1. Presented By : Prof. Alok Kumar
Head
Department of Sociology
Chaudhary Charan Singh University
Concepts and Theories of Social
Change By Yogendra Singh
2. Introduction
Social change is the change in established
patterns of social relations, or change in social
values, or change in structures and subsystems
operating in society.
Yogendra Singh in his report deals with theories
and concepts of social change rather than with
the substantial aspects.
He traces the development of concepts and
theories since the 19th century when the British
and Indian scholars were concerned with the
origin and development of the caste system.
3. Types of Approach
Gradually, these concepts and formulations got
differentiated and a variety of approaches
emerged.
In the present report, these approaches can be
classified into the following types :
Evolutionary Approach
Cultural Approach
Structural Approach
Dialectical Historical Approach
4. Evolutionary Approach
In the evolutionary approach, gradual
development is studied from simple to complex,
through a long series of small changes. Each
change results in a minor modification of the
system, but the cumulative effect of many
changes over a long period is the emergence of
new complex forms.
The evolutionary approaches analyze the stages
through which the institutions like caste, family,
marriage and kinship and village community
moved in India.
5. Studies with this approach have focused on village
community, caste system, and family as follows:
Scholars like NK Dutt (1931), Ghurye (1945) have
focused on the origin of caste and its racial
composition with emphasis on the factors which
contributed to the emergence of caste.
Similarly, Henry S Maine(1890), Baden Powell
(1908) in their studies of villages and land systems
tried either to find out the historical stage of growth or
their comparative evolutionary sequence and
succession of forms.
BN Seal and RK Mukherjee(1967) disapproved of
the assumption given by western scholars that social
institutions in India were at a lower level of evolution
than in the west.
6. Cultural Approach
In the cultural approach, change is studied by
analyzing the changing cultural elements of
society.
Within this approach, MN Srinivas studied
change through Sanskritization and
westernization processes.
Robert Redfield through a change in Little and
Great traditions, and
McKim Marriot through the process of
Parochialisation and Universalisation.
7. Sanskritization and Westernization processes
Sanskritization
According to MN Srinivas(1973), Sanskritization refers to
the process of adopting customs, rituals, ideology, and way
of life of higher castes by the lower castes with a view to
raise their position in the caste hierarchy. It is the process
of cultural mobility in the traditional social structure. The
higher castes are not always Brahmins, they could be
Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, and so on in various regions of the
country.
Yogendra Singh, in the present report, comments on the
concept of Sanskritisation as having two connotations :
1. Historical Context: In this, Sanskritisation is seen as a
process of social mobility throughout the history of Indian
society.
2. Contextual Context: In this perspective, Sanskritisation
is a process of change in a relative sense.
8. Sanskritization and Westernization processes
Westernization
MN Srinivas(1973) defines that Westernization is
adopting the ideals, values (like rationalism,
humanism), institutions, and technology of the
western society by the non-western society. Simply, it
refers to changes brought out as a consequence of
contact with western culture.
Srinivas refers to three levels of westernization :
1) Primary: The Primary level refers to those people
who came directly into contact with the British.
2) Secondary: The Secondary level includes those
who were directly benefited from the people who
were at the primary level.
3) Tertiary: These are the people who were remotely
benefited by the process of westernization.
9. Little and Great traditions
Following Robert Redfield (1955) who analyzed
the social change in the Mexican communities
with the help of the concepts of Little and Great
traditions, McKim Mariott (1955) and Milton
Singer (1959) studied social change in India with
this conceptual framework.
Little traditions are indigenous customs, deities,
and rites found at the folks or peasants level.
They persist at the level of the village community
and their growth is internal.
Great traditions are those traditions that grow
because of outside contacts and are found at the
elite level.
10. Parochialisation and Universalisation
The process of moving elements of Little tradition
(customs, rites, etc) upward to the level of Great
tradition is called ‘universalization’ by McKim
Marriott.
The process of moving of elements of Great
tradition downward to become part of the Little
tradition is called ‘parochialization’.
Thus, these concepts (of universalization and
parochialization) also describe the processes of
cultural change.
11. Structural Approach
This approach analyzes the change in the network of
social relationships and social structures (like castes,
kinship, factory, administrative structures, etc ). These
social relationships and structures are compared intra-
culturally as well as cross-culturally.
According to Yogendra Singh (1977), a structural analysis
of change consists of demonstrating the qualitative nature
of new adaptations in the patterned relationships. To
explain further he cites an example where when the
spouse is selected by a child himself and not by his
parents, the nature of quality of conjugal relations is bound
to be different.
For Yogendra Singh, Family is today functionally joint to a
large extent, but structurally it is nuclear. Further, caste is
becoming increasingly an interest group of the articulate
few from among the members of a caste.
12. Dialectical Historical Approach
The main architects of this approach are Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels.
According to Yogendra Singh(1973), Marx mentioned five
stages in social differentiation :
1. The tribal community with undivided land and agriculture
in common
2. The disintegration of the tribal community and its
transformation into family communities with the
loosening of common property
3. Shares fixed by inheritance rights or the degree of
kinship, thus creating inequality.
4. Transformation of inequality based on kinship into
inequality based on possession as expressed bu actual
cultivation
5. A system of periodic distribution of communal lands
13. DP Mukerji (1958) applied the Marxist approach
to study social change in India found that in the
emergence of new class structures(in the form of
the middle class), the role of the Indian Tradition
was immense.
On similar lines, RK Mukherjee, in his book
“Rise and Fall of East India Company” applies
the Dialectical-Historical approach for the study of
change.
AR Desai (1966) in his book “Social background
of Indian Nationalism” finds that class-based
inequalities and contradictions determine the
nature of social change and development.
14. Conclusions and Suggestions
Yogendra Singh concludes that while some
conceptual schemes have been evolved to
analyze the social change in India, no theories
have yet emerged. Most of the studies have been
done based on a cultural approach ignoring the
structural and dialectical-historical approach.
He suggests that it was the need of the hour that
the study of social change must be done from a
systematic and dialectical-historical frame of
reference instead of continuum models.
15. References
Singh,Yogendra
1974 : “ Concepts and Theories of social change
“, A survey of Research in sociology and
social anthropology,
Vol.1, Popular Prakasan,Bombay
,pp:383 - 425
