentioned in the chapter’s discussion of Backward Class movements?
Answer: Because the colonial state distributed patronage on the basis of caste, similarly-placed caste groups were influenced to unite for social and political identity in institutional life, forming what the book calls a ‘horizontal stretch’ across caste lines.
3 4-Mark Questions
Q. Explain the three types of social movements with one example each.
Answer: Redemptive (transformatory) movements aim to change the personal consciousness and actions of individual members; the Ezhava community in Kerala, led by Narayana Guru, is the example. Reformist movements aim to change existing social/political arrangements through gradual, incremental steps; the 1960s reorganisation of Indian states by language, and the Right to Information campaign, are the book’s examples. Revolutionary movements attempt to radically transform social relations, often by capturing state power; the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the Naxalite movement in India are given as examples. Most real movements actually mix all three, and a movement’s orientation can shift over its life, sometimes moving towards a more institutionalised ‘social movement organisation’.
Q. How do old and new social movements differ, according to the chapter?
Answer: Old social movements, such as working-class movements in the capitalist West, saw the reorganisation of power relations as a central goal and worked within the frame of political parties, such as the Indian National Congress leading the Indian National Movement. New social movements are not about redistributing power but about quality-of-life issues such as a clean environment; they are not organised along class lines alone, often uniting participants across class boundaries (e.g. the women’s movement includes both urban middle-class feminists and poor peasant women), and are frequently international in scope, working with old movements in new alliances such as the World Social Forum.
Q. Describe the Reni forest episode of the Chipko Movement.
Answer: Despite early protests, the government went ahead with its yearly forest auction in November, and the Reni forest was one plot due for felling. Contractors’ men travelling from Joshimath towards Reni were spotted by a small girl, who ran to alert Gaura Devi, head of the village’s Mahila Mandal. Gaura Devi mobilised the other housewives and led them to the forest, where their pleas to the labourers were first met with abuse and threats; when the women refused to budge, the men were eventually forced to retire, saving the forest from felling.
Q. Trace the growth of trade unionism in India from 1918 to 1947, using the book’s own dates.
Answer: The first trade union was established in April 1918 in Madras by B.P. Wadia; the same year, Gandhi founded the Textile Labour Association. In 1920, the broad-based All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) was formed in Bombay, bringing together communists, moderates and nationalists. In British rule’s last years, communists gained considerable control over the AITUC. In May 1947 the Indian National Congress chose to form another union, the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), after which the AITUC split further along political-party lines, and regional parties began forming their own unions from the late 1960s.
Q. Why does Box 8.7 conclude that the Dalit movement has been, on the whole, a reformist movement?
Answer: The anti-caste movement had characteristics of all three types under Jotiba Phule’s inspiration, the non-Brahmin movements, and Dr. Ambedkar’s leadership, and the post-Ambedkar movement had revolutionary practice, providing alternative ways of living. But on the whole, the box concludes it has been a reformist movement: it mobilised along caste lines but made only half-hearted efforts to destroy caste itself; it achieved some real but limited change, with gains especially for educated Dalits, but failed to transform society enough to lift the general mass out of what is still among the most excruciating poverty in the world.
Q. What issues did the leaders of the Jharkhand movement agitate against?
Answer: They agitated against: (1) acquisition of land for large irrigation projects and firing ranges; (2) survey and settlement operations being held up and camps closed down; (3) the collection of loans, rent and cooperative dues, which villagers resisted; and (4) the nationalisation of forest produce, which they boycotted.
Q. What explanations does the chapter give for the apparent lull in the women’s movement after 1947?
Answer: One explanation is that many women activists who had been part of the nationalist movement got drawn into nation-building work after independence instead of continuing an autonomous women’s movement. Another explanation points to the trauma of Partition as responsible for the lull. The movement was then renewed in the mid-1970s, in what some call its ‘second phase’, with changes in both organisational strategy and ideology.
4 6-Mark Questions
Q. Distinguish between peasant movements and New Farmers’ Movements, with examples.
Answer: Peasant movements go back to pre-colonial days. Between 1858 and 1914 they tended to be localised, disjointed and tied to particular grievances, such as the Bengal indigo revolt (1859-62) and the Deccan riots (1875) against moneylenders; some were later partially linked to the independence movement (Champaran 1917-18, Bardoli 1928), and peasant organisations arose (Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha 1929, All India Kisan Sabha 1936). At the time of Independence came the two most classical cases, Tebhaga (1946-47) and Telangana (1946-51). New Farmers’ Movements, by contrast, began in the 1970s in Punjab and Tamil Nadu; they were regionally organised and non-party, involved ‘farmers’ (market-involved as both producers and purchasers) rather than ‘peasants’, and had a strongly anti-state, anti-urban ideology centred on price and procurement issues rather than land-revenue or feudal grievances. Their methods included blocking roads and railways and refusing politicians and bureaucrats entry to villages. Over time, farmers’ movements broadened to include environment and women’s issues, so they can be seen as part of the worldwide ‘new social movements’, unlike the class-based old peasant movements.
Q. Discuss the Chipko Movement as an example of how ecological movements often combine economic and other issues.
Answer: The Chipko Movement, described by Ramachandra Guha in Unquiet Woods, saw villagers, including large numbers of women, hug trees in the Himalayan foothills to stop government contractors from felling oak and rhododendron forests. At stake was the economic ‘red’ issue: villagers’ subsistence economy (dependent on the forest for firewood, fodder and daily necessities) versus the government’s profit economy, which wanted to sell timber. Alongside this was the ecological ‘green’ issue: cutting down natural forests had resulted in devastating floods and landslides in the region. The 1970 Alaknanda valley flood, which an unusually heavy monsoon precipitated, inundated 100 square kilometres, washed away 6 bridges and 10 km of road, collapsed 366 houses and destroyed 500 acres of paddy; after it, villagers began to perceive the links between deforestation, landslides and floods. The movement also expressed a third, political dimension: hill villagers’ resentment of a distant plains-based government seen as indifferent to their concerns. This shows how an ecological movement can carry economic, ecological and political-representation issues together, exactly as the chapter argues new social movements often combine identity, environment and inequality concerns rather than a single class-based demand.
Q. Describe the Dalit movement’s meaning, examples and the book’s own verdict on its achievements.
Answer: The word ‘Dalit’ means poor and oppressed persons, first used in this political sense by neo-Buddhist followers of Babasaheb Ambedkar in the early 1970s, denying pollution, karma and justified caste hierarchy. There has never been one single, unified Dalit movement; different movements around the country have highlighted different issues, including the Satnami Movement (Chamars, Chhattisgarh plains, eastern MP), the Adi Dharma Movement (Punjab), the Mahar Movement (Maharashtra), mobilisation among the Jatavas of Agra, and the Anti-Brahman Movement in south India, all sharing a common quest for equality, self-dignity and the eradication of untouchability. Box 8.7 traces the anti-caste movement from Jotiba Phule’s 19th-century inspiration through the non-Brahmin movements of the 1920s to Dr. Ambedkar’s leadership, and concludes that despite having revolutionary and redemptive elements, the movement has, on the whole, been reformist: it achieved real but limited change, especially for educated Dalits, but failed to lift the wider mass out of severe poverty or destroy caste itself.
Q. Discuss the growth of the women’s movement in India from the early 20th century to its ‘second phase’.
Answer: The early 20th century saw the growth of national and local women’s organisations: the Women’s India Association (1917), the National Council for Women in India (1925), and the All India Women’s Conference (1926). The AIWC began believing ‘women’s welfare’ and ‘politics’ were mutually exclusive, but a later Presidential address asked, ‘Can the Indian man or woman be free if India be a slave?’, showing this had changed. Women also participated in agrarian struggles alongside men, such as the Tebhaga movement, the Telangana armed struggle, and the Warli tribal revolt against bondage. After 1947, the movement saw a lull, explained either by activists moving into nation-building work or by the trauma of Partition, before its mid-1970s renewal, called by some its ‘second phase’, bringing new organisational strategies and a focus on new issues such as violence against women, alongside older concerns like land rights and employment. The chapter stresses that not all women face the same kind or level of disadvantage, and that a gender-just society, supported by efforts like the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana, rests on the idea that injustices of all kinds have to end, so that both men and women are free from constraining dominant gender identities.
5 Case Studies
(A) 1 mark Based on the chapter’s own definition, is what Meera’s neighbours are doing (so far) already a social movement? Why or why not?
Answer: Not yet fully, on the book’s own definition: a social movement needs sustained collective action over time with some degree of organisation, leadership and shared objectives. Meera’s neighbours are only beginning to hold meetings and talk about forming a committee, which is the early, mobilising stage the chapter describes, not yet a fully organised, sustained movement.
(B) 2 marks Using the chapter’s own vocabulary, name the two kinds of issues (like those raised in the Chipko Movement) that Meera’s village’s opposition to the dam combines.
Answer: The economic (‘red’) issue of villagers’ subsistence, since the dam will displace families from land and forest resources they depend on for firewood and fodder, and the ecological (‘green’) issue of losing forest and natural resources to the dam’s reservoir, exactly the kind of ‘red’ and ‘green’ issues the chapter says were interlinked in the Chipko Movement.
(C) 3 marks If Meera’s village’s protest becomes a sustained movement, would it be closer to the chapter’s ‘old’ or ‘new’ social movements? Explain with reference to the chapter’s own criteria.
Answer: It would be a mix of both, by the chapter’s own criteria. The displacement, land and compensation demands fit the ‘old’ pattern of contesting the state over land and resources, while the forest and quality-of-life concerns fit the ‘new’ pattern. The chapter itself says that in India the line between old and new movements blurs, and that questions of social inequality can occur alongside other, equally important issues. So a strong answer calls it mixed and says which strand dominates: if the protest centres on the environment and quality of life, it is closer to ‘new’; if it centres on land and compensation, closer to ‘old’.
(D) 4 marks Using the Chipko Movement’s own history as a model, suggest what forms of protest and organisation Meera’s village could adopt, and explain why each might work.
Answer: Following Chipko’s example, villagers could form a local organisation (like the Dashauli Gram Swaraja Sangh) to take up their cause formally, giving the protest leadership and structure rather than leaving it spontaneous. They could use a distinctive, symbolic mode of protest, such as physically stopping the felling, as the book’s villagers did by hugging the trees, which draws attention and makes the human cost visible. Mobilising women specifically, as Gaura Devi did with the Mahila Mandal, could be effective: the book notes that large numbers of women took part in Chipko, and at Reni the women acted quickly and refused to budge. Finally, framing the protest in both economic and ecological terms, as Chipko did, would build a broader coalition than an appeal on a single issue alone, since it invites both directly displaced families and those simply concerned about the forest’s ecological value to join the same movement.