BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Sociology 2024-25 - ATKT 60/40 Question Paper with Solutions

A primary group, in Charles Horton Cooley's term, is a group characterised by intimate face to face association and cooperation, primary chiefly in being fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual.

Its characteristics are small size; face to face contact; intimacy and personal knowledge of one another; permanence; a community of interest; spontaneity and informality; and relationships that are ends in themselves rather than means to an end.

Cooley named three he held to be practically universal: the family, the play group of children, and the neighbourhood or community group of elders. He called them the "nursery of human nature".

Two differences, stated fully:

1. Basis of membership. Caste is ascribed at birth and cannot be changed by any effort of the individual; a person is born into a caste and dies in it. Class is largely achieved, determined by wealth, occupation and education, and a person's class position can change within his lifetime.
2. Openness and mobility. Caste is a closed system: marriage is endogamous by rule, occupation was traditionally hereditary, and movement between castes is not possible for an individual. Class is a relatively open system: there is no rule against marrying across classes or entering any occupation, and social mobility upward and downward is a normal feature of it.

A third, if a further point is wanted: caste is ranked by ritual purity and pollution, and legitimated by religious doctrine; class is ranked by wealth and market position, and legitimated by the ideology of merit.

Sociology of law is the branch of sociology that studies law as a social institution: how law arises out of society, how it actually operates as against how it reads on paper, and how it shapes and is shaped by social change.

It asks questions the law books do not: who actually obtains the benefit of a right, why a validly enacted statute is widely disobeyed, how custom hardens into law, and under what conditions law can be used as an instrument of planned social change.

Its founding figures are Montesquieu; Durkheim, who read the movement from repressive to restitutive law as an index of solidarity; Weber, who traced the rise of formally rational law; Marx, who treated law as superstructure serving the dominant class; Savigny, for whom law expresses the Volksgeist; and Roscoe Pound, who described law as social engineering.

A community is a group of people who live together in a definite locality and share a common way of life, with a consciousness of belonging together that is not confined to any single interest.

MacIver and Page define it as "any area of common life, village, or town, or district, or country, or even wider area", and identify its two essential elements:

1. Locality, a definite territorial base; and
2. Community sentiment, a "we feeling", a sense of belonging, common living and interdependence.

A village, a tribe, a town or a city is a community. It differs from an association, which is deliberately organised for a single specific purpose.

Status is the position a person occupies in a social system, carrying rights, duties and a place in the scale of prestige. Role is the behaviour expected of the person occupying that status.

Linton's formulation is the standard one: "A role is the dynamic aspect of a status. When the individual puts the rights and duties which constitute the status into effect, he is performing a role."

Status is what a person is; role is what a person does. The two are inseparable.

Status is ascribed, assigned at birth, or achieved, earned by effort, and a master status is the one that dominates all others in how a person is perceived.

For full marks, cover: whose concept it is, the definition, the attributes of dominance, examples, how the concept changed the study of caste, its relation to Sanskritisation, its criticisms, and its contemporary significance.

Whose concept. M. N. Srinivas introduced dominant caste in his study of Rampura village in Mysore, developing it in The Dominant Caste and Other Essays. It is the most influential concept produced by Indian sociology.

Definition. A caste is dominant in a locality when it wields preponderant economic and political power there, whatever its position in the classical ritual hierarchy. Srinivas: a caste is dominant when it preponderates numerically over the other castes, and when it also wields preponderant economic and political power.

The attributes of dominance. Srinivas listed six:

1. Numerical strength, which is decisive once adult franchise exists.
2. Economic power, above all ownership of land, which in a village economy is the source of everyone else's dependence.

What the concept changed. Before Srinivas, caste was studied through the classical varna scheme, which places Brahmins at the top everywhere. Field work showed that in most villages the caste that actually decided matters was not the Brahmin but a land owning middle caste, frequently of shudra varna, which had numbers and land. The dominant caste concept made it possible to describe local power accurately instead of reading it off a textual hierarchy, and it separated ritual rank from secular power, which is the essential move.

Functions of the dominant caste in the village. Settlement of disputes through its panchayat; control of employment and of credit; command of the votes of dependent castes; determination of who may use common resources; and, in Srinivas's account, acting as the reference group for the castes below it, so that it is the dominant caste's practices rather than the Brahmin's that are imitated.

Criticisms. The attributes may be distributed among several castes, in which case the concept does not identify anyone. It is local, so a caste dominant in one district may be nowhere in the next. It underplays conflict, presenting dominance as a fact rather than as a relation of exploitation. It is less applicable in urban settings, where land is not the source of power. And critics argue that it obscures the class dimension by treating land ownership as a caste attribute.

For full marks, cover: whose concept it is, the definition, the levels at which it operates, its agencies, its effects, its distinction from Sanskritisation and from modernisation, its unevenness, its criticisms, and its relation to law.

Whose concept. M. N. Srinivas coined Westernisation alongside Sanskritisation in his study of the Coorgs of south India, to describe two different processes of change that were occurring simultaneously and pulling in opposite directions.

Definition. Westernisation is "the changes brought about in Indian society and culture as a result of over 150 years of British rule, and the term subsumes changes occurring at different levels: technology, institutions, ideology and values."

The levels at which it operates.

1. Technology: railways, the telegraph, printing, industry, modern medicine, electricity.
2. Institutions: the modern state, a codified legal system, courts, the bureaucracy, universities, the press, political parties, the army.

Distinction from Sanskritisation. This is the point of the concept and must be stated sharply. Sanskritisation is a lower caste's adoption of the practices of a higher one in order to claim a better position: it changes a group's place within the hierarchy and leaves the hierarchy standing. Westernisation introduces values, above all equality, that are incompatible with hierarchy itself. Sanskritisation is positional; Westernisation is structural.

Distinction from modernisation. Modernisation is the broader movement towards industry, urban life, science, achievement based status and rational administration. It is not the same as Westernisation: Japan modernised without Westernising culturally. Treating the two as identical is the commonest error in this topic.

Its unevenness. Westernisation was selective, not wholesale. Indians adopted Western technology, education and institutional forms far more readily than Western kinship, marriage or religion. The same person may argue a constitutional case in English in the morning and observe caste endogamy in arranging a marriage in the evening. Srinivas also noted that Westernisation was more thorough among the upper castes, who had access to the new education, which allowed them to consolidate their advantage in the new order as well as the old.

For full marks, cover: whose concept it is, the definition, the types, the functions, related concepts including relative deprivation and anticipatory socialisation, applications with the Indian case, the criticisms, and the significance.

Whose concept. The term was coined by Herbert Hyman in 1942 and developed systematically by Robert K. Merton in Social Theory and Social Structure, drawing on the wartime study The American Soldier.

Definition. A reference group is a group whose standards, values and norms a person adopts as a frame of reference for evaluating himself and guiding his conduct, whether or not he belongs to it.

The essential feature is that reference and membership are different things. A person may belong to a group without referring to it, and may refer to a group he does not belong to and may never join.

Types.

1. Membership reference group: one the person belongs to and takes his standards from.

2. Comparative function: it supplies the benchmark for self evaluation.
3. Anticipatory socialisation: a person who aspires to join a group begins to adopt its ways in advance, which both prepares him for entry and makes acceptance more likely. Merton showed that this predicts who will actually rise.

Related concepts.

• Relative deprivation, from The American Soldier and developed by Merton and by W. G. Runciman: a person's sense of deprivation depends not on his absolute condition but on comparison with his reference group. The classic finding was that soldiers in units with high promotion rates were more dissatisfied about promotion than those in units with low rates, because their reference group made their own progress look poor. This explains why rising prosperity can produce increasing discontent, and why grievance does not track poverty in any simple way.
• The relative deprivation theory of social movements: movements arise not among the most deprived but among those whose expectations have risen faster than their conditions. This is a better predictor of unrest than absolute misery.

For full marks, cover: the meaning of social control and the place of law in it, the features that make law effective, the mechanisms by which it controls, the agencies, its advantages over informal control, its limits, the conditions of its success, and the theoretical accounts.

Social control is the sum of the ways in which a society secures conformity to its norms. It is exercised informally, through folkways, mores, custom, religion, praise, ridicule, gossip and ostracism, and formally, through deliberately created written rules enforced by specialised agencies. Law is the principal instrument of formal social control.

Definition of law for this purpose. Law is a body of general rules enacted or recognised by the state, applicable to all, administered by specialised agencies and backed by organised sanction.

Features that make law effective as a means of control.

1. Definite and written, so that what is required is knowable in advance, unlike custom which is uncertain at its edges.

• Regulation and licensing, controlling conduct in advance rather than punishing it afterwards.
• Declaration and education. A statute publicly states what the society treats as wrong, and over a generation that statement enters the mores. This is the most underrated mechanism.

Agencies. The legislature, which makes the rules; the police, which detect and prevent; the courts, which adjudicate; prisons and correctional services, which execute; and administrative agencies and tribunals, which regulate.

Advantages of law over informal control. It works among strangers, where gossip and ostracism cannot reach; it is precise and its limits are known; it is enforceable against the powerful; it can be changed deliberately; and it is reviewable, since a decision can be appealed, which no informal sanction can be.

Limits of law as a means of control.

1. It cannot work against the mores. Sumner: "the mores can make anything right". A statute contradicting the settled custom of a large part of the population must supply the whole of the enforcement, and it cannot.
2. It is expensive, slow and always incomplete. There can never be a policeman for every citizen.

Theoretical accounts. Durkheim: law is the visible index of solidarity, moving from repressive to restitutive as societies differentiate. Marx: law is superstructure, an instrument by which a dominant class presents its interest as the general interest. Weber: the modern legal order is formally rational, deciding by general rules through a professional logic, which is what makes it calculable. Roscoe Pound: law is social engineering, balancing competing interests to satisfy the maximum with the minimum of friction and waste. Savigny: law expresses the Volksgeist and cannot be made deliberately.

(i) The traditional joint family structure in India

Definition. The joint or extended family is a household in which several generations and collateral relatives live together, sharing a common residence, a common kitchen and common property, and subject to a single head.

Iravati Karve's classical definition is the one to quote: a joint family is "a group of people who generally live under one roof, who eat food cooked at one hearth, who hold property in common, who participate in common family worship and who are related to each other as some particular type of kindred."

Its essential features.

1. Common residence, under one roof or in a single homestead.
2. Common kitchen, food cooked at one hearth, which is the practical test of jointness.

Its legal recognition. The Hindu Undivided Family and the Mitakshara coparcenary, in which sons acquired an interest in ancestral property by birth. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, made daughters coparceners by birth on the same footing as sons, confirmed as a birth right independent of the father's survival in Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020).

Its merits. Economic security for every member, including the aged, the widowed, the ill and the unemployed; efficient use of pooled labour on a landholding; care of children and the aged without external provision; transmission of skills and culture; social control through the constant presence of elders; and insurance against every misfortune, in a society with no state provision.

Its demerits. Suppression of individual initiative and choice; unequal burden, since the earner supports the idle; the subordinate and often oppressive position of the daughter in law; quarrels between women of the household, which Indian literature treats as proverbial; discouragement of savings and enterprise, since the fruits are shared; and the obstruction of individual mobility, since a member cannot move where the work is.

(ii) Factors that have changed the structure of the family

7. Legislation, which gave individuals rights against the family: the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, admitting divorce; the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, and its 2005 amendment; the Special Marriage Act, 1954; and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, with its right of residence.
8. Decline of agriculture as the principal livelihood. This is the deepest cause. The joint family was an efficient arrangement for working an undivided landholding; salaried employment is individual and portable, and removes the reason for jointness.
9. The state and the market taking over the family's functions: education by schools, health by hospitals, protection by the police, insurance and pensions by the state and the market, recreation by a leisure industry.
10. Westernisation in Srinivas's sense, transmitting values of equality and individual choice.
11. Transport and communication, which make migration possible without total severance, so that a family can be dispersed and still function.
12. Family planning and falling fertility, which reduce household size directly.

(ii) Enumerate some sustainable solutions to bring ecological balance.

Urbanisation is the process by which an increasing proportion of a population comes to live in towns and cities, accompanied by the spread of urban ways of life. India's urban population was about 31 per cent at the 2011 Census and is projected to approach 40 per cent by 2030, which on the figure given in the question means roughly 600 million people.

(i) Impact of urbanisation on the environment

1. Air pollution. Vehicle emissions, construction dust, industrial discharge, waste burning and, in the northern plains, crop residue burning. Several Indian cities appear consistently among the most polluted in the world, and the health cost, in respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease and reduced life expectancy, falls hardest on those who work outdoors.

6. Urban heat island effect. Concrete, asphalt and glass absorb and re radiate heat, so city temperatures exceed the surrounding countryside by several degrees, which in turn raises energy demand for cooling and worsens the emissions that caused it.

7. Noise and light pollution, with measurable effects on health and on urban wildlife.

8. Land degradation and slum settlement. Because affordable housing is not supplied, a large part of the urban population lives in settlements on marginal land, along drains, on floodplains and beside landfills, without sanitation, which is simultaneously an environmental problem and a social injustice.

9. Energy consumption and emissions, since cities consume a disproportionate share of energy and generate a disproportionate share of greenhouse gases.

10. Pressure on the rural hinterland, for water, sand, aggregate, food and waste disposal, so that the environmental cost of a city is exported to the region around it.

(ii) Sustainable solutions to bring ecological balance

1. Planning and land use.

4. Waste. Segregation at source; composting of wet waste, which is more than half of Indian municipal waste; recycling and extended producer responsibility, so that manufacturers bear the cost of disposal; waste to energy where feasible; remediation of legacy landfills; and the Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016, and the ban on identified single use plastics.

5. Energy and buildings. Rooftop solar; energy efficiency standards through the Energy Conservation Building Code; green building certification; cool and reflective roofs, which directly address the heat island effect; and efficient street lighting.

6. Governance and law. Effective urban local bodies under the 74th Amendment, with the finances and staff to do the job; the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986; the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981; the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974; Pollution Control Boards with the capacity to enforce; the National Green Tribunal; environmental impact assessment; and the constitutional foundation, Article 48A and Article 51A(g), with the right to a healthy environment read into Article 21 in Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar and the line of cases after it.

The premise, stated sociologically. The question's phrase "even in the literate society" points at the finding that gender inequality is not simply a product of ignorance. Literacy and education reduce some forms of it and leave others intact, because inequality is sustained by structures and internalised norms, not only by lack of information. Some of the sharpest indicators, the child sex ratio and female labour force participation, are worst in several prosperous and comparatively literate districts, which is the evidence for that proposition.

(i) Fields in which gender inequality is prevalent

1. Before birth and in infancy. Sex selective abortion and female infanticide, and the resulting adverse child sex ratio, recorded at 919 girls per 1,000 boys in the 0 to 6 age group in the 2011 Census. This is worse in several wealthier states than in poorer ones, which is precisely the point the question's premise makes.

7. Marriage and family. Dowry; child marriage; restricted choice of partner; the expectation that the woman moves and adjusts; and unequal decision making within the household.
8. Public and political life. Low representation in Parliament, in state legislatures, in the higher judiciary and in senior administration and business.
9. Safety and violence. Domestic violence, sexual harassment, rape, trafficking, acid attack and online abuse; and the restriction of women's mobility that fear of these produces, which is itself a large and unmeasured cost.
10. Media and representation. Stereotyped portrayal and the normalisation of persistence and possessiveness as romance.
11. Religion and custom. Exclusion from certain rituals, spaces and offices.

4. Legal and safety. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013; the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, following the Justice J. S. Verma Committee; the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005; POCSO, 2012; the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006; the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994; the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017; and legal aid under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987.

5. Health. Maternal and reproductive health services, nutrition programmes and sanitation.

6. Social and attitudinal. Changing gender socialisation in the family, in textbooks and in the media; involving men and boys, since a relationship cannot be changed by altering one party to it; and the visibility of role models.

2. The rabbit hole effect. A young user who watches a small amount of content about fitness, dating or self improvement is progressively recommended more extreme material, and the path from ordinary adolescent insecurity to organised misogynist ideology is short and requires no deliberate search.
3. Manosphere influencers, who present male dominance and contempt for women as a route out of loneliness and low status. Their material is addressed precisely to boys who feel they are failing, which is why it works.
4. Objectification and the beauty economy. Constant exposure to filtered and curated images, both as a standard women are measured against and as a template boys learn to apply.
5. Normalisation of harassment. Persistence after refusal, monitoring, jealousy and possessiveness are presented as devotion; the boundary between courtship and stalking is deliberately blurred.
6. Online abuse and its silencing effect. Women who speak publicly receive coordinated abuse and threats, which drives many out of public discussion; the visible cost teaches other women to stay quiet and teaches boys that this is how disagreement with women is conducted.

1. The family, the primary and most powerful agency, reaching the child when it is most impressionable.

• It transmits gender roles directly, through differential treatment: different toys, freedoms, expectations and chores.
• The model the parents present teaches more than any instruction: a household in which the mother's opinion is disregarded teaches a lesson no lecture will undo.
• Its distinctive task now is supervision and conversation about online life, which research consistently finds is the most effective single protective measure, more effective than restriction alone.

2. The peer group, the first setting of equality, where cooperation and competition among equals are learned rather than obedience to superiors. It enforces conformity by ridicule more effectively than adults enforce anything, which is why misogynistic talk spreads through a group of boys so fast, and why a peer group that rejects it is the strongest available protection.

3. The school.

• Formal knowledge, and, through timetables and rules, training in impersonal authority.

7. The community and voluntary organisations, running awareness programmes and safe spaces.

What each agency should do. Families: co viewing, conversation and limits rather than prohibition alone, since a prohibited thing is sought elsewhere. Schools: compulsory digital and media literacy, and gender education that includes boys rather than addressing only girls. Platforms: safer defaults for minors, limits on recommending extreme content to young accounts, and effective age assurance. The state: enforce the law it has, and regulate design rather than attempting to censor content. Society: model different behaviour, since children learn what adults do rather than what adults say.

For full marks, cover: the definition and origin of sociology, its nature under each of the standard heads, the two schools on scope, its subject matter, its relation to the other social sciences, its importance under separate heads including its importance to a law student, and its limitations.

Definition and origin

Sociology is the scientific study of society, of social relationships, social institutions and social behaviour. Auguste Comte coined the word in 1838, joining the Latin socius, companion, to the Greek logos, study.

Definitions. Comte: the science of social phenomena subject to natural and invariable laws. Durkheim: the science of social institutions, and elsewhere of social facts. Weber: a science which attempts the interpretative understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects. MacIver and Page: sociology is about social relationships, the network of which is called society.

5. A generalising science. It seeks patterns, which is how it differs from history: history studies the French Revolution, sociology studies revolution.
6. Both rational and empirical: facts without theory produce description, theory without facts produces speculation.
7. A categorical, not a normative science. It describes what is, not what ought to be. This is Weber's value neutrality.
8. A general social science, not a special one.

Scope of sociology

1. The formalistic or specialistic school. Sociology is a pure and independent science with a narrow subject matter, the forms of social relationships abstracted from their content.

• Simmel: the forms of social relationships, such as competition, subordination and division of labour, which recur across many contents.

The prevailing position is synthetic: sociology studies society as a whole and works through specialised branches, sociology of law, family, religion, education, industry, medicine, crime, rural and urban sociology, political sociology and demography.

Subject matter

Society, community and association; social institutions, family, marriage, religion, education, economy, polity; groups and their types; culture, norms and values; status and role; socialisation; social control; social stratification and mobility; social processes; social change; and social problems.

Relation to other social sciences

• History supplies the record; sociology generalises from it. History is particularising, sociology generalising.
• Political science studies the state and power; political sociology studies the social basis of both.
• Economics studies production and distribution; economic sociology studies the social relations within which they occur, of which the Jajmani system is the standing Indian example.

5. Development of the sociological imagination. C. Wright Mills's term for the capacity to see private troubles as public issues, which is the discipline's characteristic habit of mind.

6. Removal of prejudice. By showing that other ways of living are intelligible in their own context, it corrects ethnocentrism.

7. Understanding of oneself. A person's beliefs, tastes and ambitions are products of a particular position in a particular society, and seeing that is the beginning of any real self knowledge.

8. Importance for a law student, which should be stated separately in this subject:

• Law is a social institution, and it can only be understood in the society that produces and receives it.
• It teaches the distinction between law in books and law in action.
• It supplies the knowledge needed for legal reform, since a law that ignores the social conditions of its operation will fail.
• Criminology and penology are branches of it, and no sentencing policy is intelligible without them.

For full marks, cover: the definition and nature of social control, the need for it, the types with a full treatment of informal and formal means and their agencies, the other classifications, the relation between the two, 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 into sociology, treated it as the means by which society secures the order without which social life is impossible.

Informal means of social control

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

Means:

1. Folkways: the customary, habitual ways of a group, such as dress, greeting and table manners. Breach brings mild disapproval; the offender is thought odd.
2. Mores: folkways regarded as essential to group welfare, carrying strong moral feeling. Breach brings severe disapproval and often punishment; the offender is thought wicked.
3. Taboos: negative mores, absolute prohibitions.
4. Customs, traditions, rituals and ceremonies, which carry the weight of long practice.
5. Religion, which controls through belief, conscience, sin and the fear of divine sanction, and reaches where no law can.
6. Morality and conscience, the internalised standard.

5. Propaganda and mass communication, deliberately used to shape attitudes.
6. Administrative regulation and licensing, controlling conduct in advance.

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

Effectiveness. Necessary as societies grow large, heterogeneous and anonymous, and informal control loses its grip.

Other classifications

• Direct control, exercised face to face by family, neighbours and peers, against indirect control, exercised at a distance by law, custom and public opinion.
• Positive control, through reward, honour and recognition, against negative control, through punishment, fine and ostracism.
• Conscious and unconscious control.
• Coercive and persuasive control, which is Kimball Young's distinction.

Relation between the two

• Durkheim: social control expresses the collective conscience. Punishment's chief function is not deterrence but the reaffirmation of shared values. The movement from repressive to restitutive law tracks the movement from mechanical to organic solidarity.
• Parsons and functionalism: social control maintains the equilibrium of the system, and deviance is a disturbance to be corrected.
• Marx and conflict theory: social control maintains an order that benefits the dominant class, and law is the instrument by which their interest is presented as the general interest.
• Weber: control rests on legitimate authority, and modern control is legal rational, exercised through rules and bureaucracy.
• Labelling theory: the agencies of control help to create the deviance they respond to, since a person labelled a criminal is treated as one and may come to see himself so.

A. Evolutionary or linear theories

Central claim. Society moves in one direction, from simple to complex, through a series of fixed stages, and later stages are generally treated as higher than earlier ones. The theories were formulated in the nineteenth century under the influence of biological evolution and of European confidence.

1. Auguste Comte: the Law of Three Stages.

Human thought and society pass through the theological stage, in which phenomena are explained by supernatural beings, with sub stages of fetishism, polytheism and monotheism; the metaphysical stage, in which supernatural beings are replaced by abstract forces such as nature and natural rights; and the positive or scientific stage, in which explanation is by observed law. Each stage carries its own social order: priests and soldiers, then lawyers and philosophers, then scientists and industrialists.

2. Herbert Spencer: the organic and evolutionary analogy.

Societies move from mechanical solidarity, based on likeness, with a strong collective conscience and repressive law, to organic solidarity, based on the division of labour and interdependence, with a weaker and more abstract collective conscience and restitutive law. The cause is increase in the volume and the material and moral density of society, which intensifies competition and is resolved peacefully by specialisation.

4. Lewis Henry Morgan proposed savagery, barbarism and civilisation, each with sub stages tied to technological developments, and his scheme was adopted by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

5. Ferdinand Tonnies described the movement from Gemeinschaft, community based on natural will, kinship and tradition, to Gesellschaft, association based on rational will, contract and interest.

6. Sir Henry Maine put the same movement in legal terms: the progressive societies have moved from status to contract.

Common assumptions of the evolutionary theories. Change is natural, continuous, unidirectional and cumulative; it proceeds through necessary stages which no society can skip; it is universal, all societies following the same path; and it constitutes progress.

B. Cyclical theories

Central claim. Change is not linear but recurrent. Societies and civilisations pass through phases of rise, maturity and decline, and the pattern repeats. There is no permanent progress and no final destination. These theories became influential after 1918, when European confidence in progress collapsed.

1. Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West (1918 to 1922).

Every culture is an organism with a determinate life span, passing through birth, growth, maturity and decay like a living thing, over roughly a thousand years. A culture in its creative phase becomes a civilisation in its declining phase, marked by cities, money, technique and the loss of creative energy. He identified eight great cultures, Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Classical, Arabian, Mexican and Western, and held that Western civilisation had entered its winter and would decline whatever anyone did. His theory is fatalistic and admits no remedy.

2. Arnold Toynbee: A Study of History.

Cultures oscillate between three types according to their conception of reality: ideational, in which reality is spiritual and needs are met by self restraint; sensate, in which reality is what the senses report and needs are met materially; and the intermediate and balanced idealistic. The movement between them is driven by the principle of immanent change: a system changes because of forces within itself, not because of external causes, and each type carries its own limitation which eventually exhausts it. Sorokin held that Western culture was in an over ripe sensate phase and would move towards a new ideational one. He also applied the same oscillation to stratification, holding that the social pyramid's height and profile fluctuate without a constant trend.

4. Vilfredo Pareto: the circulation of elites.

History is "a graveyard of aristocracies". Every society is ruled by an elite, and elites are of two psychological types, the lions, who rule by force and conservatism, and the foxes, who rule by cunning and innovation. An elite of one type gradually loses the qualities that brought it to power and is displaced by an elite of the other, and the cycle repeats. Society thus oscillates, and no elite is permanent.

For full marks, cover: the meaning of an egalitarian society and of stratification, the evidence that the proposition is largely true, the theoretical support for it, then a scrutiny of Indian stratification by caste, class, gender, tribe, region and religion, the constitutional and legal response, what has changed and what has not, and a reasoned conclusion.

The proposition and its terms

An egalitarian society is one in which all members enjoy equal status, rights, opportunities and access to resources. To call it a myth is to say that no such society has existed, and that the ideal is unattainable in its strict form.

Social stratification is the division of a society into layers ranked one above another, whose members enjoy unequal shares of wealth, power and prestige.

5. The historical record. Every attempt at a wholly egalitarian order, from religious communes to socialist states, has produced a new hierarchy, frequently of party or bureaucracy in place of property. Weber predicted precisely this, arguing that a planned economy would require more bureaucracy, not less.

The case against, which a balanced answer must state

Stratification is universal, but its degree is not fixed, and this is where the proposition needs qualification. Sorokin himself showed that the height and profile of the social pyramid fluctuate, and that both extreme inequality and extreme levelling are unstable. Some societies are markedly more equal than others on measurable indicators of income, health, education and mobility, and those differences are the product of policy. So the accurate statement is not that equality is impossible but that absolute equality is a myth while greater equality is achievable, and the distinction matters because the first invites resignation and the second invites work.

Tumin's reply to Davis and Moore is the sharpest argument on this side: stratification restricts access to training, so most talent is never discovered, which means existing inequality is not a reflection of unequal ability but a producer of it.

• What has weakened: ritual restrictions on touch and commensality, particularly in cities, and the link between caste and occupation.
• What has strengthened: caste as a political category of mobilisation and representation.

2. Class.

• Largely achieved, relatively open, ranked by wealth, occupation and education, with indefinite boundaries and weak class consciousness.
• India's structure: a small elite; a large and growing middle class, greatly expanded since liberalisation in 1991; a very large informal sector without contract or social security, which is the defining feature of the Indian working class; and an agrarian structure running from large landowners to landless labourers.
• Inequality has widened since 1991 even as absolute poverty has fallen, with the share of income and wealth at the top rising markedly.
• Class and caste overlap without coinciding: Beteille's Sripuram showed them separating; Srinivas's dominant caste holds them together.

The constitutional and legal response

Equality: Articles 14, 15, 16 and 17. Protective discrimination: Articles 15(4), 15(5), 16(4), 16(4A), 330, 332, 243D and 243T. Directive Principles: Articles 38, 39, 46 and 47, directing the state to minimise inequalities of income, status, facilities and opportunities. Legislation: the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955; the Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989; the manual scavenging prohibitions; the Forest Rights Act, 2006; land reform; and the Right to Education Act, 2009. Judicial: Indra Sawhney (1992) with the 50 per cent ceiling and the creamy layer; Janhit Abhiyan (2022) upholding economically weaker sections reservation.

What has changed and what has not

Changed. Ritual untouchability is unlawful and much reduced in public life; a substantial middle class has emerged among Scheduled Castes and Tribes; the link between caste and occupation has weakened, especially in cities and in new sectors carrying no traditional caste association; political representation has broadened; absolute poverty has fallen; and female education has risen sharply.