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Social Structure and Social Change

Notes really matters, is altogether independent of the political conditions which happen to prevail”. He
further writes: “Since social life in India is entirely independent of any form of political government,
it remains permanently stable” (Ibid:120). Hutton (1961: 121) too is of the opinion that “Indian society
has survived a vast number of invasions, famines, revolutions, and social upheavals of all kinds,
including conquests by invaders of alien religion, essentially antagonistic to Hinduism, and there
can be no doubt that this is largely due to the caste system on which that society has constructed
itself, a system which often survived even conversion to Islam or Christianity”. Thus, the caste system
has conferred social stability on India because it provides for unlimited extension of the society by
the inclusion as integral parts of the structure of any number of segregative and particularizing entities.
Fourthly, caste integrates society, that is, it combines various groups, institutions and sub-systems
(or parts) into whole. Hutton has said that one important function of caste, perhaps the most important
of all its functions, and the one which above all others makes caste in India a unique institution, is or
has been, to integrate Indian society, to weld into one community the various competing, if not
incompatible, groups composing it. He thinks that had the national and political groups not been
absorbed in Indian society through the caste system, they would have remained as unadjusted and
possibly subversive elements. Between the conquerors and the conquered, the conquerors have always
predominated and tried to absorb other group. On the other hand, the conquered have always
remained disgruntled. They do not adjust and accommodate. There are thus always conflicts between
the two. But India has always accommodated the group of conquerors and thus maintained its stability.
When Europeans and Bantus in South Africa and Whites and Negroes in America have failed in
solving their problems, Indian society has succeeded in it through the caste system. Thus, caste may
be described as integrator of peoples. Gilbert (cf. Hutton, 1961: 120) too has said that India has
developed a system of castes which, as a scheme of social adjustment, compares rather favourably
with the European system of warring territorial nationalities.
Ram Krishna Mukherjee (1957: 60) has stated that British India made serious onslaughts on the
sanctions of the caste system; yet it remains a fact that almost the entire rural population and the
great majority of the town-dwellers in British India went on adhering to the caste discipline of inter-
dining and inter-marriage and caste consciousness remained in the pores of society. Raising the
question as to what supplied the social force to this kind of existence which upheld the village
community system of India for centuries as unaffected by the political clouds over the Indian sky,
R.K. Mukherjee (Ibid: 70) says that the answer (to this question) lies in the fact that besides its self-
sufficient and autonomous character and the simplicity of the organization which maintained villages
as independent units in society vis-a-vis the outer world, internally village communities were stabilized
by the caste system. It was the jati division of the society which provided the internal mechanism of
the village community system and stabilized it socially and ideologically.
Furnival has described the Indian society a plural society in which various groups form a social
whole maintaining their distinctive characteristic. He has said: “The stability of the Indian plural
society is due to the fact that the caste system has afforded a place in society into which any group, be
it racial, social, religious or occupational, can be fitted as a co-operating part of the social whole,
while retaining its own distinctive character and its separate individual life.” Sherring (1939: 274) is
also of the opinion that caste is in a certain sense a bond of union among all classes of the Hindu
community. Referring to these social functions, Hutton (1961: 115) has opined that the functions
which caste performs for an individual may be and are performed for individuals by other institutions
in other societies. The functions performed by the caste system for the caste group as a body will be
found performed in some more or less analogous way in other systems by such social groups as exist
in them. But the functions which it has performed and still performs for the Indian society as a whole
are not found elsewhere.
8.5 Demerits and Merits of the Caste System

8.5.1 Demerits of the Caste System
The analysis of the structure of the caste system has raised the question of its dysfunctional and
functional aspects. The important demerits of the caste system have been described as follows:

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