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Unit 12: Processes of Change

The first human rights group in India the Civil Liberties Union was formed by Jawahar Lal Nehru Notes
and some of his collegues in the early 1930s with the specific objective of providing legal aid to some
freedom fighters. It was not until the late 1960s that the real emergence of human rights groups took
place. “This was triggered off when both the privileged social classes and the governed systematically
cracked down on groups fighting for the rights of traditionally oppressed peoples-landless labour,
marginal and small peasants, the unorganized working class and their mobilisers and supporters
among the articulate and conscientious sections of the political middle classes” (Smitu Kothari, 1991).
Several organizations were formed during this period, Notable among these were the Association for
the Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR) in West Bengal, the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties
Committee (APCLC) and later the Association for Democratic Rights (AFDR) in Punjab. It was only
after Jaya Prakash Narayan launched a major agitation against the growing authoritarianism of Mrs.
Indira Gandhi that a large number of prominent liberals and humanists some together with radicals
in 1975 to form the first national human rights organization, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties
and Democratic Rights (PU CLDR). Within a few months, a series of political developments helped
consolidate the scattered people and organizations working toward this end. The declaration of
Emergency on June 26,1975 proved to be a potent catalytic event. The decade of the 1980s marked in
many ways a high point for the human rights movement. This phase saw the revival of the old and
emergence of many new human rights groups.
The groups involved in advocacy of civil liberties, democratic rights and human rights in general
raised three kinds of issues: (1) direct or indirect violations by the State (police lawlessness including
torture, murders and illegal detentions, (2) denial in practice of legally stipulated rights as well as the
inability of government institutions to perform their functions, and (3) structural constraints which
restrict realization of rights, e.g., violence in the family, landlords’ private armies, the continuing
colonization and exploitation of tribal people.
Self-Assessment

1. Fill in the blanks:
(i) Sanskritization and Westernization were developed by ............... in ............... .
(ii) Vasco-da-Gama arrived with his ships at Calicut in ............... .
(iii) Land legistation has everywhere abolished concession tenures such as zamindari, jagirdari,
Inam and ............... .
(iv) Hinduism has assumed a political form in ............... and the ............... .
(v) In 1960, the government of India appointed a Hindu Religions Endowments commission
under the chairmanship of ............... .
12.7 Summary

• The concepts of ‘Sanskritization’ and ‘Westernization’ were developed by M.N. Srinivas in
1952 in the analysis of the social and religious life of the Coorgs of South India. Up to the
middle of the twentieth century, caste was studied either in terms of the varna model or in terms
of status based on notions of heredity and pollution and purity. Srinivas analyzed the caste
system in terms of upward mobility. He maintained that the caste system is not a rigid system
in which the position of each caste is fixed for all time. Movement has always been possible. A
low caste was able to rise, in a generation or two, to a higher position in the hierarchy by
adopting vegetarianism and teetotalism. It took over rituals, customs, rites and beliefs of the
Brahmins and gave up some of their own considered to be impure. The adoption of the Brahmanic
way of life by a low caste seems to have been possible, though theoretically forbidden (1985:42).
• Srinivas has defined ‘Sanskritization’ as a process by which the low castes take over the beliefs,
rituals, style of life, and other cultural traits from those of the upper castes, specially the Brahmins.
In fact, Srinivas has been broadening his definition ot Sanskritization from time to time. Initially,
he described it as “the process of mobility of lower castes by adopting vegetarianism and
teetotalism to move in the caste hierarchy in a generation or two (1962: 42). Later on, he redefined

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