BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Sociology 2025-26 - 75/25 Question Paper with Solutions

Social dominance is the position of a group or individual that exercises preponderant power, authority and influence over others in a society, so that its interests prevail and others must accommodate to them.

In Indian sociology the term is most closely associated with M. N. Srinivas's dominant caste: a caste is dominant in a locality when it combines numerical strength, ownership of land, political power, a ritual status high enough not to disqualify it, Western education and high occupations. It need not hold all six.

More generally, dominance may rest on wealth, numbers, office, knowledge or force, and it is distinguished from authority, which is power accepted as legitimate.

Societies are classified by their mode of subsistence, which is the standard sociological classification following Gerhard Lenski and Morgan:

1. Hunting and gathering societies: small, nomadic, minimal division of labour beyond age and sex, relatively egalitarian since there is no surplus to accumulate.
2. Pastoral societies: based on domesticated herds, nomadic or semi nomadic, producing the first durable surplus in the form of animals, and with it the first significant inequality.
3. Horticultural societies: small scale cultivation with hand tools, settled village life, and the beginnings of permanent property.
4. Agrarian societies: plough cultivation, large populations, cities, states, writing, and marked stratification. The traditional Indian village belongs here.
5. Industrial societies: mechanised production, urbanisation, the factory, the nuclear family, secondary groups and a class system.
6. Post industrial societies: Daniel Bell's term, dominated by services, information and knowledge rather than manufacture.

Pluralism is the principle and the practice by which many distinct groups coexist within one society, retaining their separate identities while sharing a common political and economic life. It is the opposite both of forced assimilation, which erases difference, and of segregation, which isolates it.

It carries three senses: cultural pluralism, the coexistence of many cultures, languages and religions; political pluralism, the theory that power is and should be dispersed among many competing groups rather than concentrated; and legal pluralism, the coexistence of more than one body of law in one jurisdiction, which in India means the personal laws alongside general statute.

The division of labour is the allocation of different tasks to different persons or groups in a society, so that each specialises rather than each performing every task.

Its forms are simple division by age and sex, found in every society; occupational specialisation; technical division within a single process, as on an assembly line; and territorial or regional specialisation.

Durkheim treated it as a moral rather than an economic fact: it is the source of organic solidarity, since specialisation makes each person dependent on many others. Marx treated it as the source of alienation, since the worker becomes a fragment of a process he neither controls nor comprehends. Adam Smith treated it as the source of increased productivity, illustrated by his pin factory.

A norm is a rule or standard of expected behaviour in a given situation.

An ideal norm is the rule as a society professes it: the publicly stated standard, taught and held up as right. Complete honesty in a tax return, absolute non violence, total abstention from dowry.

A practical or real norm is the standard people actually observe, which usually falls short of the ideal but is tolerated by the group: some understatement of income, the giving of gifts at a wedding, the small untruths of courtesy.

A gap between the two is normal in every society and is not by itself evidence of breakdown.

For full marks, cover: what the question of scope means, the two schools with their exponents and criticisms, a reasoned position, the subject matter that follows, the specialised branches, and the relation to the other social sciences.

The question. The scope of a subject is the range of phenomena it studies. Sociology's scope has been disputed since its foundation, and there are two schools.

1. The formalistic or specialistic school

Sociology is a pure, independent and specific science with a narrow subject matter: the forms of social relationships, abstracted from their content. Sociology should not attempt to study everything social, since the other social sciences already study the content; its distinctive object is the form.

• Georg Simmel, its founder: sociology studies the forms of social relationships, such as competition, subordination, superordination and the division of labour, which recur in many different contents. The same form, subordination, appears in an army, a family and a church.

• Emile Durkheim divided it into three: social morphology, the territorial and demographic base of society and its structure; social physiology, the specialised sociologies of religion, law, economy, morals and language; and general sociology, which formulates the general laws by synthesising the rest.
• Pitirim Sorokin: sociology studies the relationships between different classes of social phenomena, the relations between the social and the non social, and the general characteristics common to all classes of social phenomena.
• Morris Ginsberg divided it into social morphology, the study of population and social structure; social control, the study of the regulative institutions, law, morals, religion; social processes, the modes of interaction; and social pathology, the study of social problems and maladjustment.
• L. T. Hobhouse: sociology is a synthesis of the numerous social sciences.

Criticism. The field becomes so wide that sociology risks becoming a superficial survey of everything and a master of nothing, and the claim to synthesise other disciplines is resented by those disciplines.

Relation to other social sciences

History supplies the record and sociology generalises from it; history is particularising, sociology generalising. Political science studies the state and power, and political sociology studies their social basis. Economics studies production and distribution, and economic sociology studies the social relations within which they occur, of which the Jajmani system is the Indian example. Psychology studies the individual mind, and social psychology occupies the ground between. Anthropology studies culture and lent sociology its field methods. Law supplies the rules, and the sociology of law studies how they arise and how they actually work.

The classifications

1. Primary and secondary (Charles Horton Cooley). The basic classification, by the quality of the relationship.

A primary group is marked by intimate face to face association and cooperation: small, personal, enduring, spontaneous and an end in itself. Cooley named the family, the play group and the neighbourhood group of elders as practically universal, calling them the "nursery of human nature". A secondary group is large, impersonal, formal and contractual, entered for a specific purpose and therefore a means to an end.

2. In group and out group (W. G. Sumner). By identification. The in group is the "we" group, marked by loyalty and cooperation; the out group is the "they" group, viewed with indifference or hostility. The distinction generates ethnocentrism, the judging of other groups by the standards of one's own.

3. Formal and informal. By organisation. Formal groups have written rules, defined offices and prescribed procedure; informal groups arise spontaneously from personal liking, with no constitution.

9. Other schemes. Tonnies: Gemeinschaft, community based on natural will, kinship and tradition, against Gesellschaft, association based on rational will and contract, which is Cooley's distinction arrived at independently. Giddings: genetic groups, into which one is born, against congregate groups, which one enters by choice. Sorokin: vertical groups, which are ranked, against horizontal groups, which are not.

Significance

The classifications are not an exercise in tidiness. Each is built on a criterion that predicts something: the quality of the relationship predicts how control will be exercised; identification predicts prejudice; organisation predicts how decisions are made; and frame of reference predicts mobility. That is what makes them analytical tools rather than labels.

1. The functional theory (Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore)

Central claim. Stratification is universal and functionally necessary. Some positions in a society are functionally more important than others and require scarce talent and long, costly training. To induce the ablest people to undertake that training and to perform those duties conscientiously, society must attach unequal rewards to them. Inequality is therefore a device by which a society ensures its most important tasks are performed by its most qualified members.

Criticism (Melvin Tumin). It assumes the most highly rewarded positions are the most important, which is doubtful, since a sanitation worker is more functionally necessary than a film star. It ignores that access to training is itself unequal, so the pool of talent is never fully drawn on and most talent is never discovered. It cannot explain the inheritance of position. It sets rigid limits on the ambitions of those born low, distributes favourable self images unequally, and provides an ideological justification for existing inequality rather than an explanation of it.

• Class: economic position, determined by market situation, by what a person can offer in the market, and expressed in life chances.
• Status (stand): social honour and prestige, expressed in a distinct style of life and in commensality and connubium, that is in who eats with and marries whom. Status may be independent of wealth: an impoverished aristocrat retains status, a wealthy criminal does not acquire it.
• Party: organised power, the associations through which people pursue their interests, whether parties, unions or lobbies.

The three vary independently, which is the point of the theory.

Strength. It explains societies such as India where caste (status) and class do not coincide, and Weber himself treated caste as the clearest case anywhere of a status group carried to its extreme, closed by endogamy and ritual restriction.

Criticism. Descriptive rather than explanatory: it identifies the dimensions of inequality without explaining why any of them takes the shape it does, and it offers no account of change comparable to Marx's.

For India, Weber's framework is the most useful, because caste is a status group ranked by ritual purity rather than by income, which is why economic growth alone has not dissolved it and why a purely class analysis misses what makes it durable. Marx supplies the dynamics that Weber lacks, and Sorokin supplies the study of mobility. A satisfactory account of Indian stratification needs Weber for its structure and Marx for its dynamics.

• Durkheim: law is the visible index of social solidarity. Mechanical solidarity, based on likeness, produces repressive law, which punishes offences against the shared conscience. Organic solidarity, based on interdependence, produces restitutive law, which restores the injured party's position, as contract and tort do. The proportion of the two measures the type of society.
• Marx: law is part of the superstructure, determined by the economic base and serving the class that owns the means of production, presenting a particular interest as the general one.
• Weber: the type of law corresponds to the type of authority, moving from charismatic law finding through traditional customary law to formally rational law, in which decisions follow from general rules applied by a professional and systematic logic. Formal rationality is what makes law calculable, and calculability is what a modern economy requires.
• Sumner: "the mores can make anything right", and law lacking the support of the mores cannot easily be enforced.

B. Law as an instrument of social change

2. There is a functioning enforcement machinery and a real probability of sanction.
3. The rule is publicised and understood.
4. There is a beneficiary class able and willing to invoke it.
5. It is consistent with the constitutional order and with other laws.
6. It provides an accessible remedy, cheap and quick enough to be used.

(i) Communalism and its causes

Meaning. Communalism is the ideology that a religious community constitutes a distinct social and political interest, that this interest is opposed to that of other communities, and that loyalty to it overrides loyalty to the wider society. It is not religiosity; a deeply religious person need not be communal, and a communal politician need not be religious.

Its three stages, as Indian historians have described it: first, the belief that people of one religion share common secular interests; second, the belief that those interests are different from those of other communities; and third, the belief that they are incompatible and hostile, which is the stage at which violence becomes possible.

Its forms. Communal ideology; communal politics and mobilisation; communal riots; hate speech; economic and social boycott; and majoritarian and minority communalism, both of which exist.

8. Failure of the state: partisan policing, delay, and above all impunity after earlier violence.
9. Cultural and psychological factors: ethnocentrism and the in group and out group dynamic that Sumner described, which every group generates and communal ideology exploits.

(ii) Role of law and media as agencies of social control

Law as an agency of formal social control.

1. Constitutional guarantees: Articles 14, 15 and 16 on equality; Articles 25 to 28 on freedom of religion; Articles 29 and 30 on minority rights; Article 51A(e), the duty to promote harmony; and secularism as part of the basic structure, S. R. Bommai v. Union of India (1994), where the Court also upheld the dismissal of state governments that had failed to protect secular order.
2. Penal law: promoting enmity between groups, imputations prejudicial to national integration, outraging religious feelings and statements conducing to public mischief, formerly Sections 153A, 153B, 295A and 505 of the Indian Penal Code and now carried into the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023; and the provisions on unlawful assembly, rioting and common object.

Negatively, it can: spread rumour, which is the standing mechanism of riot escalation; frame incidents in communal terms, converting a crime into a community's act; carry hate speech and inflammatory content; and, through algorithmic recommendation on social platforms, create echo chambers in which hostility hardens without contradiction.

Regulation. Article 19(1)(a) with the restrictions permitted by Article 19(2); the Press Council norms; the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995; and the Information Technology Act, 2000, with the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021. Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) struck down Section 66A as unconstitutionally vague and remains the governing authority on online speech.

1. Before birth and in infancy: sex selective abortion and female infanticide, and the adverse child sex ratio, 919 girls per 1,000 boys in the 0 to 6 age group at the 2011 Census. Notably it is worse in several prosperous and literate districts, which shows the cause is norm rather than ignorance.
2. Health and nutrition: unequal food and health care within the household, very high anaemia prevalence, and delayed treatment for girls.
3. Education: dropout at puberty, associated with the absence of functioning toilets, and steering into "suitable" subjects.
4. Employment: occupational segregation, unequal pay, the glass ceiling, and low and falling female labour force participation even as female education rises.
5. Unpaid work: Indian women perform many times the unpaid domestic and care work men do, and it is not counted as work, producing the double burden.
6. Property: daughters routinely relinquish shares despite the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, and land is very rarely in a woman's name.
7. Marriage and family: dowry, child marriage, restricted choice of partner, and unequal decision making.

Its causes.

1. Patrilineal and patrilocal structure: the daughter leaves and joins another household, so she was historically given movable property instead of a share in land. Stridhan, the woman's own property, was the original institution; dowry is its corruption, because what began as her property became a transfer to her husband's family.
2. Hypergamy (anuloma), the preference for marrying a daughter upward, which requires a payment to compensate the higher family.
3. Economic dependence of women and their exclusion from inheritance in practice.
4. Prestige and status competition, since the scale of a wedding advertises the family's standing.
5. Commercialisation, with the groom's earning capacity and profession openly priced.
6. Consumerism, which has increased rather than reduced demand.
7. Social sanction: the practice is accepted by both families, which is why nobody complains.

Its consequences.

The legal response. The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, with Dowry Prohibition Officers and a list of gifts to be maintained under the rules; Sections 304B and 498A; the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, which includes dowry harassment within economic abuse and gives immediate civil relief; and the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, which attacks the root by giving daughters an equal share.

1. Agricultural productivity rose faster than he allowed. Mechanisation, chemical fertiliser, irrigation and, in India from the late 1960s, the Green Revolution with high yielding varieties of wheat and rice multiplied output per hectare. India moved from importing food grain to holding buffer stocks.
2. Fertility fell as societies developed. The demographic transition runs from high birth and death rates, through falling death rates and rapid growth, to falling birth rates and stabilisation. India's total fertility rate has fallen to around replacement level, which Malthus could not foresee because he could not foresee contraception, female education and urbanisation.
3. Trade and storage moved food from surplus regions to deficit ones.

3. Inequality in land ownership, leaving cultivators landless or with unviable holdings.
4. Failures of distribution and storage: grain rotting in godowns while people go hungry, leakage from the public distribution system, and poor rural transport.
5. Conflict and displacement, the largest single driver of acute famine conditions worldwide.
6. Natural disaster and climate shock: drought, flood, cyclone and pest.
7. Social discrimination, which is the Indian specific cause and must not be omitted: caste and gender discrimination in the distribution of food within the household and within the village. Women and girls eat last and least in many households, which is why female anaemia and child malnutrition persist in households that are not, by income, the poorest.
8. Hidden hunger, micronutrient deficiency alongside adequate calories, from a diet lacking diversity.
9. Poor sanitation and disease, which prevent absorption of nutrition even where food is eaten, and which explain much of India's stunting.
10. Policy failure: subsidy patterns favouring cereals over pulses and vegetables, and neglect of dryland agriculture.

(i) The negative effects

On relationships, which the question asks about directly.

1. Displacement of face to face interaction. Time spent online is time not spent with the people physically present, and the primary group, which Cooley identified as the "nursery of human nature", is the casualty. Families sitting together on separate screens is the commonest illustration.
2. Weakening of primary groups, and with them the informal social control that depends on close, continuous, face to face contact.
3. Weak ties displacing strong ties. A person may have hundreds of online connections and nobody to call in a crisis. Quantity of contact has risen while depth has fallen.

1. Misinformation and rumour, which on messaging platforms carry the credibility of the relative who forwarded them, and which have directly produced mob lynching.
2. Polarisation and echo chambers, since algorithms show people more of what they already accept.
3. Cyberbullying and harassment, which follows the victim home and disproportionately targets women.
4. Privacy and data exploitation, since the business model depends on collecting personal data.
5. Trial by media and the pronouncement of guilt before adjudication.

(ii) Remedial measures

Individual. Awareness of one's own usage, and the deliberate setting of limits; device free times and places, particularly at meals and before sleep; disabling non essential notifications, since the interruption is the mechanism of compulsion; and prioritising face to face contact.

Legal and regulatory. The Information Technology Act, 2000, with the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021, which impose due diligence and a three tier grievance mechanism; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, which requires verifiable parental consent for the data of children under 18 and prohibits tracking and targeted advertising directed at them; provisions on cyberstalking, obscenity and defamation; and Article 19(1)(a) with the reasonable restrictions permitted by Article 19(2). Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) remains the governing authority on online speech.

Social and community. Public awareness campaigns; de addiction and counselling services; workplace norms on out of hours contact; and the revival of shared physical spaces, sport, libraries and community activity, which supply what the platform imitates.

For full marks, cover: the definition and nature of social control, its purposes set out separately, the types with their means and agencies in full, the other classifications, the relation between informal and formal control, the conditions of effectiveness, and the theoretical accounts including the conflict critique.

Meaning and nature

Social control is the sum of the ways in which a society secures conformity to its norms and regulates the behaviour of its members.

Mannheim: "Social control is the sum of those methods by which a society tries to influence human behaviour to maintain a given order." E. A. Ross, who introduced the term, treated it as the means by which society secures the order without which social life is impossible. Ogburn and Nimkoff: the patterns of pressure which a society exerts to maintain order and established rules.

8. To secure the individual's own development. This is Durkheim's point and it is easily missed: regulation is a benefit to the person regulated, because human desires are naturally unlimited and only society can set a limit to them. A person without internalised restraint is at the mercy of his own impulses, and that condition, anomie, is one Durkheim connected with unhappiness and with suicide.
9. To bring about planned social change, since control includes the deliberate use of law to alter behaviour.

Types of social control

1. Informal social control

Definition. Unwritten, spontaneous, exercised chiefly by primary groups, and internalised through socialisation so that the person applies it to himself.

Means:

• Folkways: the customary, habitual ways of a group, such as dress, greeting and table manners. Breach brings mild disapproval; the offender is thought odd, not wicked.
• Mores: folkways regarded as essential to group welfare, carrying strong moral feeling. Breach brings severe disapproval and often punishment.

2. Formal social control

Definition. Deliberately created, written, and enforced by specialised agencies with defined penalties.

Means:

• Law, the principal instrument: general, definite, uniform, backed by the coercive power of the state, and enforceable against the powerful as well as the weak.
• Coercion, physical and non violent, the latter including strikes, boycotts and non cooperation.
• Codified rules of organisations: service rules, professional codes, university regulations.
• Education, formal in its organisation and largely informal in its effect.
• Propaganda and mass communication, deliberately used to shape attitudes.
• Administrative regulation and licensing, which controls conduct in advance rather than punishing it afterwards.

Agencies: the state, the legislature, the police, the courts, prisons and correctional services, the bureaucracy, the military, and formal organisations generally.

The relation between the two

Informal control precedes formal control historically and remains the more important, because an internalised norm requires no supervision. Formal control operates at the margin, on the minority in whom informal control has failed. Sumner's proposition, "the mores can make anything right", entails that a law lacking the support of the mores must supply the whole of the enforcement and usually cannot: prohibition, dowry prohibition and the abolition of untouchability have all struggled for exactly this reason. But the influence runs both ways: formal control also shapes the mores over long periods through its declaratory effect.

Conditions of effectiveness

Consistency between formal and informal norms; certainty of detection, which matters far more than severity; legitimacy, since a rule believed unjust is evaded; accessibility of the remedy; and the existence of a beneficiary willing to invoke it.

A note on the name. The paper prints "Karl Max". The thinker is Karl Marx, and the answer treats him as such.

For full marks, cover: what the division of labour is, then Marx's account in full with alienation and its causes, then Durkheim's account in full with the two solidarities, law, and the abnormal forms, then a direct point by point comparison, an assessment of each, and a conclusion.

The division of labour

The division of labour is the allocation of different tasks to different persons or groups, so that each specialises rather than each performing every task. Its forms are the simple division by age and sex, found everywhere; occupational specialisation; technical division within one process, as on an assembly line; and territorial specialisation.

Adam Smith had treated it purely economically, as the source of increased productivity, illustrated by his pin factory. Both Marx and Durkheim took it as a social rather than an economic fact, and reached opposite conclusions about it.

• From the act of production, which is imposed, external, monotonous and offers no satisfaction, so that the worker "is at home only when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home".
• From his species being, his distinctively human capacity for free, conscious, creative activity, which is reduced to a mere means of physical survival.
• From other people, who become competitors for work rather than fellow producers.

4. The worker becomes a fragment. Marx's most vivid claim is that the detailed division of labour cripples the worker: he is reduced to an appendage of the machine, exercising one faculty at the expense of all the others, and the more skilled the process becomes the less skill the individual needs.

5. Its economic function. The division of labour serves the extraction of surplus value: it raises productivity, cheapens the value of labour power, and increases the portion of the working day that is unpaid.

• Mechanical solidarity, in simple societies, rests on likeness. People do similar work and hold similar beliefs, and the binding force is a strong, extensive, rigid and religious collective conscience. Individuality is weak.
• Organic solidarity, in complex societies, rests on difference and interdependence. Specialisation makes each person dependent on many others he does not know and cannot replace. The collective conscience becomes weaker, more abstract and more secular, and its remaining core is the cult of the individual. Individuality is strong, and is produced by the division of labour rather than suppressed by it.

4. Law as the index. Durkheim measured solidarity through law. Mechanical solidarity produces repressive law, which punishes because the offence outrages the shared conscience; punishment's function is to reaffirm that conscience. Organic solidarity produces restitutive law, which restores the injured party's position, as contract, tort and commercial law do. The proportion of the two measures the type of society.

• The forced division of labour: people are allocated to positions by birth, wealth or coercion rather than by aptitude. Solidarity requires spontaneity, which means external inequality must be abolished; inherited wealth and hereditary status falsify the allocation and generate conflict.
• The inadequately coordinated division of labour, where functions are so poorly organised that effort is wasted and integration does not follow.

7. The remedy. Not the abolition of the division of labour, which Durkheim regarded as necessary and beneficial, but moral regulation: the development of professional ethics and of occupational associations to supply the rules that are missing.

C. Direct comparison

Assessment

Marx's strength is that he identifies who benefits and refuses to treat the arrangement as natural; his account of alienation remains the most powerful description of industrial work ever written, and it applies visibly to assembly line and call centre labour today. His weakness is economic determinism, the failure of his predictions of polarisation and revolution, and the fact that societies which abolished private property produced their own hierarchies and their own alienation, frequently worse.

Durkheim's strength is that he explains what actually holds complex societies together, and his distinction between the normal and the abnormal forms allows him to condemn exploitation without condemning specialisation. His forced division of labour is a serious argument for equality of opportunity. His weakness is that he treats conflict as pathology rather than as a structural feature, underestimates power, and offers a remedy, occupational associations, that looks inadequate to the problem he diagnosed.

For full marks, cover: the definition, the features one by one, the factors, then the four families of theory with exponents, claims and criticisms, a comparison, and a conclusion on how factors and theories relate.

Definition

Social change is a change in the structure and functioning of society: in its institutions, its patterns of social relationship, its norms and its values, over a period of time.

Kingsley Davis: "By social change is meant only such alterations as occur in social organisation, that is, the structure and functions of society." MacIver and Page confine it to changes in social relationships, distinguishing social change from cultural change. Gillin and Gillin: variations from accepted modes of life, whether due to alteration in geographical conditions, cultural equipment, composition of the population, ideologies or diffusion.

Features of social change

7. It is not always planned, and unplanned change is the larger part. Where it is planned, through legislation, policy and social movements, the outcome frequently differs from the intention, which is Merton's latent function applied to reform.
8. It is not the same as progress. "Change" is a neutral description; "progress" imports a standard by which the change is judged good. Industrialisation raised incomes and destroyed the artisan economy; asking who gained and who lost is the sociological question.
9. It is a community change, affecting the group and not merely individuals. A change in one person's circumstances is biography; a change in the pattern is social change.
10. It is comparative: it can be observed only by comparing two points in time or two societies.
11. It frequently meets resistance, particularly from those whose position the existing arrangement protects, and from vested interests.

2. Cyclical. Change is recurrent: rise, maturity, decline, repeat. Spengler, every culture an organism passing through birth, growth, maturity and decay; Toynbee, challenge and response, growth while a creative minority responds and decline when it becomes a merely dominant minority; Sorokin, the principle of immanent change and the oscillation between ideational, idealistic and sensate cultures; Pareto, the circulation of elites, history as "a graveyard of aristocracies".

Criticisms. Vague and hard to test; the organic analogy is misleading; fatalistic in Spengler; and they underplay real cumulative gains in knowledge and technology.

3. Functional or equilibrium. Parsons treated society as a system tending towards equilibrium. Change is a disturbance the system absorbs by adjusting its parts, proceeding by structural differentiation as institutions divide and specialise, so change is gradual, adaptive and orderly, and revolution is a pathology.

Criticism. Explains stability far better than change, and says nothing about whose interests the existing equilibrium serves.

No single theory accounts for all change. Evolutionism captures long term direction; cyclical theory accounts for decline; functionalism explains gradual adaptation; conflict theory explains revolutionary change and the role of interest. Most real changes need more than one, and the factors answer a different question from the theories: factors say what caused a particular change, theories say what shape change takes and where it comes from.

The changes in modern India

1. Untouchability abolished in law and much reduced in public life. Article 17 abolishes it and makes its practice an offence; the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, enforce it. Temple entry, access to wells, roads and schools are legally secured, and public defence of untouchability is no longer possible.

2. The link between caste and occupation has broken. New occupations created by industry, services and technology carry no traditional caste association, so anyone may enter them. This is the largest single change, and it is why information technology and modern services have been comparatively open.

3. Commensality restrictions have weakened, particularly in cities. The rules about who may eat with whom and accept food from whom cannot survive canteens, restaurants, trains and hostels.

4. Ritual hierarchy has lost its public authority. The idea that a person's worth depends on birth cannot be openly asserted, and the Brahmin's ritual pre eminence no longer translates into secular power in most localities.

What has NOT changed, which is the more important half

1. Endogamy. Inter caste marriages remain a small percentage of all marriages nationally, and matrimonial advertising is still organised by caste. This is decisive, because endogamy is the mechanism by which caste reproduces itself.

2. Residential segregation persists, in separate hamlets in villages and in discrimination in urban housing.

3. Atrocities have not declined, and the National Crime Records Bureau records tens of thousands of cases annually.

4. Manual scavenging survives, despite prohibition in 1993 and again in 2013, with deaths in septic tanks recorded every year.

5. Landlessness among Scheduled Castes remains the material base of their subordination in the village.

6. Caste in the private sector, which is now the larger employer and lies outside the reservation scheme.

7. Discrimination inside institutions, including in higher education, which is well documented.

5. Caste in the diaspora and online, in matrimonial platforms which reproduce caste categories with new efficiency.

Factors producing the changes

Industrialisation and urbanisation, which made purity rules unenforceable; modern education; transport, which destroyed the isolation on which local hierarchies depended; the Constitution and legislation; reservation; social and religious reform movements, from Bhakti through Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar; land reform, where it was implemented; adult franchise; the market, which is indifferent to the caste of a customer; and Westernisation in Srinivas's sense, which carried the value of equality.

Assessment

The honest summary is that caste has changed form rather than disappeared. Its ritual content has thinned considerably, particularly in cities: purity rules, commensality restrictions and occupational assignment have weakened or gone. Its matrimonial content is nearly intact. And it has acquired a new political life that the traditional system did not have. A prediction made in the 1950s, that modernisation would dissolve caste, has been falsified, and the reason is instructive: modernisation destroyed the local, vertical, ritual caste system and simultaneously created the conditions, mass politics and competition for state resources, in which a national, horizontal, political caste identity became useful.

Causes. Individual differences of interest and attitude; differences of culture, religion, language and caste; conflict of interests, especially economic; rapid social change, producing generational and group gaps; and inequality in the distribution of wealth, status and power.

Forms. Personal; group; class; racial; caste; communal or religious; linguistic and regional; political; industrial; and international. Gillin and Gillin add corporate against personal conflict; it is further classed as direct and indirect, latent and manifest, and, in Coser's terms, realistic, over a genuine issue, against non realistic, which serves only to release tension.

Functions. It strengthens solidarity within each group; clarifies issues and boundaries; produces social change no other process delivers; releases tension; and leads to accommodation and a new equilibrium. Simmel treated conflict as a form of sociation, and Coser showed that a society permitting conflict to be expressed is more stable than one suppressing it.

Dysfunctions. Destruction of life and property; lasting hatred between groups; diversion of resources; damage to personality; and disintegration of the group.

3. The protection of minorities. In a plural society, majorities can impose their norms by weight of numbers. Control must therefore include restraints on the majority, which is what a constitutional bill of rights is: Articles 25 to 30 exist to control the majority, not the minority.

4. Maintenance of national integration, against communalism, casteism, linguistic chauvinism and regionalism.

5. Regulation of competition for scarce resources, jobs, land, water between states, and reservation benefits, which is where inter group conflict actually originates.

6. Ensuring equality where custom prescribes inequality. Caste and gender hierarchy are enforced by the informal control of communities themselves, so the formal system must override informal control rather than support it. This is the hardest case, and Article 17 and Shakti Vahini are its examples.

7. Managing rapid social change and the anomie it produces, since India is changing faster than its norms can adjust.

8. Providing a common framework within which difference can be maintained, which is the definition of pluralism: control that permits diversity rather than eliminating it.

Informal control. The family, the neighbourhood, religious leadership that refuses to sanction violence, peace and mohalla committees, education, media, and civil society associations with mixed membership.

Conclusion

A multicultural society cannot rely on shared mores, because it does not have a single set of them. It must therefore be held together by a common framework of formal rules that everyone accepts even though they do not share the same values, and by the deliberate cultivation of cross cutting institutions that give people from different communities a shared interest. The Indian Constitution is exactly such a framework, and its success is measured not by the absence of conflict, which no society achieves, but by how much conflict is conducted through courts, elections and negotiation rather than through violence.