Social Order and Social Change in Rural Areas

Rural social order tends to be sturdier and more resistant to change than urban social order, and this follows fairly directly from the objective conditions of village life. Because villages are small, relationships tend to be personal -- most members recognise one another by sight -- and traditional institutions such as caste, religion, and custom retain a stronger grip than they typically do in towns and cities. This closeness and lack of anonymity actually works against dissent: people who challenge the existing order can be easily identified and punished by dominant local groups, who also tend to control most of the available employment and resources, leaving the poor with little choice but to depend on them. The small scale of a village also makes it difficult to organise or mobilise large numbers of people without the effort being noticed and suppressed early. Together, these conditions mean that shifts in local power structures, once established, are slow and difficult to dislodge.

Other kinds of change have also historically been slower to reach villages simply because they were less connected to the wider world -- though improvements in communication (telephone, television) and transport (roads, railways) have narrowed this gap considerably in recent decades, so that few villages today remain genuinely isolated. Agrarian change, however, has always had an outsized and fairly immediate impact on rural society, precisely because land and agriculture are central to rural livelihoods. India's post-independence land reforms, for instance, transferred proprietary rights away from absentee landlords toward the intermediate castes who were actually managing cultivation -- groups that M.N. Srinivas termed the "dominant castes," who subsequently gained substantial economic and, through their electoral weight, political power in many regions. More recently, these dominant castes have themselves faced pressure from the assertive mobilisation of castes below them in the social hierarchy, producing significant social upheaval in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. …