BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Sociology 2017-18 Question Paper with Solutions

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.

Leadership is the capacity to influence, guide and direct the behaviour of a group towards the achievement of its goals. A leader is a person whom the group accepts in that role, whether formally appointed or informally recognised.

Types. Formal leadership, deriving from an office, and informal leadership, resting on personal qualities. Kurt Lewin's classic threefold classification is authoritarian, where the leader decides alone; democratic, where he decides with the group; and laissez faire, where the group is left to itself.

Weber's three types of authority supply the sociological classification of leadership: traditional, resting on custom; charismatic, resting on the extraordinary personal qualities of the leader; and legal rational, resting on office and rules.

Functions. Setting goals; taking decisions; representing the group to outsiders; maintaining discipline and cohesion; resolving internal conflict; and, in a changing society, initiating reform.

Two functions of a social group, stated fully:

1. Socialisation and the formation of the self. The group is the medium through which culture is transmitted and personality formed. Cooley called the primary group the "nursery of human nature", and his looking glass self describes the mechanism: we come to see ourselves as we imagine others see us and judge us. Without a group the human infant does not become a social person at all.
2. Social control. The group secures conformity to its norms, informally through approval and disapproval, praise, ridicule, gossip and ostracism, and, in formal groups, through written rules and defined sanctions. This is the cheapest and most effective form of control, because a norm the group has taught is one the member applies to himself.

Two further functions if wanted: the satisfaction of needs, physical, social and psychological; and the division of labour and cooperation, which is possible only in a group and which is the condition of everything a society achieves beyond subsistence.

1. Durkheim's functionalist theory. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Durkheim studied Australian totemism and concluded that the totem is a symbol of the clan, so that in worshipping the totem the clan worships itself. The essential religious distinction is between the sacred and the profane, and religion's essential function is social integration: ritual assembles people, generates collective effervescence, and renews the collective conscience.

2. Marx's conflict theory. Religion is part of the superstructure, determined by the economic base and serving the ruling class. It is "the sigh of the oppressed creature... the opium of the people": it consoles the exploited with reward hereafter, explains present suffering as ordained, and so produces false consciousness.

Two others may be substituted: Weber's demonstration in The Protestant Ethic that religious ideas can reshape economic conduct, and Tylor's animism, that religion begins in the belief that spirits inhabit natural objects.

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.

For full marks, cover: the definitions, the distinction with its practical test, the sources of power, Weber's three types of authority, legitimacy, and the application to the modern state.

Power is the capacity to impose one's will on the behaviour of others even against their resistance. Weber: "Power is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance."

Authority is legitimate power: power that those subject to it accept as rightful, so that obedience is voluntary rather than compelled.

The distinction. Power may be legitimate or illegitimate; authority is by definition legitimate. Power compels, authority commands.

Sources of power. Force and coercion; wealth; knowledge and expertise; numbers and organisation; office; and personal qualities. Etzioni's types are coercive, resting on threat; remunerative, resting on reward; and normative, resting on shared values.

For full marks, cover: the definition of religion, then the evolutionary, functionalist, conflict and Weberian theories with their exponents and criticisms, and an assessment.

Definition. Religion is a system of beliefs and practices relating to sacred things which unites its adherents into a moral community. Durkheim's full definition turns on things "set apart and forbidden".

1. Evolutionary theories.

• E. B. Tylor: animism. Religion begins in the belief that spirits inhabit natural objects, an idea Tylor derived from reflection on dreams, shadows and death, and it moves from animism through polytheism to monotheism.
• R. R. Marett: animatism, belief in an impersonal supernatural force, the Melanesian mana, prior even to animism.
• James Frazer: magic, religion, science. Man first tries to compel nature, then propitiates gods, then explains nature.

4. Max Weber. In The Protestant Ethic he showed that religious ideas can reshape economic conduct: Calvinist predestination produced anxiety, relieved by treating worldly success as a sign of election, which combined with the prohibition of luxury produced methodical work, thrift and reinvestment. He claimed an elective affinity, not a simple cause.

Assessment. Evolutionary theories are largely rejected. Durkheim, Marx and Weber survive because they answer different questions and can all be true at once.

1. Primary and secondary (Cooley). 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, and called them the "nursery of human nature". A secondary group is large, impersonal, formal and contractual, a means to an end.
2. In group and out group (Sumner). The "we" group against the "they" group, generating ethnocentrism.
3. Formal and informal, by organisation.
4. Reference groups (Merton): a group whose standards a person adopts whether or not he belongs to it, explaining anticipatory socialisation and, in India, Sanskritisation.
5. Voluntary and involuntary, by mode of entry.
6. Small and large groups, which differ qualitatively; Simmel's analysis of the dyad and triad is the classical treatment.
7. Tonnies: Gemeinschaft, community, against Gesellschaft, association.

For full marks, cover: the meaning, functions, elements, historical forms, the treatments by Marx, Weber and Durkheim, the Indian context, and the relation to law.

Meaning. The economic institution is the complex of norms, roles and organisations through which a society produces, distributes, exchanges and consumes goods and services, and thereby provides for the material needs of its members.

Functions. Production; distribution and exchange; consumption; the division of labour and occupational specialisation; determination of property relations; allocation of status, since occupation and income are the principal determinants of class; provision of livelihood and security; and the generation of the surplus that makes possible everything a society does beyond subsistence.

Elements. Property and its rules of transmission; labour; capital; markets and exchange; money; and organisations such as firms, cooperatives, banks and unions.

Indian context. A traditional agrarian economy with caste based occupational assignment and the Jajmani system; colonial commercialisation of agriculture and destruction of the artisan sector; a mixed economy with Five Year Plans after 1947; liberalisation in 1991; and a very large informal sector today.

Relation to law. Contract, property, company law, banking regulation, labour law, taxation, insolvency and competition law are the rules without which a modern economy could not operate. Constitutionally: Article 19(1)(g), freedom of trade subject to reasonable restriction; Article 300A on property; Article 39(b) and (c) on the distribution of material resources; and Articles 23 and 24 on forced and child labour.

Merton's additions. Status set: the whole collection of statuses held at one time. Role set: the several relationships attached to a single status, as a schoolteacher answers to pupils, parents, colleagues, the head and the board.

Role conflict: incompatible demands from two different statuses, as a woman who is both judge and mother. Role strain: incompatible demands within one role, as an advocate owing both zealous advocacy to the client and candour to the court.

Managing them. Priority of obligations; insulation of role activities, keeping audiences apart; compartmentalisation; and formal rules that remove one role, which is what recusal does.

Significance. Status and role are the units out of which social structure is built; they make behaviour predictable, which is the condition of cooperation among strangers; they allocate the work of society; and they are the mechanism by which culture becomes individual conduct.

He listed the differences carefully: an organism is a concrete whole while society is discrete, its units dispersed and mobile; consciousness is concentrated in one part of an organism while in society each unit has its own; and, decisively, an organism exists for the whole whereas a society exists for the benefit of its members. That last difference is the foundation of his individualism.

2. The law of evolution. Evolution is a change from indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to definite, coherent heterogeneity. Applied to society: societies grow in size, growth produces structural differentiation, and differentiation produces functional specialisation and interdependence.

3. Stages of social evolution, by degree of composition: simple, compound, doubly compound and trebly compound societies. This is his account of the gradual growth of the state: it was not created by contract but grew as societies compounded, temporary war leadership hardening into permanent chieftainship and then into kingship.

2. The Supreme Court itself accepted the seriousness of the problem in Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India (2018), describing lynching as an "affront to the rule of law" and issuing binding preventive, remedial and punitive directions, which a court does not do for an imagined problem.
3. Parliament has legislated: Section 103(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, now makes murder by a group of five or more on grounds of race, caste, community, sex, place of birth, language or personal belief punishable with death or life imprisonment, and Manipur, Rajasthan and West Bengal enacted their own anti lynching laws.
4. The victims are selective: religious minorities, Dalits and Adivasis are disproportionately represented, which indicates a social pattern rather than random crowd violence.

What qualifies it.

1. There is no separate official category for lynching in national crime statistics for most of the relevant period, so precise numbers are contested and different compilations give different figures. A candidate should say this rather than assert a number.

1. Implement Poonawalla (2018): a nodal officer of at least Superintendent of Police rank in every district; identification of lynching prone areas; special task forces to gather intelligence on those spreading hate; prompt registration of FIRs; fast track courts with trial concluded within six months; victim compensation under Section 357A of the Criminal Procedure Code; and departmental action against police and district officers who fail to prevent or investigate.
2. Section 103(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and the state anti lynching statutes.
3. The Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989, where the victim belongs to a Scheduled Caste or Tribe.
4. Speedy and certain justice generally, since lynching feeds on the belief that courts do not work.

Administrative. Police accountability and preventive intelligence; patrolling on known routes; immediate dispersal of gathering crowds; and regulation of platforms, including traceability of mass forwarded messages, forwarding limits and rapid takedown, under the Information Technology Rules, 2021.

A note on the premise. The estimate in the question was made before the paper was set and has since been borne out: India became the world's most populous country in 2023, on United Nations estimates. The demographic picture is more complicated than the headline suggests, and the qualification belongs in the answer: India's total fertility rate has fallen to around or below the replacement level of 2.1, so the population is still growing chiefly because of population momentum, the very large cohort already of childbearing age, and rising life expectancy, rather than because families are large.

(a) Causes and consequences of population growth

Causes.

9. Rising life expectancy, which adds to numbers at the other end.
10. Population momentum, which is now the principal arithmetic cause.

Consequences.

Economic: pressure on land and on natural resources; fragmentation of holdings; unemployment and underemployment; low per capita income; a heavy dependency burden; and the diversion of investment from growth to consumption.

Social: pressure on housing, health and education; growth of slums; strain on infrastructure and services; and migration to cities on a very large scale.

Environmental: deforestation; depletion of groundwater; air and water pollution; and loss of biodiversity and of arable land.

Positive, which an honest answer includes: a demographic dividend, since a large working age population relative to dependants is an economic opportunity if it is educated and employed; a large domestic market; and a large labour force.

(b) Remedial measures

9. Awareness and communication, through mass media and community health workers.
10. The National Population Policy, 2000, and the National Health Mission, which set voluntary and informed choice as the governing principle.

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.
7. Marriage and family: dowry; child marriage; restricted choice of partner; unequal decision making.
8. Public and political life: low representation in legislatures, the higher judiciary and senior administration.
9. Safety: domestic violence, sexual harassment, rape, trafficking and online abuse, and the restriction of mobility that fear produces.
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.

Legal and safety. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013, enacting the Vishaka (1997) guidelines; the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013; the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005; POCSO, 2012; the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006; the PCPNDT Act, 1994; and the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017.

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

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.

For full marks, cover: what the quoted proposition asserts, the case for and against it with a full comparison of caste and class, a reasoned verdict, and then two theories of stratification in detail.

Part 1: Comment on the proposition

What it asserts. That caste and class are the same kind of thing, differing only in degree of rigidity, caste being class with the mobility taken out.

The case for it. Both are systems of stratification: both rank people in layers, both distribute wealth, power and prestige unequally, both determine life chances, and both are transmitted across generations. In India the two also overlap substantially, since the upper castes historically held most of the land and the professions and Scheduled Castes were disproportionately landless. On that view caste is simply a closed class system.

The case against it, which is the stronger. The proposition mistakes a difference of kind for a difference of degree, on five counts:

The verdict. The proposition is partly true and finally misleading. Caste is indeed more rigid than class, so the observation is accurate as far as it goes. But rigidity is a consequence rather than the essence: caste is a status group in Weber's sense, closed by ritual and by endogamy, and its rigidity follows from the fact that ritual purity cannot be acquired. Calling it a rigid class conceals what actually distinguishes it, and it is exactly the error Weber avoided by separating class from status.

Part 2: Two theories of social stratification

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

The 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 to undertake that training and to fill those positions 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, and it explains why every known society is stratified.

Criticism (Melvin Tumin).

• 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.
• Party: organised power, the associations through which people pursue their interests.

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

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

3. To protect the weak from the strong, since in its absence the powerful would take whatever they could.
4. To maintain solidarity in a society divided by caste, religion, language and class.
5. To restrain deviance and crime.
6. To preserve institutions and see that they perform their functions.
7. To transmit the culture intact to the next generation.
8. For the individual's own benefit, which is Durkheim's point and easily missed: human desires are naturally unlimited and only society can set a limit to them, so a person without internalised restraint is at the mercy of his impulses. That condition, anomie, 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.

Its means. Informal, through folkways, mores, customs, religion, public opinion, gossip, ridicule and ostracism, exercised by the family, neighbourhood, peer group and caste; and formal, through law, coercion, codified rules and education, exercised by the state, police, courts, prisons and bureaucracy.

6. It leads to accommodation and a new equilibrium.
7. Simmel's deeper point: conflict is a form of sociation, presupposing a relationship and binding the antagonists as much as separating them.

Disintegrative effects:

1. Destruction of life and property.
2. Lasting hatred between groups, which outlives the dispute that caused it.
3. Diversion of resources from production to destruction.
4. Damage to personality: fear, insecurity, hostility and trauma.
5. Disintegration of the group where the conflict is internal.
6. Suppression of internal dissent, the shadow side of increased solidarity, since a group at war does not tolerate criticism and minorities within each side come under suspicion.
7. Interruption of ordinary social processes: education, trade, administration and family life.

3. Law as the index of solidarity. Mechanical solidarity produces repressive law, which punishes because the offence outrages the shared conscience; organic solidarity produces restitutive law, which restores the injured party's position. The proportion of the two measures the type of society.

4. Anomie. The condition of normlessness in which the norms regulating desire lose their authority. The anomic division of labour occurs where specialisation outruns moral regulation, and industrial conflict is its symptom.

5. Suicide. The demonstration that even the most private act has social causes. Rates vary systematically with religion, marital status and nationality, and are explained by integration and regulation, giving egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic types.

6. Religion. The totem is a symbol of the clan; the fundamental distinction is sacred and profane; religion's function is social integration.

7. Sociology as a discipline. He established its subject matter, method and independence, and founded L'Année Sociologique.

5. Bureaucracy: hierarchy, written rules, defined competence, selection by qualification, salaried career officials, separation of office from person, records and impersonality. Technically superior, and productive of the iron cage.

6. The Protestant ethic, showing that religious ideas can reshape economic conduct, which is his argument against economic determinism.

7. Stratification: class, status and party, three dimensions varying independently.

8. Rationalisation and disenchantment, his master theme.

Criticisms. Verstehen is hard to verify; methodological individualism sits awkwardly with the structures he studied; the Protestant ethic thesis is contested; and his study of India relied on texts rather than observation.

C. Talcott Parsons (1902 to 1979)

1. Structural functionalism. Society is a system of interrelated parts, each performing a function for the whole, tending towards equilibrium. He is the leading twentieth century systematiser of functionalism.

6. The family. In modern society it retains two irreducible functions, the primary socialisation of children and the stabilisation of adult personalities, with the instrumental and expressive roles divided within it.

7. The sick role, showing that illness is a social status with rights and obligations.

Criticisms. Conservative, explaining order far better than change and treating conflict as pathology; abstract and impenetrably written; it neglects power and interest; his account of the sexual division of labour universalises a mid twentieth century household; and it leaves little room for agency.

Comparison and assessment

For full marks, cover: the two communities separately, since their problems differ, then the common problems, then remedial measures for each, and an assessment.

A. Problems of the tribal community

Scheduled Tribes, about 8.6 per cent of the population, specified under Article 342, number more than 700 communities. Their disadvantage is territorial rather than ritual.

1. Land alienation, the gravest problem: tribal land passing to non tribals through debt, fraud and non enforcement of protective legislation, despite the Fifth Schedule and state laws prohibiting transfer.
2. Displacement by development projects: dams, mines, industry and protected areas. Tribals are a small fraction of the population and a very large fraction of those displaced since independence, and rehabilitation has been poor.

1. Agrarian distress: fragmented and uneconomic holdings; dependence on the monsoon; low and volatile prices; the cost of inputs; and indebtedness, with farmer suicides as its extreme expression.
2. Landlessness and tenancy insecurity. A large proportion of rural households are landless agricultural labourers, and land reform was implemented unevenly.
3. Unemployment and underemployment, including disguised unemployment, where more people work a holding than it needs.
4. Poverty and low per capita income.
5. Caste discrimination and atrocities, which are far sharper in the village than in the city, since a village permits surveillance the city does not.
6. Poor infrastructure: roads, electricity, irrigation, drinking water, sanitation, health care and schools.
7. Educational backwardness and the poor quality of rural schooling.
8. Migration to cities, draining the young and the able and leaving households divided.
9. Poor health, including malnutrition, maternal mortality and now non communicable disease.

D. Remedial measures

For tribal communities. Strict enforcement of laws prohibiting transfer of tribal land, and restoration of alienated land; a fair rehabilitation and resettlement regime for displaced persons, with land for land where possible; effective implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006, and of PESA, 1996, which gives the gram sabha in Scheduled Areas a decisive voice; health measures directed at malnutrition, malaria and sickle cell; education in the mother tongue in the early years and residential schools where distance is the obstacle; fair prices for minor forest produce, through cooperatives rather than contractors; and enforcement of the Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989. The governing policy is integration, formulated by Nehru as the Panchsheel for tribals: development along the lines of their own genius, respect for their rights in land and forest, working through their own institutions, light administration, and judging results by the quality of human character built up rather than by statistics.

For full marks, cover: the definition and characteristics, the forms of marriage in full, the changes with their causes, then a reasoned verdict on the proposition, and the problems.

Definition and characteristics

Marriage is the socially approved union of a man and a woman which establishes a family and regulates sexual relations, descent, inheritance and mutual obligation. Westermarck: "Marriage is a relation of one or more men to one or more women which is recognised by custom or law and involves certain rights and duties both in the case of the parties entering the union and in the case of the children born of it."

Characteristics. Universality; social approval, which distinguishes it from cohabitation; reciprocal rights and duties; ceremony; the intention of permanence; and regulation by rules of endogamy, exogamy and prohibited degrees.

B. By rules of mate selection. Endogamy, marriage within one's own group; exogamy, marriage outside a defined group, in Indian forms gotra, pravara, sapinda under Section 5(v) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and village exogamy; hypergamy (anuloma) and hypogamy (pratiloma); levirate and sororate; and cross cousin and parallel cousin marriage.

C. By residence. Patrilocal, matrilocal, neolocal and avunculocal.

D. By descent and authority. Patrilineal and matrilineal; patriarchal and matriarchal.

E. By mode of acquiring a mate. Marriage by negotiation, purchase, service, exchange, capture, intrusion, elopement and trial. The classical texts list eight Hindu forms: Brahma, Daiva, Arsha, Prajapatya, Asura, Gandharva, Rakshasa and Paishacha.

The changes

1. Rising age at marriage, in law under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, and in practice through education and employment.
2. From arranged to self chosen, with the intermediate "arranged love marriage" and matrimonial platforms replacing the caste network.

Verdict on the proposition

The proposition is misleading, and the accurate statement is that marriage is changing rather than losing its hold.

What supports the proposition: rising divorce; later and sometimes no marriage; the appearance of live in relationships; declining social pressure; and the loss of many of the institution's former functions.

What refutes it: the great majority of Indians still marry; alternatives remain, in absolute terms, small; and no other institution has taken over its irreplaceable functions of assigning legitimacy, descent and inheritance. What has weakened is not the institution but the compulsion attached to it and the range of functions it performs.

Problems

Dowry and dowry death; domestic violence; child marriage; the adverse sex ratio; marital rape, still excepted; desertion and maintenance disputes; the double burden; and honour crimes.

1. Technology

Ogburn treated technology as the leading factor in social change and built his theory of cultural lag on it. Technology changes society through invention, discovery and diffusion.

How it produces change:

• It alters the economy: the machine created the factory, the factory created the working class and the town, and industrial production destroyed the artisan economy and with it the Jajmani system.
• It alters the family: separating home from workplace made the joint household unnecessary and the nuclear one convenient; contraception separated sex from reproduction; and household appliances altered the domestic division of labour.
• It alters stratification: new occupations carrying no traditional caste association weakened the link between birth and work.

1. By abolishing a practice: sati, untouchability under Article 17, child marriage, manual scavenging.
2. By conferring rights that alter power within an institution: the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005.
3. By redistributing resources: land reform, reservation.
4. By creating institutions: panchayati raj under the 73rd Amendment.
5. By changing incentives: taxation, subsidy, penalty and licensing.
6. Through judicial decision: Vishaka (1997), Shakti Vahini (2018), Navtej Singh Johar (2018), and the whole of public interest litigation.
7. By its declaratory effect, publicly stating what the community holds to be wrong, which over a generation enters the mores.

Conditions of success. Some existing social support; a functioning enforcement machinery; publicity; a beneficiary class able and willing to invoke it; constitutional consistency; and an accessible remedy.

Its negative effects: misinformation and rumour, with a direct link to communal violence and lynching; polarisation and echo chambers; hate speech; paid news; trial by media; and consumerism.

The interaction between the three

The three are not independent, and this is the part a strong answer supplies. Technology creates the problem law must solve, which is cultural lag stated as a sequence. Media creates the climate in which law becomes possible, as the attention after December 2012 produced the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013. Media publicises law and makes it usable, since a right nobody knows of is not exercised. Law regulates both technology and media, through the Information Technology Act, 2000, and the Rules of 2021. And technology transforms media itself, which is what the shift from press to platform has done.

Conclusion. Technology changes the conditions; media changes attitudes; law changes rules. None alone is sufficient, and the changes that have actually worked in India have combined a legal instrument with sustained public attention and a material change that made the old arrangement unworkable.

Property is a socially recognised right to possess, use, enjoy and dispose of a thing, and to exclude others from it.

Two differences:

1. Ownership. Private property is owned by an individual or a private legal person, who alone may use and dispose of it. Public property is owned by the state or the community on behalf of everyone, and no individual may dispose of it.
2. Purpose and access. Private property is used for the owner's own benefit, and he may exclude everyone else. Public property is held for the common benefit and is, subject to regulation, open to all: roads, rivers, public parks, government buildings and defence installations.

A third difference if wanted: transferability. Private property may be freely sold, gifted or bequeathed; public property may be alienated only by the procedure the law prescribes and is generally inalienable.

Cooperation is an associative social process in which two or more persons or groups work together for a common goal. It is the most basic of all social processes: no group, and therefore no society, can exist without it.

Merrill and Eldredge: "Cooperation is a form of social interaction wherein two or more persons work together to gain a common end."

Its forms. Direct cooperation, where people do the same work together, as in harvesting or building; and indirect cooperation, where people do different tasks towards a common end, which is the division of labour. It is further classified as primary, in primary groups where cooperation is an end in itself; secondary, in formal organisations; and tertiary, between groups whose attitudes may be antagonistic but who cooperate for a limited purpose, which Sumner called antagonistic cooperation.

Voting behaviour is the study of how and why people vote as they do. Two factors, stated fully:

1. Caste. The single most studied determinant of voting in India. Caste supplies a ready made network for mobilisation, candidates are frequently selected with the caste composition of a constituency in mind, and caste associations function as vote banks. Srinivas's dominant caste became a state level political force once adult franchise made numerical strength decisive.
2. Religion and community. Religious identity is mobilised directly, and communal polarisation before an election is a recognised electoral strategy. The Representation of the People Act, 1951, makes an appeal on grounds of religion a corrupt practice precisely because it works.

Other factors worth naming: region and language; class and economic interest; charisma of the leader; party ideology and manifesto; incumbency and performance; money and muscle power; mass and social media; and age, gender and education.

A note on the wording. The paper prints "into generational". The term is intra generational, and the pair is intergenerational and intra generational mobility.

Social mobility is the movement of an individual or a group from one social position to another.

Intergenerational mobility is movement between generations: a comparison of a person's position with that of his parents. The son of an agricultural labourer who becomes a schoolteacher has moved upward intergenerationally. It is the standard measure of how open a society is, because it shows whether origin determines destination.

Intra generational mobility is movement within one person's own lifetime, from one position to another during his career. A clerk who rises to become a senior officer has moved upward intra generationally.

Both may be upward or downward, and both are forms of vertical mobility, as distinct from horizontal mobility, which is movement without change of rank.

Two differences, stated fully:

1. Size, density and heterogeneity of population. Louis Wirth identified these three as the defining features of urbanism. An urban society is large, densely settled and heterogeneous, containing people of many religions, languages, castes and occupations who are strangers to one another. A tribal society is small, sparsely settled and homogeneous, its members sharing one language, one set of beliefs and a common descent.
2. The basis of social relationships and of control. Urban relationships are impersonal, segmental, transitory and contractual, so order rests on formal social control through law, police and courts. Tribal relationships are personal, face to face and enduring, organised through kinship, so order rests on informal control through custom, public opinion and the tribal council.

A third difference if wanted: the economy. Tribal economies are largely subsistence, based on hunting, gathering, shifting cultivation or settled agriculture with little specialisation; urban economies rest on an advanced division of labour and on the market.

• As specialisation advances, people become unlike and are bound by interdependence, giving organic solidarity, whose characteristic law is restitutive.
• Its cause is not economic but morphological: increase in the volume and the material and moral density of society intensifies competition, and specialisation is the peaceful solution to it, since a specialist competes with fewer rivals.
• Its abnormal forms are the anomic division of labour, where specialisation outruns the moral rules needed to coordinate it, producing industrial conflict; the forced division of labour, where positions are allocated by birth or wealth rather than aptitude; and the inadequately coordinated form.

Marx's treatment. The division of labour is inseparable from private property and produces alienation: the worker is estranged from the product, from the act of production, from his species being and from other people. The detailed division of labour cripples the worker, reducing him to an appendage of the machine. It serves the extraction of surplus value, and no regulation can cure it because the cause is the property relation itself.

For full marks, cover: the definition and characteristics of conflict, its causes and forms, its functions, then the resolution strategies in full, and the connection to law.

Definition. Conflict is a dissociative social process in which individuals or groups seek their ends by directly opposing, harming, defeating or destroying the opponent. Gillin and Gillin: "the social process in which individuals or groups seek their ends by directly challenging the antagonist by violence or threat of violence."

Characteristics. Universal; conscious and deliberate, unlike competition; personal, directed at the rival himself; and intermittent.

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

Forms. Personal; group; class; racial; caste; communal; political; industrial; and international.

4. Arbitration. A third party decides, and the award binds. Faster and more private than litigation, and chosen by the parties in advance.

5. Adjudication. A court decides according to law, and the decision is enforceable by the state. It produces a winner and a loser and settles the legal right rather than the underlying relationship.

6. Compromise, where each side gives ground; toleration, where the parties simply live with the difference without agreeing; truce, a suspension of hostilities; conversion, where one side accepts the other's position; and subordination, where one submits.

7. Coercion and force, which ends a conflict without resolving it and stores the grievance.

8. Institutional and preventive strategies: grievance procedures, ombudsmen, Lok Adalats under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, collective bargaining machinery under the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, and peace committees.

The mechanism. Religion is part of the superstructure, determined by the economic base and serving the interests of the class that owns the means of production. It works by:

1. Consoling the exploited with the promise of reward hereafter, so that present suffering is bearable.
2. Explaining present suffering as ordained, deserved or a test, so that it appears just rather than arbitrary.
3. Legitimating the social order, conferring sanctity on property, hierarchy and authority.
4. Producing false consciousness, a set of beliefs held by the exploited which conceals the reality of their situation and prevents the development of class consciousness.

Its place in his system. It follows from historical materialism: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness." Marx's conclusion is that the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism, and that the demand to give up illusions about one's condition is the demand to give up a condition which requires illusions.

4. Weber reversed the causation, showing in The Protestant Ethic that religious ideas can reshape an economy rather than merely reflecting it.
5. Religion has survived in societies where the economic conditions Marx blamed have changed, and it revived in states that suppressed it.

3. Forming the government, and, for the losers, forming the opposition, which is the function that makes accountability possible.
4. Political socialisation and education of the electorate.
5. Interest aggregation: converting the demands of many groups into a manageable programme.
6. Recruitment of political leadership.
7. Linking the citizen to the state, which in a large country is otherwise impossible.

Types.

A. By the number of parties in a system. One party system, as in a totalitarian state; two party system, as in Britain and the United States; and multi party system, as in India and most of continental Europe.

B. By ideology. Rightist or conservative; centrist; leftist or radical; and reactionary and revolutionary at the extremes.

C. By structure and membership (Duverger). Cadre parties, built around a small group of notables and activated at elections; and mass parties, with a large dues paying membership and continuous activity.

For full marks, cover: the place of social action in Weber's definition of sociology, what makes an action social, the four types with examples, the ideal type qualification, and what the classification is for.

Its place. Weber defined sociology as "a science which attempts the interpretative understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects." Social action is therefore the unit of sociological study, which is his break with Durkheim, for whom the unit was the social fact.

What makes an action social. Action is social when the subjective meaning the actor attaches to it takes account of the behaviour of others and is thereby oriented in its course. Two conditions must both be met: the actor attaches a meaning, and the meaning is oriented to others. Purely reactive behaviour, action directed at objects rather than persons, and mere imitation without meaning are therefore not social action.

The four types.

The qualification. These are ideal types, deliberately constructed pure models used as yardsticks. Real action is almost always a mixture: a marriage may be entered into for calculated advantage, from affection, out of duty and because it is customary, all at once.

3. Observation, participant and non participant. Participation gives access to meanings no questionnaire reaches, at the cost of objectivity and with ethical difficulty about disclosure; non participation preserves detachment and loses access.

4. The interview, structured, unstructured, semi structured, focused (Merton) or depth. Allows probing and access to motive; consumes time and admits interviewer bias, which in Indian field work includes the visible caste, sex, class and language of the investigator.

5. The comparative method. Comparison of societies, institutions or periods to isolate what varies with what. Durkheim called it sociology's substitute for experiment, since human beings cannot be manipulated. Its weakness is that natural variation never isolates a single factor.

Further methods if wanted: the historical method; the statistical method; the functional method; and Weber's ideal type.

(b) Role of different socialization agencies in sensitizing people to respect their environment.

The context. In October 2017 the Supreme Court suspended the sale of firecrackers in the National Capital Region for that Diwali, and manufacturers and others challenged the order as an interference with religious practice. The litigation continued in Arjun Gopal v. Union of India, in which the Court subsequently permitted only green crackers, banned series or joined crackers and barium salts, and confined bursting to a two hour window.

7. Economic consequences on the other side, which an honest answer includes: the fireworks industry employs a large workforce, and a prohibition imposes a real cost on it, which is why the Court's response has been regulation and a shift to green crackers rather than abolition.

8. The constitutional consequence. Where celebration injures health, Article 21, which includes the right to a healthy environment as held in Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, is engaged against Article 25, which protects religion only subject to public order, morality and health. The essential religious practices test settles the conflict: the Court held that bursting firecrackers is not an essential religious practice of Diwali, which is the festival of lights, and that fireworks are a comparatively recent commercial accretion.

(b) The role of socialisation agencies

1. The family, the primary agency and the only one reaching the child in the years of deepest impressionability. Whether a household buys crackers, segregates waste or wastes water is learned here and carried for life. Children also socialise their parents backwards on environmental questions, which is why school campaigns reach adults.

6. The peer group and the neighbourhood, which enforce informally. A residents' association that agrees on a shared lamp lighting achieves compliance no notification will.
7. Voluntary organisations, which campaign, litigate in the public interest and supply the expertise courts rely on.

2. In the link between caste and occupation. New occupations created by industry, services and technology carry no traditional caste association, so anyone may enter them.
3. In commensality, particularly in cities. Rules about who may eat with whom cannot survive canteens, restaurants, trains and hostels.
4. In ritual authority. Brahminical pre eminence no longer translates into secular power in most localities.
5. In political representation, through reserved seats and through the political mobilisation of formerly excluded groups.

Where caste has not weakened, which is the more important half.

1. Marriage. Endogamy is nearly intact: 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. Atrocities, which have not declined; the National Crime Records Bureau records tens of thousands of cases annually under the Prevention of Atrocities Act, and the incident in the question is one of them.

2. Reservation, which created a middle class among Scheduled Castes and Tribes and altered the composition of public institutions.
3. Modern education, which attacks the belief on which caste rests and creates achieved status.
4. Industrialisation, which produced occupations with no caste association.
5. Urbanisation, which weakens caste because a factory cannot enforce purity rules and a city cannot police who eats with whom.
6. Transport and communication, which destroyed the isolation on which local hierarchies depended.
7. The market, which is indifferent to the caste of a customer.
8. Adult franchise, which converted numerical strength into political power and made Srinivas's dominant caste a state level force.
9. Social and religious reform movements: Bhakti, the Brahmo and Arya Samaj, Phule, Periyar, Gandhi and Ambedkar.
10. Land reform, where implemented, which altered the economic base.

(b) Apply deterioration, cyclic and deterministic theories of social change to the above mentioned social practice.

(a) Reasons for changes in the institution of marriage, and their consequences

The reasons.

1. Industrialisation, which separated home from workplace, so the family ceased to be a unit of production and the household no longer needed to be large.
2. Urbanisation and its anonymity, which removed the community surveillance that enforced marital norms.
3. Education, particularly of women, which raises the age at marriage and changes expectations of autonomy.
4. Employment of women and economic independence, which alters the balance of power inside a marriage and makes exit possible.

5. New forms alongside marriage: live in relationships, recognised for limited statutory purposes in D. Velusamy and Indra Sarma; single parenthood.
6. Greater freedom and greater insecurity together, since the same change that permits exit removes the guarantee of support.
7. Legal uncertainty about the rights of parties to non marital relationships, in maintenance, property and the legitimacy of children, which is where the law has been slowest to follow.

The Indian legal position on the practice in the question. Consensual relationships between adults are not criminal, and adultery ceased to be an offence in Joseph Shine (2018), but adultery remains a ground for divorce under Section 13(1)(i) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. Bigamy, that is a second marriage during the subsistence of the first, remains void under Section 11 and punishable under the general criminal law. So the law's position is that it will not punish the relationship and will not recognise it either.

Applied: the loosening of restraint on sexual relationships is what an over ripe sensate phase looks like, and Sorokin's prediction is that it exhausts itself and the pendulum returns towards an ideational phase. Pareto's circulation of elites and Spengler's organic decline are the other cyclical versions.

3. The deterministic theory. Holds that change is produced by a single determining factor which the actors do not control. Its main versions are technological determinism, associated with Ogburn, and economic determinism, associated with Marx.

Applied technologically: the decisive causes are contraception, which separated sexual activity from reproduction; women's employment, which removed economic dependence; and communication technology, which supplies partners and models. On this reading the practice is not a moral development at all but the predictable social consequence of a material change, and moral exhortation cannot reverse it because the technology will not be withdrawn.

Applied economically: Engels argued that monogamy arose with private property and the need for legitimate heirs, and that the subordination of women followed from it. On that reading the loosening of monogamy follows from women's economic independence and from the declining importance of inheritance for most households.

A note on the quotation. The line states the founding proposition of the sociology of authority: no ruler has power without obedience, so the question a sociologist must ask is not how rulers command but why people obey. That is Weber's question, and his answer is legitimacy.

What social control is

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: "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.

Features of social control

1. Universal, present in every society at every period.
2. Exercised by the group over the individual, and by society over the group.
3. Pervasive, operating in every sphere of life, public and private.

The means

A. Informal. Unwritten, spontaneous, exercised by primary groups and internalised through socialisation.

• Folkways, the habitual customs of daily life, breach bringing mild disapproval.
• Mores, the folkways regarded as essential to welfare, breach bringing severe disapproval.
• Taboos, negative mores.
• Customs, traditions, rituals and ceremonies.
• Religion, controlling through belief, sin and the fear of divine sanction.
• Morality and conscience.
• Public opinion, gossip, praise, ridicule, satire, sympathy and ostracism.
• Art, literature and proverbs.
• Agencies: family, neighbourhood, peer group, caste, religion, public opinion.

B. Formal. Deliberately created, written, enforced by specialised agencies with defined penalties.

• Law, the principal instrument.
• Coercion, physical and non violent.
• Codified rules of organisations.

For full marks, cover: the definition, the types and degrees, descent, residence and authority, the kinship usages, kinship terminology, its importance, the changes in it, and its legal significance.

Definition

Kinship is the system of socially recognised relationships based on blood and marriage which binds people together and assigns them rights and obligations towards one another. It is the network through which descent, inheritance, residence and marriage rules are organised, and in pre modern societies it is the framework of the entire social order.

Types

1. Consanguineous kinship, based on blood, that is descent from a common ancestor: parents and children, brothers and sisters.
2. Affinal kinship, based on marriage: husband and wife, and the relatives acquired by marriage.

• Joking relationships: permitted teasing and familiarity, as between a man and his wife's younger sister.
• Teknonymy: addressing a person through a third, as "Ramu's mother".
• The avunculate: the special authority and obligation of the mother's brother, strong in matrilineal societies.
• The amitate: the special position of the father's sister.
• Couvade: the husband taking to bed and observing restrictions at the birth of a child.

Kinship terminology

Classificatory systems apply one term to several relatives of different degrees, as when father's brother is also called father, which is common in India and expresses the fact that he has a comparable role. Descriptive systems use a distinct term for each relative. The Indian terminology is largely classificatory, and it is worth noting that the vocabulary itself records the social structure: north Indian languages have distinct words for elder and younger brother and for the father's and mother's siblings, because the relationships differ, while English collapses them into "brother" and "uncle".

For full marks, cover: the definition, the material and non material division, the characteristics, the elements, the related concepts of cultural lag, ethnocentrism, relativism, culture and civilisation, sub culture, diffusion and assimilation, the importance of culture, and its relation to law.

Definition

Culture is the entire social heritage of a people: everything learned as a member of society and transmitted to the next generation.

E. B. Tylor, the classical definition, from Primitive Culture (1871): "Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." MacIver and Page: "the expression of our nature in our modes of living and thinking, in our everyday intercourse, in art, in literature, in religion, in recreation and enjoyment."

9. Integrated: its parts hang together, so a change in one produces change in others.
10. Idealistic and normative: it tells members not only what is but what ought to be.
11. Superorganic and man made: above the organic, created by man, and outliving any individual.

Elements

Norms, comprising folkways, mores, taboos and laws; values, conceptions of the desirable; beliefs; language, the vehicle of the whole; symbols; customs; technology and artefacts; and institutions.

Related concepts

• Cultural lag (Ogburn). Material culture changes faster than non material culture, and the gap produces maladjustment. The motor car preceded traffic law; the internet preceded privacy law.
• Ethnocentrism (Sumner). Judging other cultures by the standards of one's own and regarding one's own as superior. It strengthens in group solidarity and produces prejudice.
• Cultural relativism. The opposite principle: a trait must be understood in its own context.

5. It determines personality, which is why personality types vary across societies, as Benedict and Mead established.
6. It is the source of social control, since norms and values are cultural and it is by internalising them that a person controls himself.
7. It creates new needs and so drives economic and technological life.
8. It provides the pattern for the division of labour and for status.
9. It preserves and accumulates human experience, which is the condition of all progress.

Forms. Caste, closed and ascribed, ranked by ritual purity; class, relatively open and largely achieved, ranked by wealth and market position; estate, the legally defined orders of feudal Europe; and slavery.

The other theories, in outline, for contrast. Davis and Moore hold that unequal rewards are functionally necessary to draw scarce talent into important positions, to which Tumin replies that stratification restricts access to training so most talent is never discovered. Weber adds status and party to Marx's economic dimension, and the three vary independently. Sorokin founded the study of mobility.

Part 2: The Marxian understanding of class and class conflict

1. The foundation: historical materialism. The way people produce their material life determines their social, political and intellectual life. The economic base, comprising the forces and the relations of production, determines the superstructure of law, politics, religion and ideology.

5. Class in itself and class for itself. A class becomes a political force only when it becomes conscious of its position and organises. The transition is obstructed by false consciousness, produced by ideology: "the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class."

6. Class conflict as the motor of history. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Change occurs when the forces of production develop beyond what the existing relations can accommodate, and the contradiction bursts them.

7. Polarisation and revolution. Marx predicted concentration of capital, the disappearance of intermediate classes, increasing misery, growing class consciousness, revolution, a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally a classless society in which the state "withers away".

For full marks, cover: the debate on scientific status with both sides and the underlying methodological dispute, then the scope under the two schools, then the branches, then the relationship with the other social sciences, and a conclusion.

Part 1: Is sociology a science?

What science means. A body of systematic knowledge acquired by objective observation, classification, experiment where possible, and the formulation of general laws permitting prediction. The test is the method, not the subject matter.

Arguments for. It uses scientific methods, survey, case study, comparison, statistics and sampling; it is systematic and cumulative; facts are observed and verified, and Durkheim insisted that social facts be treated as "things"; it formulates laws, probabilistic rather than absolute, as in the finding that suicide rates vary inversely with social integration; it predicts within limits; and it establishes cause and effect.

Part 2: The scope of sociology

1. The formalistic or specialistic school. Sociology is a pure and independent science studying the forms of social relationships abstracted from their content: Simmel, Vierkandt, Von Wiese, Weber and Tonnies. Criticism: form and content cannot be separated, and no other science studies these forms.

2. The synthetic school. Sociology is a general science of society as a whole: Durkheim, dividing it into social morphology, social physiology and general sociology; Sorokin; and Ginsberg, dividing it into social morphology, social control, social processes and social pathology. Criticism: the field becomes so wide it risks superficiality.

The prevailing position is synthetic, worked out through specialised branches.

Part 3: The branches

Sociology of law; sociology of the family and of marriage; sociology of religion; sociology of education; industrial sociology; medical sociology; criminology and penology; rural sociology; urban sociology; political sociology; demography; social psychology; and the sociology of knowledge.

Conclusion. Sociology is a general social science whose subject matter, social relationships, runs through the territory of all the others, which is why it borrows from them and lends to them and why the boundaries are disputed.

4. The hierarchy of the sciences: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, ordered by decreasing generality and increasing complexity, with sociology last and most complex.

5. Social statics and social dynamics, the study of order and of progress. Statics treats the family as the basic unit and consensus universalis as the binding force; dynamics contains the Law of Three Stages. His motto: order and progress.

6. Methods: observation, experiment understood as the study of pathological cases, comparison, and the historical method.

7. The Religion of Humanity, his later and unsuccessful proposal of a positivist religion with humanity as its object.

Criticisms. The Law of Three Stages is unhistorical, since the three modes coexist; unilinear and Eurocentric; he underrated religion and then invented one; the hierarchy of sciences is arbitrary; he did no empirical research; and his political conclusion, rule by a scientific elite, is authoritarian.

6. Suicide. The demonstration that the most private act has social causes: rates vary systematically with religion, marital status and nationality, and are explained by integration and regulation, giving egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic types.

7. Religion. The totem is a symbol of the clan; the fundamental distinction is sacred and profane; religion's function is social integration through ritual and collective effervescence.

8. Sociology as a discipline. He established its subject matter, method and independence, held the first chair, and founded L'Année Sociologique.

Criticisms. Over emphasis on consensus, with little room for conflict or power; reliance on official statistics, which are themselves social products; the collective conscience is hard to observe; and his functionalism tends towards conservatism.

Assessment. Comte is the father of sociology by founding and naming, not by the durability of his theories; almost none of his substantive doctrines survives. Durkheim is the founder in the academic and methodological sense: the discipline as it is actually practised, empirical, comparative and concerned with social facts rather than individual motives, is his.

Mores are those folkways which a group regards as essential to its welfare, and which therefore carry strong moral feeling. The term is Sumner's. Their violation brings severe disapproval and often punishment, and the offender is thought immoral rather than merely odd. Honesty, monogamy and the prohibition of incest are mores.

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

The relation. Mores are informal and enforced by the community; law is formal and enforced by the state. Most of the criminal law began as mores, and law is what a society reaches for when informal disapproval stops being sufficient.

The functionalist perspective treats society as a system of interrelated parts, each of which performs a function contributing to the working and stability of the whole, so that the system tends towards equilibrium. It asks of any institution: what does it do for society?

Its exponents are Comte and Spencer, who supplied the organic analogy; Durkheim, who made function a method; Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown in anthropology; and Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton, its twentieth century systematisers.

Merton's refinements are essential: manifest functions, intended and recognised; latent functions, unintended and unrecognised; and dysfunctions, consequences that damage the system.

Two factors, stated fully:

1. Industrialisation, which separated the home from the workplace. Production moved out of the household to the factory and the office, so the family ceased to be a unit of production and became a unit of consumption. Work now requires the individual to go where the job is, which the joint household cannot accommodate.
2. Education and employment of women, which altered the internal balance of power. A woman with her own income is not in the position of one without: she marries later, has fewer children, participates in household decisions, and can leave a marriage that a dependent woman could not.

Two further factors if wanted: urbanisation, with small and expensive dwellings that cannot hold three generations; and legislation, which gave individuals rights against the group, most clearly in the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005.

By the number of partners:

1. Monogamy: one man married to one woman at a time; the most widespread form, and the only lawful form for Hindus, Christians and Parsis in India. Serial monogamy is remarriage after death or divorce.
2. Polygamy: polygyny, one man with several wives, sororal or non sororal; polyandry, one woman with several husbands, fraternal as among the Todas or non fraternal as among the Nairs; and group marriage, reported but doubted.

By rules of mate selection: endogamy, marriage within one's own group; exogamy, marriage outside a defined group, in Indian forms gotra, pravara, sapinda and village exogamy; hypergamy (anuloma) and hypogamy (pratiloma); levirate and sororate.

By residence: patrilocal, matrilocal, neolocal, avunculocal.

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.

Forms. The 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 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.

1. Primary and secondary (Cooley). 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 of children and the neighbourhood group of elders as practically universal, calling them the "nursery of human nature". A secondary group is large, impersonal, formal, contractual and a means to an end.
2. In group and out group (Sumner). The "we" group, marked by loyalty, against the "they" group, viewed with indifference or hostility. The distinction generates ethnocentrism.
3. Formal and informal, by organisation.
4. Reference groups (Merton): a group whose standards a person adopts whether or not he belongs to it, explaining anticipatory socialisation and, in India, Sanskritisation.
5. Voluntary and involuntary, by mode of entry.
6. Small and large groups, which differ qualitatively; Simmel's analysis of the dyad and triad is classical.
7. Tonnies: Gemeinschaft against Gesellschaft. Giddings: genetic against congregate. Sorokin: vertical against horizontal.

For full marks, cover: the definition, its relativity, its types, the theories, its functions, and the implications for law.

Definition. Social deviance is behaviour that violates the norms of a group or society and attracts disapproval, sanction or punishment.

Its essential feature: relativity. Nothing is deviant in itself. The same act may be deviant in one society and normal in another, deviant in one period and accepted in the next, deviant for one status and expected of another. Deviance is defined by the reaction of others, not by any quality in the act.

Types. By intensity, from breach of folkways, which brings mild disapproval, through breach of mores, to crime, which breaches the criminal law. Also individual and group deviance; positive deviance, where a person exceeds the norm, as a reformer does; and primary and secondary deviance in Lemert's terms.

Theories.

4. Labelling theory (Becker, Lemert). Deviance is created by the reaction, not the act: a group makes rules and applies them to particular people, who are thereby labelled outsiders. Primary deviance is the initial act; secondary deviance is the further offending produced by being labelled and treated as a deviant.
5. Control theory (Hirschi). The question is not why people deviate but why most do not, and the answer is the strength of their bond to society: attachment, commitment, involvement and belief.

Pluralism

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

The dimensions of Indian diversity. Religious, with every major world religion present and four of them born here; linguistic, with 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule and four language families; caste, with thousands of endogamous groups; tribal, with more than 700 Scheduled Tribes; and regional, in dress, food, festival and kinship rule.

The bases of unity. Geographical unity; civilisational continuity through shared epics and pilgrimage routes; the composite culture produced by centuries of interaction; a common constitutional order; the freedom movement; and secularism and federalism.

For full marks, cover: the definition of culture briefly, then its functions for the individual and for society separately, and its relation to law.

Culture is the entire social heritage of a people: everything learned as a member of society and transmitted to the next generation. Tylor: "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

Functions for the individual

1. It makes man human. Without culture the human infant is only an organism; language, morality, self awareness and the capacity for abstract thought appear only through it. The isolated and feral children are the evidence.
2. It completes the deficiency of instinct. Man has few reliable instincts, and culture supplies ready made solutions to the problems of living, so that each generation need not begin again.

4. Preservation and accumulation of experience across generations, which is the condition of all progress and the feature that most sharply distinguishes human from animal society.
5. Creation of new needs and of the drives to satisfy them, which is the engine of economic and technological life.
6. Continuity of society, since a society outlives its members only because culture is transmitted.

Relation to law

Law is itself part of the non material culture, and Tylor's definition names it explicitly. Culture supplies the values law enacts, the customs law recognises as a source, and the mores without whose support law cannot easily be enforced.

Descent, residence and authority

Descent: patrilineal, the Indian norm; matrilineal, as among the Nair, Khasi and Garo; or bilateral. Residence: patrilocal, matrilocal, neolocal, avunculocal. Authority: patriarchal or matriarchal.

Kinship usages

1. Avoidance. Certain kin must keep apart and may not address each other directly: a daughter in law and her father in law, or a man and his wife's mother. The purdah and the veil are its material expression in north India.
2. Joking relationships. Certain kin are permitted, even expected, to tease and joke with one another with familiarity that would be improper elsewhere: a man and his wife's younger sister, or a woman and her husband's younger brother.
3. Teknonymy. A person is referred to not by his own name but through a third person, usually a child: "Ramu's father", "Ramu's mother".
4. The avunculate. The mother's brother holds special authority over and obligation towards his sister's children, characteristic of matrilineal societies.

For full marks, cover: the meaning, the state and its elements, the other political institutions, the functions, the theories of who holds power, and the sociological framework.

Meaning. A political institution is the established system of norms, roles and organisations through which a society acquires, distributes and exercises power, maintains order, and settles conflict authoritatively.

The state, its central form, has four elements: population, territory, government and sovereignty. Weber's definition is the standard sociological one: the state is "the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."

Other political institutions. Government, with its legislature, executive and judiciary; political parties; pressure and interest groups; the electoral system; bureaucracy; and, in India, local self government through panchayats and municipalities under the 73rd and 74th Amendments.

1. It converts private troubles into public issues. This is the mechanism of the campaigns named. Each woman who posted had believed her experience exceptional; seeing thousands of similar accounts converted a private trouble into what C. Wright Mills called a public issue, and moved the shame from the victim to the conduct.
2. Agenda setting. From McCombs and Shaw: media may not tell people what to think but is strikingly effective in telling them what to think about. Harassment existed long before 2017; what changed was its salience.
3. Breaking the spiral of silence. Noelle Neumann found that people believing themselves in a minority keep quiet, which makes the apparent majority larger. These campaigns worked by reversing it: once enough women spoke, silence rather than speech became the minority position.
4. Bypassing institutional gatekeepers, which is why accounts naming powerful men appeared at all.
5. Redefining norms. Conduct previously treated as ordinary was renamed as harassment, and matrimonial expectations previously treated as reasonable were named as absurd. Norm change through publicity precedes and enables legal change.

(b) The reach of technology and social media in rural areas

What has reached. Mobile telephony and cheap data have spread very widely, and rural internet users are now a large share of the Indian total. The mobile phone, not the computer, is the Indian internet, and the growth of regional language and video content has brought in users who read little English and sometimes little of anything.

What its reach has produced. Access to information, prices and entitlements; direct benefit transfers and digital payments; telemedicine and distance education; new markets for small producers; and, during the pandemic, online schooling.

The limits, which are the point of the question.

1. The digital divide has several axes at once: urban against rural; rich against poor; male against female, since ownership of a phone by a woman is very much lower than by a man in rural India; caste; and language.
2. Access is not the same as use. Many rural users share a household phone, have limited data and use it for messaging and video rather than for the open web.
3. Infrastructure: electricity, network coverage and the cost of devices and data.

What are the effects of caste discrimination?

The context. Incidents of this kind, in which children or parents refused a mid day meal cooked by a Dalit cook, have been reported from several states. They matter sociologically because the mid day meal is designed to do two things at once, feed children and make them eat together, and the second is the harder one.

(a) The practice of purity and pollution, and where it extends

What it is. The caste hierarchy is ranked not by wealth or power but by ritual purity. Groups are ordered on a scale from most pure to most polluting, and contact of certain kinds with a lower group is believed to transmit pollution to a higher one, requiring purification. Louis Dumont, in Homo Hierarchicus, argued that the opposition of pure and impure is the single principle from which the whole caste order follows: hierarchy, separation and the division of labour all derive from it.

8. Menstruation and childbirth, where the same logic of pollution is applied to women within every caste, which is the connection the Sabarimala litigation turned on.
9. Death and mourning, which pollute the household temporarily and require purification.

(b) The effects of caste discrimination

1. Denial of dignity, which is the primary harm and the one the Constitution names: Article 21 as interpreted, and Article 17, which abolishes untouchability outright.
2. Psychological damage: internalised inferiority and what Ambedkar described as the destruction of self respect. The children in the incident described are being socialised into contempt, and the cook into humiliation, in the same act.
3. Educational harm: children of the excluded group drop out, and all the children learn a lesson the curriculum contradicts.
4. Economic exclusion: from land, credit, markets, private employment and customers.
5. Occupational confinement, and the persistence of degrading work.

The context. The "Blue Whale" phenomenon of 2016 and 2017 was reported as an online game or challenge series in which participants, mostly adolescents, were assigned escalating tasks of self harm. Its actual extent was disputed and much of the reporting was itself unverified, which is part of the sociological interest of the case: a moral panic and a genuine harm can be present at once.

(a) "Technology is a bane": examined rather than asserted

The case for the proposition.

1. Harm to children and adolescents: exposure to self harm content, violence and pornography; cyberbullying, which follows the victim home and has no closing time; grooming by strangers; and addiction that displaces sleep and study.
2. Mental health effects, driven by constant upward comparison with curated images, with the associations to anxiety, depression and disordered eating among adolescents among the most consistent findings in the field.

The case against the proposition, which an honest answer gives. Technology is also the source of the education, medicine, communication, employment and access to rights that have transformed Indian life; the same platforms that spread the harm carry the campaigns against it; and it has given a voice to people no established medium would have published. Technology is not a bane or a boon; it is a multiplier, and what it multiplies depends on the institutions surrounding it.

A necessary caution about this case in particular. Much of the reporting on the game was unverified, and several claimed instances were later doubted. Sociologists call this pattern a moral panic: a threat identified, amplified by media, attributed to an out group or a new technology, and producing demands for action out of proportion to the evidence. Saying so does not deny the real harms of online content to adolescents; it distinguishes what is established from what was reported, which is exactly the discipline a sociology paper should reward.

Law and regulation. The Information Technology Act, 2000, with the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021, imposing due diligence and a grievance mechanism; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, requiring verifiable parental consent for the data of children under 18 and prohibiting tracking and targeted advertising directed at them; POCSO, 2012, and Section 67B of the Information Technology Act on child sexual abuse material; the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015; and, on the constitutional side, Article 19(1)(a) with the reasonable restrictions permitted by Article 19(2), subject to Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015), which struck down Section 66A for vagueness.

Health and community. Accessible mental health services for adolescents; helplines; awareness campaigns conducted on the platforms themselves; and community and peer support.

Are we an egalitarian society?

An egalitarian society is one in which all members enjoy equal status, rights, opportunities and access to resources.

The answer is no in fact and yes in aspiration, and the examination should set out both.

Why not in fact. Sorokin's proposition is that no permanent social group has ever been "flat"; every known society is stratified. India is stratified simultaneously on caste, ascribed and ranked by ritual purity, with endogamy nearly intact and atrocities undiminished; on class, with inequality widening since 1991 even as absolute poverty has fallen; on gender, with an adverse child sex ratio, falling female labour force participation and unequal property in practice; on tribe, through land alienation and displacement; on religion, as the Sachar Committee (2006) documented; and on region.

3. Property rights, particularly the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, confirmed as a birth right in Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020).
4. Political participation, through reservation of one third of seats in panchayats and municipalities under Articles 243D and 243T, and the Women's Reservation Act, 2023.
5. Legal protection: the 2013 harassment statute, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, and the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006.
6. Health and nutrition, including maternal services and the address of anaemia.
7. Self help groups and micro credit, and MGNREGA, which guarantees equal wages.
8. Affordable childcare, the single largest missing input for participation in work.
9. Media and role models, and changed gender socialisation in the family and the school.
10. Involving men and boys, since a relationship cannot be changed by altering one party to it.
11. The women's movement, without which almost none of the legislation above would exist.

• Article 39(a): equal right to an adequate means of livelihood.
• Article 39(d): equal pay for equal work.
• Article 39(e): protection of the health and strength of women workers.
• Article 42: just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief.
• Article 44: uniform civil code.

Political and local government.

• Articles 243D and 243T: reservation of not less than one third of seats and offices for women in panchayats and municipalities.

Fundamental Duty.

• Article 51A(e): to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women.

Judicial development. Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997), laying down binding guidelines on sexual harassment; K. S. Puttaswamy (2017), privacy; Joseph Shine (2018), striking down adultery as treating a wife as her husband's property; Shakti Vahini (2018), the right to choose a partner; and Shayara Bano (2017), on instantaneous triple talaq.

5. Social statics and social dynamics, the study of order and of progress, with the family as the basic unit and consensus as the binding force. Motto: order and progress.

6. Methods: observation, experiment as the study of pathological cases, comparison and the historical method.

Criticisms. The Law of Three Stages is unhistorical and Eurocentric; he underrated religion and then invented one; and he did no empirical research.

B. Herbert Spencer (1820 to 1903)

1. The organic analogy. Society resembles an organism: both grow, grow more complex, show differentiation of structure with differentiation of function, have interdependent parts, and possess regulative, sustaining and distributive systems. The decisive difference is that an organism exists for the whole while a society exists for the benefit of its members.

2. The law of evolution. Change proceeds from indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to definite, coherent heterogeneity: societies grow in size, growth produces differentiation, and differentiation produces specialisation and interdependence.

1. The French Revolution (1789) and the political upheavals that followed, which destroyed the old order of monarchy, aristocracy and church and showed that a social order could be overturned, raising the question of what holds one together.
2. The Industrial Revolution, which created the factory, the working class, the industrial town and unprecedented forms of poverty, and destroyed the settled village order.
3. Urbanisation, producing crowding, crime, disease and anonymity on a scale no previous experience had prepared anyone for.
4. The Enlightenment, which supplied the confidence that human affairs could be understood by reason rather than accepted as divinely ordained.
5. The success of the natural sciences, which supplied the model of method, and Comte's ambition to extend it to society.
6. Socialism and the response to it, which forced attention to inequality, property and class.
7. Colonial expansion and the encounter with other societies, which produced comparative ethnography and made it obvious that human arrangements vary enormously.

What social control is, and its role

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: "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.

Its role.

1. To maintain order and stability.
2. To secure conformity and make behaviour predictable, which is the deepest role: cooperation requires that each person be able to anticipate what others will do, and without predictability no contract, institution or plan could exist.
3. To protect the weak from the strong.
4. To maintain solidarity in a society divided by caste, religion, language and class.
5. To restrain deviance and crime.

• Morality and conscience, the internalised standard.
• Public opinion, gossip, praise, ridicule, satire, sympathy and ostracism.
• Art, literature and proverbs.
• Agencies: family, neighbourhood, peer group, caste, religion, public opinion.
• Scrutiny: cheap, requiring no machinery; continuous, operating every waking moment; and effective, because internalised. But it works only in small, stable, face to face communities; it is imprecise and unappealable; and it enforces oppressive norms as readily as beneficial ones, since it is indifferent to content.

B. Formal means. Deliberately created, written, enforced by specialised agencies with defined penalties.

• Law, the principal instrument: general, definite, uniform, backed by the coercive power of the state, enforceable against the powerful, deliberately changeable and reviewable on appeal.
• Coercion, physical and non violent.
• Codified rules of organisations.
• Education, formal in organisation and largely informal in effect.
• Propaganda and mass communication.

The phenomenon

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.

Characteristics. It is universal, occurring in every society; continuous; variable in speed, faster in modern than traditional societies and faster in technology than in custom; the product of many causes; often unpredictable in its exact form, because human beings are reflexive; it produces chain reactions, since institutions are interdependent; it is frequently unplanned; it meets resistance from those the existing arrangement protects; and it is not the same as progress.

4. Conflict. Marx: change is driven by the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, working out as class struggle, and at the decisive moments by revolution. Dahrendorf restated it around authority, so conflict arises wherever some command and others obey. Criticism: one dimensional, and its predictions of polarisation and revolution in industrial societies were not borne out.

The two pairs. Evolutionary and cyclical theories disagree about the shape of change, a line or a circle. Functionalist and conflict theories disagree about its source, outside the system as a disturbance or inside it as a contradiction.

The factors

1. Demographic: size, density, composition and migration. Durkheim treated increasing material and moral density as the immediate cause of the growing division of labour.
2. Technological, which Ogburn treated as the leading factor, and on which he built cultural lag.
3. Economic: industrialisation, the market, and, in India, liberalisation in 1991.
4. Cultural and ideational: the diffusion of ideas and values, including Sanskritisation and Westernisation.

Part 1: The universality of social stratification

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

The claim of universality. Sorokin states it most strongly: "There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is 'flat' and in which all members are equal." Every known society is stratified.

The evidence for it.

1. No unstratified society has been found. Even the simplest societies rank by age, sex, kinship and ritual standing where there is no property to divide.
2. Groups founded on proclaimed equality develop hierarchies quickly: revolutionary parties, religious communities and communes all produce leaders, and Michels's iron law of oligarchy explains why, since organisation itself requires specialisation and specialisation produces power.

The qualification, which a complete answer supplies. Stratification is universal; its degree is not. Sorokin himself showed that the height and profile of the social pyramid fluctuate, being cut down when it grows too steep and rising when flattened too far, and that both extremes are unstable. Some societies are markedly more equal than others on income, health, education and mobility, and those differences are the product of policy. The accurate statement is therefore that absolute equality is unattainable 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 argument on this side: stratification restricts access to training, so most talent is never discovered and the system manufactures the differences it claims to reward.

Part 2: Marx's views

1. The foundation. Historical materialism: the way people produce their material life determines their social, political and intellectual life. The economic base determines the superstructure.

2. Class defined objectively by the relationship to the means of production, not by income or self perception. In every epoch two fundamental classes: master and slave, lord and serf, bourgeoisie and proletariat.

Criticisms of Marx. Economic determinism; polarisation did not occur, since the middle classes expanded; increasing misery did not occur in industrial societies; revolution occurred in agrarian states; class is not the only cleavage, since status, ethnicity, religion, caste and gender operate independently; and the societies founded on his theory produced new hierarchies rather than none.

Arguments that it is not.

1. No laboratory experiment: human beings cannot be isolated or manipulated, and ethics forbids the attempt.
2. Lack of objectivity: the sociologist belongs to the society he studies.
3. No exact measurement of attitudes, prestige, satisfaction or alienation.
4. Unreliable prediction, because behaviour is voluntary and reflexive.
5. Imprecise terminology.
6. Few universal laws, since social phenomena are bound to time and place.

The underlying dispute. Positivism, from Comte and Durkheim, holds that society can be studied exactly as nature is. Interpretivism, from Weber, replies that human action carries meaning for the actor, so the method must be verstehen. Neither wins outright.

Conclusion. Sociology is a science, but a social science, not a natural one. It satisfies the definition on the ground that matters, method, and cannot attain the precision of physics because its subject matter is conscious, variable and self aware. It is a young or developing science.

1. The social survey, by questionnaire or schedule on a sample. Covers large populations; superficial and subject to social desirability bias.
2. The case study, intensive study of one unit. Depth and process; cannot be generalised.
3. Observation, participant and non participant. Access to meaning against objectivity.
4. The interview, structured, unstructured, semi structured, focused or depth. Probing and motive against time and interviewer bias.
5. The comparative method, which Durkheim called sociology's substitute for experiment.
6. The historical method.
7. The statistical method: sampling, correlation and tests of significance.
8. The functional method, explaining an institution by its contribution to the whole.
9. Weber's ideal type, a pure model used as a yardstick.
10. Content analysis of texts, newspapers, judgments and digital records.