Q.What are some features of social order in rural areas?

Village social order has features that make it distinct from urban order and generally hard to change. …

Rural social order has several distinctive features that make it different from — and generally more resistant to change than — urban social order. First, because villages are small, relationships tend to be personalised: most members know each other by sight, meaning there is little anonymity. Second, traditional institutions — caste, religion, and customary social practice — remain comparatively strong in villages, giving the existing social order deep cultural roots. Third, this lack of anonymity itself works to suppress dissent, since people who challenge the existing order can be easily identified and punished by the dominant sections of village society. Fourth, dominant groups in villages typically control most of the available employment and resources, which makes subordinate groups economically dependent on them and unable to easily organise resistance; and because villages have a small population, it is also difficult to mobilise large numbers of people without the effort being quickly noticed and suppressed. Fifth, land relations are central to rural social order: post-independence land reforms transferred effective control over land to intermediate castes actually managing cultivation — the group M.N. Srinivas termed 'dominant castes' — who then became locally powerful both economically and politically, a power structure now itself being contested by castes below them in states like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. …