Meaning, Characteristics, factors or causes of social change, processes of social change (Westernization, Modernization, Industrialization, Sanskritisation, Liberalization, Globalization)

A family in a Maharashtra village stops eating meat, starts wearing the sacred thread, hires a Brahmin priest for its weddings and tells the census it is Kshatriya. Nothing about the caste system has changed. But that family's place in it has. Half of Indian social change works like this — movement within a structure that itself stays put — and the other half, arriving with the railway, the factory and the 1991 reforms, works by changing the structure from outside.

In two minutes

Six processes carry social change in India: Sanskritisation, Westernization, Modernization, Industrialization, Liberalization and Globalization. The first moves a group up inside the caste hierarchy and leaves the hierarchy intact; the other five come from outside it and corrode it.

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