Q.What are the specificities of Indian culture and society, and how do they affect the pattern of change?

India's social life is centred on the group rather than the individual, and D.P. Mukerji argued this makes collective experience, not class conflict, the real driver of change. …

This question has two linked parts: what D.P. Mukerji identified as distinctive about Indian culture and society, and then how he connected that specificity to how change actually happens in India.

On the first part, D.P. argued that Indian history, economics and even philosophy had always been organised around social groups and 'socialised persons' rather than around separate individuals -- society, in his view, was 'over-developed' in India relative to less developed political and economic spheres. A direct consequence was that Indian social life was not built around individualistic, voluntaristic action in the western sense: an individual's desires were largely fixed by the pattern of their caste or social group, though he noted urban middle-class voluntarism was beginning to emerge as a new development worth studying in its own right.

On the second part, D.P. argued this specificity changed where the real engine of social change was located. Western social theory typically points to economic class conflict as the main driver of change; D.P. held this had been comparatively weak in India, 'smoothed and covered by caste traditions' that kept sharp class relations from forming. In its place, he identified personal experience -- anubhava -- as the genuinely revolutionary principle within Indian tradition (alongside shruti and smriti), and argued that in the Indian context this experience quickly became collective: generalised anubhava, or shared group experience, was what actually drove change, periodically unsettling high tradition (as in the bhakti movement and, similarly, the Sufi tradition within Indian Islam). The resulting pattern was cyclical rather than linear -- or …