Introduction

The last chapter traced how colonial rule restructured Indian society — factories displacing fields, cities displacing villages, as the places where people lived and worked. But the changes colonialism set in motion were never purely structural; they reached into culture too, into everyday habits, values, fashions, even the way people carried themselves. Sociology draws a useful distinction here: social structure is the lasting arrangement of people into relationships that institutions define and enforce, while culture is the set of norms and behaviour-patterns a society has come to accept as established. Chapter 1's structural changes are the necessary backdrop for the cultural ones this chapter takes up.

Two related strands run through the chapter. One is deliberate — the conscious campaigns of 19th-century reformers and early-20th-century nationalists against practices that discriminated against women and against castes deemed 'lower'. The other is less a campaign than a slow drift: cultural change proceeding through four broad processes — sanskritisation, modernisation, secularisation, and westernisation. Of these, only sanskritisation predates colonial rule; the other three are best read as India's varied responses to what colonialism itself set going.