Page 256 - DSOC201_SOCIAL_STRUCTURE_AND_SOCIAL_CHANGE_ENGLISH

Unit 12: Processes of Change

2. Power and dominance have been integrated by Srinivas with the process of Sanskritization. This Notes
introduces the structural element in the Sanskritization model of social change. Srinivas has not
made this explicit. He has maintained that many lower castes in the past ascended to higher
positions and became dominant castes either through royal decrees or through usurping the power.
This means that without going through the process of Sanskritization too, lower castes can rise in
the social scale through structural changes, that is, through conflicts and war, through rise and
fall of power, or through political stratagems.
3. The concepts of Sanskritization and Westernization primarily analyze social change in cultural
and not in structural terms. Sanskritization involves ‘positional change’ in the caste system without
any structural modification.
4. Zetterberg (1965: 40) is of the opinion that Srinivas’s two concepts are ‘truth asserting’ concepts.
This connotation is often vague. Srinivas himself has said that Sanskritization is an extremely
complex and heterogeneous concept. It would be more profitable to treat it as a bundle of concepts
than as a single concept. It is only name for a widespread cultural process.
5. Srinivas’s model explains the process of social change only in India which is based on the caste
system. It is not useful for other societies.
6. These concepts do not lead to a consistent theory of cultural change. Even their nominal definitions
are devoid of theory. Zetterberg (1965: 40) has said that these two concepts can be appropriate or
inappropriate, effective or worthless, but never false or true.
7. Harper treats this concept as a functional concept distinct from a historical concept of change.
8. Yogendra Singh maintains (1973: 11) that Sanskritization fails to account for many aspects of
cultural changes in the past and contemporary India as it neglects the non-sanskritic traditions,
which often are a localized form of the sanskritic tradition. McKim Marriott (1955: 196-97) also
found such phenomenon in his study of a village community in India.
9. In some parts of the country (like Punjab and former Sind), what was imitated by castes was not
sanskritic tradition but the Islamic tradition. In Punjab, Sikkhism emerged as synthesis of the
Hindu tradition with the Islamic movements of Sufism and mysticism.
All this points out that the two concepts developed by Srinivas indicate only the limited and not
the complete change in India.
12.3 Modernization

Modernization has many dimensions. It may be perceived at society level, group level, or individual
level. It may also be perceived as economic modernization, political modernization, social
modernization, technological modernization, military modernization, police modernization,
educational modernization, administrative modernization, and so forth. The concept has thus been
employed in a diffused manner.
Economists perceive modernization in terms of man’s application of technologies to the control of
natures’ resources in order to bring about a marked increase in the output per individual in the
society. Sociologists examine it in terms of differentiation in the quality of life that characterizes the
modern societies. They explore new structures created to perform new functions, or new functions
assigned to old structures. They also study the dysfunctional consequences of the modernization
process like mental illness, violence, social unrest, regionalism and parochialism, and caste and class
conflicts, etc. Political scientists focus on the problems of nation and government building as
modernization occurs. They also remain concerned with the ways in which political elite respond to
the efforts of new participants in politics to share power and to make demands upon those who
monopolize power (Myron Weiner, 1966: 3).
According to Eisenstadt (1969: 1), modernization is the most over-whelming feature of the
contemporary scene, in the sense that most nations are nowadays caught in its web. The characteristics
and the processes of modernization in different countries are in some respect common and in some
respect different. Historically, modernization (as the process of change in social, economic and political
systems) has developed from a great variety of different traditional societies in different regions of

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