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Chapter 8: Social Movements

Think about your Sunday. Most students, office-workers and factory workers across the world work for five or six days and rest on the weekend. It feels like a natural rhythm of life, as though the week has always been shaped this way. It has not.

The weekly holiday, the idea that a working day should not stretch beyond eight hours, the principle that men and women should be paid equally for the same work, the promise of social security and a pension in old age — none of these was a gift handed down by employers or governments. Each was demanded, resisted, demanded again, and finally won by workers who organised themselves over decades. Many of them never lived to enjoy what they had fought for.

This is a strange feature of the rights we hold most casually. We assume they simply exist, the way rain and sunlight exist. In fact almost every one of them carries a history of collective struggle behind it — the nineteenth-century social reform movements against caste and gender discrimination, the nationalist movement that ended colonial rule in India in 1947, the anti-colonial movements across Asia, Africa and the Americas, the civil rights movement in the United States, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.

Sociologists call this force a social movement. This chapter asks what it is, how it works, and how it has shaped India.

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.1 – Ordinary rights and past collective struggles.

NoteCuriosity Corner

Q1. Every protest is not a social movement. So what exactly must a collective action have before sociologists will call it one? Q2. Why does an effort to change society so often produce an organised effort to stop that change? Q3. Why did villagers in the Himalayan foothills hug trees — was it about the environment, about food and firewood, or about power? Q4. Movements are sometimes divided into “old” and “new”. Does that division work in India? Q5. Why has the Dalit movement been described not only as a struggle for jobs or land, but as “a struggle to be touched”?

Read on. Every one of these questions is answered somewhere in this chapter.

8.1 Features of a Social Movement

Rights are won, not given

Before we can say what a social movement is, it helps to notice what social movements have already done. The right of every adult to vote, for instance, looks today like an obvious feature of a democracy. It was not obvious to those who resisted it, and it was not granted quietly.

Recalling such histories is not sentimental. It is the first step in thinking sociologically about change: whenever you find a right that people now take for granted, you can usually find, behind it, an organised struggle that once seemed unreasonable, dangerous or impossible.

The right to vote. Universal adult franchise — the right of every adult to vote — is among the foremost rights guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. It means that we can be governed only by representatives we have ourselves elected. This was a radical departure from colonial rule, when ordinary people had to submit to the authority of colonial officers who represented the interests of the British Crown. Even in Britain, however, the vote was not open to all: it was restricted to men who owned property. Chartism was a social movement demanding parliamentary representation in England. In 1839, more than 1.25 million people signed the People’s Charter, asking for universal male suffrage, voting by ballot, and the right to stand for election without owning property. In 1842 the movement collected 3.25 million signatures — an enormous number for a small country. Yet it was only after World War I, in 1918, that all men over 21, married women, women who owned houses, and women university graduates over the age of 30 got the vote. When the suffragettes — women activists — took up the cause of the vote for all adult women, they were bitterly opposed and their movement was violently crushed.

Compare your life with your grandmother’s. How is it different from yours? Which rights do you take for granted that she did not have? Discuss in class.

You have already read about the nineteenth-century social reform movements, about the struggles against caste and gender discrimination, and about the nationalist movement that ended colonial rule in India in 1947. You know too of the nationalist movements across Asia, Africa and the Americas that brought colonial rule to an end, of socialist movements the world over, of the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s that fought for equal rights for Blacks, and of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Each changed its society in fundamental ways.

Movements also feed one another. They do not simply change societies; they inspire further movements. You saw in Chapter 3 how the Indian national movement shaped the making of the Indian Constitution — and how the Constitution, once made, itself became a powerful instrument of social change.

Think of one example that shows both things at once: how a society was changed by a social movement, and how that movement went on to inspire other social movements. Trace the link in three or four sentences.

What makes a movement a movement

Not every gathering of angry people is a social movement. A crowd that blocks a road for an afternoon because a bus has broken down, and disperses by evening, is not one. A social movement requires sustained collective action over time — action taken together, by many people, over months and years rather than hours.

Such action is often directed against the state, and usually takes the form of demanding a change in state policy or practice. A spontaneous, disorganised protest, however loud, cannot be called a social movement.

Collective action must also carry some degree of organisation. That organisation may include a leadership, and a structure that defines how members relate to one another, how decisions are made, and how they are carried out.

Those who take part share something further: shared objectives and ideologies. A social movement has a general orientation — a way of approaching the task of bringing about change, or of preventing it.

These defining features are not fixed for all time. They may change over the course of a movement’s life: leaders die or are replaced, structures harden, aims widen or narrow.

NoteDefinition

A social movement is sustained collective action, marked by some degree of organisation — a leadership and a structure — carried out by people who share objectives and an ideology, and directed at bringing about (or preventing) change on a public issue.

Fig. 8.2

Fig. 8.2 – The five features of a social movement.

Q1. Every protest is not a social movement. So what exactly must a collective action have before sociologists will call it one?

A. Four things. It must be sustained over time, not a single outburst. It must have some organisation, including a leadership and a structure for making and carrying out decisions. Its participants must share objectives and an ideology. And it must aim at change on a public issue, not a private grievance. A spontaneous, disorganised protest that ends the same day meets none of these conditions.

a protest vs a social movement A protest is a single act of collective expression — a march, a strike, a road blockade. A social movement is the sustained, organised effort of which such protests may be one visible instrument. Every social movement uses protest; not every protest belongs to a social movement.

identifying the features of a social movement For two years, residents of a small town have been trying to stop the local river from being polluted by untreated effluent. They meet on the first Sunday of every month in a school hall. They have elected a small committee, which decides what to do next; a retired schoolteacher speaks for the group when officials visit. They have agreed on a common demand — a treatment plant before any new licence is granted — and they explain their case in the language of the town’s right to clean water. Some members want to negotiate; others want to sit outside the collector’s office. This is a social movement in miniature: sustained collective action, an organisation with a leadership and a structure, shared objectives and an ideology, and a public issue as its goal.

Movements and the movements against them

Social movements often arise with the aim of bringing about changes on a public issue — for example, securing the right of the tribal population to use the forests, or the right of displaced people to resettlement and compensation. Think of the other issues that movements have taken up, in the past and in the present.

But change is not welcomed by everyone. While social movements seek to bring about social change, counter movements sometimes arise in defence of the status quo — that is, in defence of things as they are. The history of Indian social reform is full of them.

When Raja Rammohun Roy campaigned against sati and formed the Brahmo Samaj, defenders of sati formed the Dharma Sabha and petitioned the British not to legislate against it. When reformers demanded education for girls, many protested that this would be disastrous for society. When reformers campaigned for widow remarriage, they were socially boycotted.

When children of the so called ‘lower castes’ enrolled in schools, some so called ‘upper caste’ children were withdrawn from those schools by their families. Peasant movements have often been brutally suppressed. More recently, the movements of groups that were formerly excluded, such as the Dalits, have often invoked retaliatory action, and proposals to extend reservation in educational institutions have led to counter movements opposing them.

The pattern is worth pausing on. A social movement cannot change society easily, because it goes against both entrenched interests and entrenched values — against people who stand to lose something, and against people who believe the existing arrangement is right. Opposition and resistance are therefore not an accident of a movement; they are a normal part of its life. Yet over a period of time, changes do take place.

Q2. Why does an effort to change society so often produce an organised effort to stop that change?

A. Because an existing social arrangement is held in place by two things at once — interests (someone benefits materially from it) and values (someone believes it is right and proper). A movement that attacks the arrangement therefore threatens both, and those who are threatened organise in defence of the status quo. This is what sociologists call a counter movement.

Q. Does the existence of a counter movement mean the original movement has failed?

A. No — it usually means the opposite. A counter movement appears only when a demand has become serious enough to threaten established interests and values. Opposition is a sign that the movement is being taken seriously, and change, though slow, still follows.

The many things a movement does

Protest is the most visible form of collective action, but it is only one of the things a social movement does — and often not the most important.

Movement activists hold meetings to mobilise people around the issues that concern them. Such activity builds a shared understanding, and prepares the ground for a feeling of agreement, or consensus, about how the collective agenda should be pursued. A movement must first persuade its own people before it can persuade anyone else.

Social movements also chart out campaigns. These include lobbying with the government, with the media, and with other important makers of public opinion — the slow, unglamorous work of argument and pressure that you will recall from the discussion in Chapter 3.

Movements also develop distinct modes of protest: their own repertoire of ways to be seen and heard. These may be candle and torchlight processions, the use of black cloth, street theatre, songs and poetry. Gandhi adopted novel methods such as ahimsa (non-violence), satyagraha (the insistence on truth as a form of resistance) and the use of the charkha (the spinning wheel) in the freedom movement. Recall too the innovative modes of protest of that struggle — picketing, and the deliberate defiance of the colonial ban on producing salt.

The repertoire of satyagraha. During India’s nationalist struggle, the fusion of foreign power and foreign capital was the focus of social protest. Mahatma Gandhi wore khadi — hand-spun, hand-woven cloth — to support Indian cotton-growers, spinners and weavers whose livelihoods had been destroyed by a government policy that favoured mill-made cloth. The legendary Dandi March to make salt was a protest against British taxation policies, which placed a huge burden on the consumers of basic commodities in order to benefit the empire. Gandhi took items of everyday mass consumption — cloth and salt — and transformed them into symbols of resistance.

Fig. 8.3

Fig. 8.3 – Breaking the salt laws, 1930.

Notice what Fig. 8.3 shows about the choice of a mode of protest. Salt was not chosen because it was valuable. It was chosen because it was ordinary — because everybody, rich and poor, used it, and everybody paid the tax on it. A good mode of protest turns something familiar into an argument.

Make a list of the different social movements you have heard or read about. For each, write down two columns: what changes does it want to bring about, and what changes does it want to prevent? This list, extended over a few weeks with newspaper cuttings, would make a good CBSE project.

8.1.1 Distinguishing Social Change and Social Movements

It is important to distinguish between social change in general and social movements in particular. The two are related, but they are not the same thing, and confusing them makes the study of either impossible.

Social change is continuous and ongoing. It has no leadership, no office, no agenda. The broad historical processes of social change are the sum total of countless individual and collective actions, gathered across time and space — nobody plans them, and no single group can claim them.

Social movements, by contrast, are directed towards specific goals. They involve long and continuous social effort and action by people who intend a particular outcome. Intention and direction are exactly what distinguishes a movement from a drift.

To draw on the discussion in Chapter 2: we can view sanskritisation and westernisation as instances of social change — slow processes, produced by innumerable ordinary decisions. But the efforts of the nineteenth-century social reformers to change society were social movements: organised, deliberate, aimed at a stated goal.

Social change vs Social movement | Feature | Social change | Social movement | |—|—|—| | Nature | Continuous, ongoing, ever-present | Episodic — it begins, grows and may end | | Direction | No specific goal; the sum of countless actions | Directed at specific, stated goals | | Agency | No identifiable leadership or organisation | Has leadership, organisation and structure | | Intention | Largely unintended; nobody plans it | Deliberate and sustained effort by people | | Example (NCERT) | Sanskritisation; westernisation | The nineteenth-century social reformers’ efforts |

Q. If a social movement succeeds, does it become social change?

A. In a sense, yes. A movement is the deliberate, organised push; social change is the wider, slower shift in society. When a movement’s demand is absorbed into law, custom and common sense — as the demand for the vote was — the movement fades and the change remains.

8.2 Sociology and Social Movements

8.2.1 Why the Study of Social Movements is Important for Sociology

From the very beginning, the discipline of sociology has been interested in social movements. This is not a coincidence. Sociology was itself born in a Europe that was being shaken by collective action, and its earliest questions were questions about what such action meant.

Consider the two great upheavals in its background. The French Revolution was the violent culmination of several movements aimed at overthrowing the monarchy and establishing ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. In Britain, the industrial revolution was marked by great social upheaval. Recall the discussion on the emergence of sociology in the west in your Class XI textbook, Introducing Sociology.

Look closely at what industrialisation actually did to people. Poor labourers and artisans left the countryside to find work in the cities, and found there the inhuman living conditions into which they were forced — overcrowded, insanitary, and insecure. They protested. Food riots in England were common, and were often suppressed by the government.

Fig. 8.4

Fig. 8.4 – How collective protest became a sociological question.

Durkheim: the anxiety about order

How were these protests understood at the time? The elites of the day perceived them as a major threat to the established order of society. Their anxiety about maintaining social order was reflected in the work of the sociologist Emile Durkheim.

Durkheim’s writings — on the division of labour in society, on the forms of religious life, and even on suicide — all mirror one underlying concern: how do social structures enable social integration? What is it that binds individuals into a society and keeps them bound? From within this way of asking the question, social movements appear as forces that lead to disorder. Collective protest is read as a symptom of something coming loose.

social integration and the fear of disorder Proposed by: Emile Durkheim (French, late nineteenth and early twentieth century) Core idea: The central sociological problem is how societies hold together. Social structures — the division of labour, religion, shared moral rules — integrate individuals into a collective life. Collective protest, seen from this angle, signals a breakdown of that integration. Key terms: social integration, social order, division of labour Evidence: Durkheim’s studies of the division of labour, of religious life, and of suicide, all approached society as something that must be held together by structures external to the individual. Limitation: It treats collective action largely as disorder. It cannot easily see a protest as a reasoned response to injustice — which is precisely what the next tradition insists it is.

Marx and after: the crowd has its reasons

Scholars influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx offered a different view of violent collective action. Where the first tradition saw disorder, they asked a blunter question: disorder for whom, and why?

Historians like E. P. Thompson showed that the ‘crowd’ and the ‘mob’ were not made up of anarchic hooligans out to destroy society. They too had a moral economy — their own shared understanding of what was right and wrong, of what a fair price was and what a rightful claim was, and this understanding informed their actions.

Their research showed that poor people in urban areas had good reasons for protesting. And they often resorted to public protest for a reason worth remembering: they had no other way of expressing their anger and resentment against deprivation. Where the ballot, the newspaper and the courtroom are closed to you, the street is what remains.

E. P. Thompson — the ‘moral economy’ of the crowd Question: Were the crowds that rioted over food in early industrial England simply lawless mobs, or were they acting on some shared idea of justice? Method: Historical and documentary analysis — a close reading of the records left behind by such crowds and by the authorities who suppressed them. Finding: The crowds acted on a shared moral code about fair prices and rightful claims. Their targets were selective, not random. Meaning: It established that collective protest by the poor is a rational, morally reasoned act, not a lapse into anarchy. Its limitation is that it reads such a code largely from official records — the crowd’s own voice survives mostly through the writing of those who policed it.

what is a social movement — a threat to order, or a claim for justice? View 1: Movements as disorder. Sustained collective protest signals a weakening of the bonds that integrate individuals into society; the sociologist’s task is to understand what holds society together. Strongest evidence: the genuine upheaval of revolutionary France and industrialising Britain, where established institutions did break down. View 2: Movements as reasoned claims. The crowd has a moral economy of its own; the poor protest because they are deprived and because no other channel is open to them. Strongest evidence: Thompson’s finding that crowd action followed a shared code of right and wrong, and was directed at specific grievances. What both agree on: Collective action is not random. It arises out of the structure of a society and tells the sociologist something important about it.

Q. Why should a sociologist study a movement at all, rather than leave it to historians?

A. Because a movement makes visible what is usually hidden. In ordinary times, the interests, values and inequalities of a society are taken for granted and rarely stated aloud. When people organise to change them, they must name them — and the sociologist can then see the structure of the society written out in the open.

8.3 Types of Social Movements

8.3.1 Reformist, Redemptive, Revolutionary

Movements differ enormously in what they want. Some want to change how a person lives; some want to change a law; some want to change who rules. Sociologists have therefore classified social movements into three kinds: (i) redemptive or transformatory; (ii) reformist; and (iii) revolutionary.

A redemptive social movement aims to bring about a change in the personal consciousness and actions of its individual members. It begins with the self. For instance, people in the Ezhava community in Kerala were led by Narayana Guru to change their social practices.

A reformist social movement strives to change the existing social and political arrangements through gradual, incremental steps. It works within the system and asks the system to correct itself. The 1960s movement for the reorganisation of Indian states on the basis of language, and the more recent Right to Information campaign, are examples of reformist movements.

A revolutionary social movement attempts to radically transform social relations, often by capturing state power. It does not ask the system to correct itself; it seeks to replace it. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which deposed the Tsar to create a communist state, and the Naxalite movement in India, which seeks to remove oppressive landlords and state officials, can be described as revolutionary movements.

Redemptive vs Reformist vs Revolutionary movements | Feature | Redemptive (transformatory) | Reformist | Revolutionary | |—|—|—|—| | What it seeks to change | The personal consciousness and actions of individual members | The existing social and political arrangements | Social relations as a whole, often by capturing state power | | Method | Change begins with the self and the community’s own practices | Gradual, incremental steps within the system | Radical transformation; a break with the existing system | | Relation to the state | Not primarily aimed at the state | Petitions, campaigns, demands on the state | Seeks to take over or displace state power | | NCERT example | Narayana Guru and the Ezhava community in Kerala | The 1960s movement to reorganise states on the basis of language; the Right to Information campaign | The Bolshevik revolution in Russia; the Naxalite movement in India |

Fig. 8.5

Fig. 8.5 – The spectrum of social movements.

The typology is a tool, not a box

Try classifying an actual movement using this typology, and you will discover something awkward. Most movements have a mix of redemptive, reformist and revolutionary elements. They rarely sit neatly in one column.

The orientation of a movement may also shift over its lifetime. A movement may start out with, say, revolutionary objectives and gradually become reformist. It may begin in a phase of mass mobilisation and collective protest, and then settle into offices, memberships and procedures. Social scientists who study the life cycles of movements call this a move towards social movement organisations.

NoteDefinition

A social movement organisation is what a movement becomes as it grows institutionalised — an organised body with offices, procedures and a settled structure, formed out of a phase of mass mobilisation and collective protest.

Q. If a movement becomes an organisation, has it lost something?

A. It gains and it loses. An organisation can negotiate, sustain itself over years, and turn a demand into a policy. But the energy of mass mobilisation is difficult to keep alive inside an office, and the movement can begin to speak for its members rather than through them.

Whose name for the event?

There is a further difficulty, and it is not a technical one. How a social movement is perceived and classified is always a matter of interpretation. It differs from one section of society to another.

For instance, what was a ‘mutiny’ or a ‘rebellion’ to the British colonial rulers in 1857 was ‘the first war of Independence’ to Indian nationalists. The difference is not merely a matter of vocabulary. A mutiny is an act of defiance against an authority that is supposedly legitimate — in this case, British rule. A struggle for independence is a challenge to the very legitimacy of British rule itself.

The two words therefore contain two entirely different judgements about who had the right to govern. This shows how people attach different meanings to social movements — and it is a warning to the student of sociology, who must always ask who is doing the naming.

8.3.2 Distinguishing the new social movement from the old social movements

Working class movements in the capitalist west were wresting better wages, better living conditions, social security, free schooling and health security from the state. That was also the period when socialist movements were establishing new kinds of states and societies. The point to hold on to is this: the old social movements clearly saw the reorganisation of power relations as a central goal. Who owned, who ruled, who commanded whom — these were the questions.

The old social movements also functioned within the frame of political parties. The Indian National Congress led the Indian National Movement. The Communist Party of China led the Chinese Revolution. The party was the vehicle; the movement travelled in it.

Fig. 8.6

Fig. 8.6 – Archival record of the early socialist movement.

Today some believe that ‘old’ class-based political action, led by trade unions and workers’ parties, is on the decline. Others argued that in the affluent West, with its welfare state, issues of class-based exploitation and inequality were no longer central concerns. On this reading, the new social movements were not about changing the distribution of power in society at all, but about quality-of-life issues — such as having a clean environment.

is class-based politics finished? View 1: It is in decline. Trade unions and workers’ parties command less loyalty than they did; in the affluent West the welfare state absorbed the sharpest grievances of class, and the newer movements organise around environment, identity and quality of life instead. View 2: It is not finished, only differently expressed. Inequality has not disappeared; it has changed shape and location. Even movements that look like ‘quality-of-life’ campaigns turn out, on inspection, to be about whose livelihood is destroyed and who is compensated. What both agree on: The issues that mobilise people today cannot be read off from class alone — but questions of inequality have not left the field.

Kothari: why the 1970s produced a surge

In the old social movements, the role of political parties was central. Why, then, did India in the 1970s see a surge of movements outside the party system?

The political scientist Rajni Kothari attributes this surge to people’s growing dissatisfaction with parliamentary democracy. Kothari argues that the institutions of the state have been captured by elites. Because of this, electoral representation through political parties is no longer an effective way for the poor to get their voices heard.

People left out by the formal political system therefore join social movements, or non-party political formations, in order to put pressure on the state from outside. Today the broader term civil society is used to refer to both kinds at once: to the old social movements represented by political parties and trade unions, and to the newer non-governmental organisations, women’s groups, environmental groups and tribal activists.

the ‘new’ movements in India The Western account explains new social movements by affluence: once the welfare state has settled the question of bread, people turn to the question of the environment. India does not fit that story. Here the surge of movements outside the party system came not from prosperity but from exclusion — from the sense, as Kothari puts it, that the institutions of the state had been captured by elites and that the poor had no effective voice inside them. An Indian environmental movement is therefore rarely about the environment alone; it is usually also about livelihood, dignity and political representation. The concept had to be modified to travel.

Globalisation and the reach of a movement

As you have read about the various dimensions of social change in India, you would have been struck by the fact that globalisation has been re-shaping people’s lives in industry and agriculture, in culture and media.

Consider where power now sits. Firms are often transnational. Legal arrangements that bind a country are often international, such as the regulations of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Environmental and health risks, and the fear of nuclear warfare, are global in nature — a poisoned river and a warming atmosphere do not stop at a border.

Not surprisingly, therefore, many of the new social movements are international in scope. If the target of your demand is transnational, your movement cannot afford to be merely local.

What is significant, however, is that old and new movements are working together in new alliances — such as the World Social Forum, which has been raising awareness about the hazards of globalisation. The neat division begins to dissolve in practice.

What the new movements are not

The new social movements are not just about the ‘old’ issues of economic inequality. Nor are they organised along class lines alone.

Identity politics, cultural anxieties and aspirations are essential elements in creating social movements, and they occur in ways that are difficult to trace back to class-based inequality. A demand for recognition, or for the dignity of a language, cannot be explained purely by income.

Often, these movements unite participants across class boundaries. The women’s movement, for instance, includes urban, middle-class feminists as well as poor peasant women. The regional movements for separate statehood bring together different groups of people who do not share homogeneous class identities.

The conclusion is not that inequality has ceased to matter. It is that in a social movement, questions of social inequality can occur alongside other, equally important, issues. This will become clear when we turn to the Chipko movement in the next section.

Old social movements vs New social movements | Feature | Old social movements | New social movements | |—|—|—| | Central goal | Reorganisation of power relations — wages, living conditions, social security, who rules | Quality-of-life issues, such as a clean environment; recognition and dignity | | Basis of mobilisation | Class; organised along class lines | Identity, cultural anxieties and aspirations; cuts across class boundaries | | Organisational frame | Worked within the frame of political parties and trade unions | Non-party political formations, NGOs, women’s, environmental and tribal groups | | Scope | Largely national — the state was the arena | Often international in scope, because firms, laws and risks are global | | Examples | The Indian National Movement led by the Indian National Congress; the Chinese Revolution led by the Communist Party of China | Environmental movements; the women’s movement; alliances such as the World Social Forum |

8.4 Ecological Movements

For much of the modern period, the greatest emphasis has been laid on development. Over the decades, however, there has been a great deal of concern about the unchecked use of natural resources, and about a model of development that keeps creating new needs — needs whose satisfaction then demands still greater exploitation of resources that are already depleted.

This model has been criticised on a second ground as well. It assumes that all sections of people will be beneficiaries of development. The record does not bear this out. Big dams displace people from their homes and from their sources of livelihood. Industries displace agriculturalists from their land. The impact of industrial pollution on those who live near it is yet another story.

An ecological movement arises out of exactly this gap — between a promise that development will benefit everyone, and the experience of those who pay its costs. Here we take just one example, in order to examine the many issues that are interlinked in such a movement.

Find out about some instances of environmental pollution in your own region — a river, a canal, an air-quality reading, a landfill. Discuss what you find. You could also hold a poster exhibition of the class’s findings.

The Chipko Movement

The Chipko Movement, in the Himalayan foothills, is a good example of such intermingled interests and ideologies. According to Ramachandra Guha in his book Unquiet Woods, villagers rallied together to save the oak and rhododendron forests near their villages. When government forest contractors came to cut down the trees, villagers — including a large number of women — stepped forward to hug the trees and prevent their being felled.

Fig. 8.7

Fig. 8.7 – Chipko activists gathered at Saklana, 1986.

What was at stake was, first of all, the question of the villagers’ subsistence. All of them relied on the forest for firewood, for fodder for their animals, and for other daily necessities. A felled forest is, for such a household, not a landscape lost but a kitchen and a cattle-shed lost.

This conflict placed the livelihood needs of poor villagers against the government’s desire to generate revenues by selling timber. The economy of subsistence was pitted against the economy of profit.

the economy of subsistence vs the economy of profit In an economy of subsistence, the forest is used to live from — firewood, fodder, daily necessities, consumed by the household itself. In an economy of profit, the same forest is a commodity, valued for the revenue its timber can fetch when sold. The trees are the same; the relationship to them is not.

Ramachandra Guha — the social history of Chipko, in Unquiet Woods Question: What were hill villagers in the Himalayan foothills actually fighting for when they hugged trees to stop them being felled? Method: Historical and documentary study of the region’s ecological and social history, and of the movement’s own record. Finding: The forests the villagers defended — oak and rhododendron — were the base of their subsistence. Their opponent was a state that saw the same forest as timber revenue and auctioned it to contractors. Alongside this conflict of livelihood ran a conflict about ecology, and a long-standing resentment against a distant administration. Meaning: It established that an Indian environmental movement cannot be read as a movement about nature alone. The limitation of any such account is that it necessarily flattens differences within the villages — between households, and between women and men, who did not all use or lose the forest in the same way.

Red and green together

Along with this issue of social inequality — villagers set against a government that represented commercial, capitalist interests — the Chipko Movement also raised the issue of ecological sustainability.

Cutting down natural forests was a form of environmental destruction, and it had already produced devastating floods and landslides in the region. The connection was not abstract for the people who made it; they had watched it happen.

Fig. 8.8

Fig. 8.8 – Deforestation and the loss of subsistence.

For the villagers, then, these ‘red’ and ‘green’ issues were interlinked. Their survival depended on the survival of the forest — but they also valued the forest for its own sake, as a form of ecological wealth that benefits all, and not only themselves.

There was a third strand as well. The Chipko Movement expressed the resentment of hill villagers against a distant government, headquartered in the plains, that seemed indifferent and hostile to their concerns. This is a question of political representation: who decides, and from how far away?

So three concerns underlay Chipko at once — economy, ecology and political representation. Any attempt to sort the movement into a single box misses it.

was Chipko a ‘green’ movement or a ‘red’ one? View 1: It was an environmental movement. Its object was the forest itself, valued as ecological wealth that benefits all; the felling of natural forests had produced floods and landslides, and Chipko’s demand was that this destruction stop. View 2: It was a livelihood movement. Poor villagers depended on the forest for firewood, fodder and daily necessities; the fight was between an economy of subsistence and an economy of profit, and between hill people and a distant administration. What both agree on: Both readings are drawn from the same movement, and neither can be removed from it. In Indian ecological movements, questions of survival, of ecology and of political voice arrive together.

Q3. Why did villagers in the Himalayan foothills hug trees — was it about the environment, about food and firewood, or about power?

A. About all three, and that is the point of the example. The forest was their subsistence (firewood, fodder, daily necessities); its destruction had brought floods and landslides, so it was also a question of ecological sustainability; and the decision to auction it was taken by a distant government in the plains, so it was a question of political representation as well. In an ecological movement, ‘red’ and ‘green’ issues are interlinked.

How Chipko began. The unusually heavy monsoon of 1970 caused the most devastating flood in living memory. In the Alaknanda valley, water inundated 100 square kilometres of land, washed away 6 metal bridges and 10 kilometres of motor roads, and swept off 24 buses and several other vehicles; 366 houses collapsed and 500 acres of standing paddy were destroyed. The loss of human and bovine life was considerable. The 1970 floods mark a turning point in the ecological history of the region: villagers, who bore the brunt of the damage, began to perceive the hitherto tenuous link between deforestation, landslides and floods. It was observed that some of the villages worst affected by landslides lay directly below forests where felling operations had taken place. The villagers’ cause was taken up by the Dashauli Gram Swaraja Sangh (DGSS), a cooperative organisation based in Chamoli district. Despite these early protests, the government went ahead with its yearly auction of forests in November, and one of the plots to be assigned was the Reni forest. The contractors’ men travelling to Reni from Joshimath stopped their bus shortly before the village and, skirting it, made for the forest. A small girl who saw the workers with their implements ran to Gaura Devi, the head of the village Mahila Mandal (Women’s Club). Gaura Devi quickly mobilised the other women of the village and went to the forest. Pleading with the labourers not to begin felling, the women were at first met with abuse and threats. When they refused to budge, the men were eventually forced to retire.

Fig. 8.9

Fig. 8.9 – Villagers meeting to discuss deforestation.

Movements after Chipko

Trees are necessary for the conservation of the environment. Clean water, similarly, is necessary for a healthy environment. In the light of this, the Government of India has, since 2014, initiated systematic efforts to bring balance, structure and quality to India’s ecology.

the Integrated Ganga Conservation Mission (Namami Gange) and the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan These are programmes of the Government of India, begun in 2014, addressed to two long-standing environmental problems: the pollution of India’s rivers, and the absence of adequate sanitation and waste management. The first is directed at conserving and cleaning the Ganga; the second at cleanliness and sanitation across the country. Both rest on the recognition made by movements such as Chipko — that forests, rivers and clean water are conditions of a healthy environment and of the livelihoods that depend on it.

In our current information age, social movements across the globe are able to join together in huge regional and international networks. These comprise non-governmental organisations, religious and humanitarian groups, human rights associations, consumer protection advocates, environmental activists and others who campaign in the public interest. The enormous protests against the World Trade Organisation that took place in Seattle, for example, were organised in part through internet-based networks.

8.5 Class Based Movements

8.5.1 Peasant Movements

Peasant movements, or agrarian struggles, have taken place from pre-colonial days. What changed under colonial rule was not that peasants began to resist, but what they were resisting — a new revenue system, a new class of intermediaries, and a new set of creditors.

The movements in the period between 1858 and 1914 tended to remain localised, disjointed, and confined to particular grievances. Each rose against a specific oppression in a specific place, and rarely joined hands with the next.

Two are well known. The Bengal revolt of 1859-62 was directed against the indigo plantation system, under which cultivators were compelled to grow indigo for planters instead of food. The ‘Deccan riots’ of 1857 were directed against moneylenders, on whom indebted cultivators had come to depend and to whom they were steadily losing their land.

From local grievance to national struggle

Some of these issues continued into the following period, and under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi became partially linked to the Independence movement. A grievance about revenue could now be spoken in the language of the nation.

The Champaran Satyagraha (1917–18) was directed against the indigo plantations. The Bardoli Satyagraha (1928, Surat District) was a ‘non-tax’ campaign — a campaign of refusal to pay land revenue — mounted as part of the nationwide non-cooperation movement.

In the 1920s, protest movements also arose in certain regions against the forest policies of the British government and of local rulers. Recall the discussion of structural changes in Chapter 1: when a forest that villagers had always used becomes state property, the everyday act of collecting firewood becomes an offence, and resistance follows.

Peasants organise

Between 1920 and 1940, peasant organisations arose. The first to be founded was the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (1929), and in 1936 the All India Kisan Sabha was formed. This is an important shift: a Sabha, unlike a riot, has an office, a membership and a programme.

The peasants organised by the Sabhas demanded freedom from economic exploitation — and not for themselves alone, but for peasants, workers and all other exploited classes. The demand had become a class demand.

At the time of Independence we have the two most classical cases of peasant movements: the Tebhaga movement (1946–47) and the Telangana movement (1946–51).

The Tebhaga movement was a struggle of sharecroppers in Bengal in North Bihar. A sharecropper cultivates another person’s land and hands over a share of the crop as rent; the customary share was half. The demand of the movement was that the cultivator should keep two-thirds of the produce instead. It had the support of the Kisan Sabha and of the Communist Party of India (CPI).

The Telangana movement was directed against the feudal conditions in the princely state of Hyderabad, and was led by the CPI.

Q. Why should a demand about the size of a crop share be called a movement rather than a dispute?

A. Because it was not one cultivator bargaining with one landlord. It was sustained, organised collective action, with a leadership (the Kisan Sabha, the CPI), a shared objective (two-thirds of the produce) and an ideology of freedom from exploitation — the features you met in section 8.1.

The new farmers’ movements

New farmers’ movements began in the 1970s, in Punjab and Tamil Nadu. In several respects they were a different animal from the peasant movements that preceded them.

They were regionally organised, and they were non-party — they did not work through political parties. And they involved farmers rather than peasants. The distinction matters: farmers are said to be market-involved, as both commodity producers and purchasers. They sell what they grow, and they buy seed, fertiliser, diesel and machinery. Their fortunes therefore rise and fall with prices.

The basic ideology of the movement was strongly anti-state and anti-urban. The demands followed from this: the focus was on ‘price and related issues’ — price procurement, remunerative prices, the prices of agricultural inputs, taxation, and the non-repayment of loans.

Novel methods of agitation were used: blocking of roads and railways, refusing entry to politicians and bureaucrats in the villages, and so on. The method fits the demand — a farmer who feels ignored by the city and the state makes the city and the state feel his absence.

It has been argued that the farmers’ movements have broadened their agenda and ideology to include environmental and women’s issues. On that reading, they can be seen as a part of the worldwide ‘new social movements’ — which shows again how hard the old–new division is to hold in India.

Peasant movements vs New farmers’ movements | Feature | Peasant movements | New farmers’ movements | |—|—|—| | Period | From pre-colonial days; organised phase between 1920 and 1940; the classical cases at Independence | Began in the 1970s, in Punjab and Tamil Nadu | | Who participates | Peasants — including sharecroppers and tenants working another’s land | Farmers — market-involved, as both commodity producers and purchasers | | Central demands | Freedom from economic exploitation: land, rent, revenue, share of produce (as in the demand for two-thirds in Tebhaga) | ‘Price and related issues’: price procurement, remunerative prices, input prices, taxation, non-repayment of loans | | Organisation | Worked with parties and party-linked bodies — the Kisan Sabhas, the Communist Party of India | Regionally organised and non-party | | Ideology | Against landlords, moneylenders, planters and the colonial revenue system | Strongly anti-state and anti-urban | | Methods | Refusal to pay revenue, satyagraha, armed struggle in some cases | Blocking roads and railways, refusing entry to politicians and bureaucrats |

Naxalbari. Writing about the Naxalbari movement, Sumanta Banerjee records that the peasants’ conference of the Siliguri subdivision was a great success: cultivators long worn down by labour on the jotedars’ fields came to it with expectation. He notes Kanu Sanyal’s later claim that between March and April 1967 all the villagers were organised, and that between 15,000 and 20,000 peasants were enrolled as wholetime activists. Peasants’ committees were formed in every village and became armed guards. In the name of these committees the peasants occupied land, burnt the land records that they said had been used to cheat them of their dues, cancelled debts, and set up a parallel administration to run the villages. Oppressive landlords were passed sentence upon, guns were taken from them, and the peasants armed themselves with bows, arrows and spears. Source: Sumanta Banerjee, ‘Naxalbari and the Left Movement’, in Ghanshyam Shah (ed.), Social Movements and the State (Sage, Delhi 2002), pp. 125–192.

A second account records how a guerrilla movement was announced by the forcible cutting of crops from the land of a rich landlord at Garudabhadra, near Boddapadu in the plains area, on 24 November 1968. More significant was the action in the hill tracts the next day, when in Pedagottili village of the Parvatipuram Agency area about 250 Girijans from several villages, armed with bows, arrows and spears, raided the house of a landlord and moneylender, took possession of his hoarded paddy, rice and other food grains, and of property worth about Rs. 20,000. They also seized his documents.

Read the two accounts above sociologically rather than dramatically. In both, notice what is attacked: the land records, the debt papers, the hoarded grain, the documents. These are the instruments through which the relationship of exploitation was maintained. A revolutionary peasant movement attacks not merely persons but the paper on which its subordination is written.

8.5.2 Workers’ Movements

Factory production began in India in the early part of the 1860s. Recall the discussion of the specific character of industrialisation in the colonial period.

The general pattern of trade set up by the colonial regime was one in which raw materials were procured from India, goods were manufactured in the United Kingdom, and those goods were then marketed in the colony. The factories that came up in India were shaped by this pattern, and were therefore established in the port towns — Calcutta (Kolkata) and Bombay (Mumbai), and later Madras (Chennai). Tea plantations in Assam were established as early as 1839.

In the early stages of colonialism, labour was very cheap, because the colonial government did not regulate either wages or working conditions. You will remember the manner in which the colonial government ensured the supply of labour in the tea plantations (Chapter 1). Cheap labour was not a natural fact; it was an arrangement.

Protest before the union

Though trade unions emerged later, workers did protest. Their actions in this early phase were, however, more spontaneous than sustained — which, by the definition in section 8.1, means they were not yet a movement. Some of the nationalist leaders also drew workers into the anti-colonial movement.

The war changed the pressure. It led to the expansion of industries in the country, but it also brought a great deal of misery to the poor: there were food shortages and a sharp increase in prices.

The result was a wave of strikes. There were waves of strikes in the textile mills in Bombay; in September and October 1917 there were around 30 recorded strikes. Jute workers in Calcutta struck work. In Madras, the workers of Buchingham and Carnatic Mills (Binny’s) struck work demanding an increase in wages. Textile workers in Ahmedabad struck work for an increase in wages by 50 per cent (Bhowmick 2004).

Unions, and then unions of unions

The first trade union was established in April 1918 in Madras by B.P. Wadia, a social worker and member of the Theosophical Society. During the same year, Mahatma Gandhi founded the Textile Labour Association (TLA). In 1920, the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) was formed in Bombay.

Table 8.1 – Landmarks in the early industrial and trade union history of India | Year | Landmark | |—|—| | 1839 | Tea plantations established in Assam | | Early 1860s | Factory production begins in India | | September–October 1917 | Around 30 recorded strikes in the textile mills of Bombay | | April 1918 | First trade union established in Madras by B.P. Wadia | | 1918 | Textile Labour Association (TLA) founded by Mahatma Gandhi | | 1920 | All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) formed in Bombay | | May 1947 | Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) formed by the Indian National Congress |

Read Table 8.1 as a sequence rather than as a list. Nearly six decades separate the beginning of factory production from the first trade union. In between lie the strikes of 1917 — which is to say that in India, as elsewhere, the strike came first and the union came afterwards. Organisation was the result of protest, not its precondition.

The AITUC was a broad-based organisation involving diverse ideologies. Its main ideological groups were the communists, led by S.A. Dange and M.N. Roy; the moderates, led by M. Joshi and V.V. Giri; and the nationalists, which involved people like Lala Lajpat Rai and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Fig. 8.10

Fig. 8.10 – The Bombay textile workers’ strike, 1981–82.

Splits along party lines

During the last few years of British rule, the communists gained considerable control over the AITUC. The Indian National Congress chose to form another union, the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), in May 1947.

The split in the AITUC in 1947 paved the way for further splits on the line of political parties. Apart from the working class movement being divided on party lines at the national level, regional parties too began to form their own unions from the late 1960s.

Notice the structural consequence. A working class that is organised into many party-linked unions can be mobilised in large numbers — but it can also be divided against itself at the moment of bargaining, since two unions in the same factory may owe loyalty to two different parties.

Fig. 8.11

Fig. 8.11 – Women workers marching at Arwal, Bihar, 1987.

In 1966–67, the economy suffered a major recession, which led to a decrease in production and consequently in employment. There was a general unrest. In 1974 there was a major railway workers’ strike, and the confrontation between the state and the trade unions became acute. The workers’ movement was very much part of the wider struggle for civil liberties.

That last sentence is worth holding on to. A strike about wages had become, in that moment, part of a struggle about rights — which is exactly the kind of blurring that makes the old–new distinction so hard to apply in India.

Follow the news regularly for a few weeks and collect information on the issues that trade unions are taking up today. Discuss them in the context of globalisation: are the demands the same as those of 1917, or has the ground shifted?

8.6 Caste Based Movements

8.6.1 The Dalit Movement

The social movements of Dalits show a particular character, and it is worth pausing to see what that character is.

They cannot be explained satisfactorily by reference to economic exploitation alone, or to political oppression alone — although both these dimensions are certainly important. Land, wages and votes matter here as they matter everywhere. But something else is at stake as well.

This is a struggle for recognition as fellow human beings. It is a struggle for self-confidence, and for a space in which a community may determine itself. It is a struggle for the abolition of the stigmatisation that untouchability implied. It has, for this reason, been called a struggle to be touched.

Q5. Why has the Dalit movement been described not only as a struggle for jobs or land, but as “a struggle to be touched”?

A. Because the injury it addresses is not only material. Untouchability denied a person the ordinary human contact that others took for granted — the shared well, the shared meal, the shared entrance — and in doing so denied that person’s status as a fellow human being. A movement against it must therefore demand recognition and dignity, not merely economic redress. Wages can be raised without stigma being lifted.

The word ‘Dalit’

The word Dalit is commonly used in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and many other Indian languages, where it means the poor and oppressed persons. It was first used in its new sense in Marathi by neo-Buddhist activists, the followers of Babasaheb Ambedkar, in the early 1970s.

It refers to those who have been broken, ground down by those above them in a deliberate way. The last two words carry the argument: not by accident, not by fate, but deliberately.

Look at what the word therefore refuses. Contained in it is an inherent denial of pollution, of karma, and of a justified caste hierarchy — that is, a denial of the entire set of ideas by which untouchability was explained and defended. A community that names itself is already arguing.

NoteDefinition

Dalit — a term used in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and other Indian languages for the poor and oppressed; brought into its present use in the early 1970s by neo-Buddhist activists, followers of Babasaheb Ambedkar. It refers to those who have been broken and ground down deliberately by those above them, and it carries within it a denial of pollution, of karma, and of any justification of caste hierarchy.

Dalit vs Scheduled Caste ‘Scheduled Caste’ is an administrative and constitutional category — a list of castes recognised by the state for purposes of protection and safeguards. ‘Dalit’ is a term of self-assertion, chosen by a people to describe their own condition and to reject the ideas that produced it. One is a classification made from outside; the other is an identity claimed from within.

Many movements, one quest

There has not been a single, unified Dalit movement in the country, now or in the past. Different movements have highlighted different issues related to Dalits, and have done so around different ideologies.

However, all of them assert a Dalit identity, even though its meaning may not be identical or precise for everyone. Notwithstanding the differences in the nature of these movements and in the meaning of the identity, there has been a common quest for equality, self-dignity, and the eradication of untouchability (Shah 2001: 194).

This common quest can be seen across very different regions and histories: in the Satnami Movement of the Chamars in the Chattisgarh plains in eastern MP, in the Adi Dharma Movement in Punjab, in the Mahar Movement in Maharashtra, in the socio-political mobilisation among the Jatavas of Agra, and in the Anti-Brahman Movement in south India.

Fig. 8.12

Fig. 8.12 – A Dalit rights demonstration.

Dalit literature: writing as a movement

In the contemporary period, the Dalit movement has unquestionably acquired a place in the public sphere that cannot be ignored. This has been accompanied by a growing body of Dalit literature.

Dalit writers are insistent on using their own imageries and expressions, rooted in their own experiences and perceptions. Many have felt that the high-flown social imageries of mainstream society would hide the truth rather than reveal it — that a polished literary language, borrowed from those who had never been humiliated, would make humiliation unsayable.

Dalit literature therefore gives a call for social and cultural revolt. Within it, some writers emphasise the cultural struggle for dignity and identity; others also bring in the structural features of society, including its economic dimensions.

who may speak for whom The insistence of Dalit writers on their own imagery raises a question that every sociologist must face. When a researcher studies a community to which she does not belong, whose language does the account end up in — the community’s, or the researcher’s own? Speaking about a community can slide, almost unnoticed, into speaking for it, and the concepts of the observer can crowd out the self-understanding of the observed. Good research therefore treats the community’s own account as evidence, not as raw material to be improved upon, and is honest about the researcher’s own social position.

How sociologists have classified the Dalit movements. Attempts to classify Dalit movements have led sociologists to conclude that they belong to all the types — reformative, redemptive and revolutionary. The anti-caste movement began in the nineteenth century under the inspiration of Jotiba Phule, was carried forward in the 1920s by the non-Brahmin movements in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, and then developed under the leadership of Dr. Ambedkar. It had characteristics of all three types: at its best it was revolutionary in terms of society, and redemptive in terms of individuals. The ‘post-Ambedkar Dalit movement’ has, in part, had a revolutionary practice. It has offered alternative ways of living — at some points limited and at some points radical and all-encompassing — ranging from changes in behaviour, such as giving up eating beef, to religious conversion. Its aims have run from the radical goal of abolishing caste oppression and economic exploitation altogether, to the limited goal of providing scope for members of the Scheduled Castes to achieve social mobility. But on the whole, it is argued, the movement has been a reformist one: it has mobilised along caste lines but made only half-hearted efforts to destroy caste; it has achieved real though limited societal change, with gains especially for the educated sections among Dalits; and it has not transformed society sufficiently to lift the general mass out of what remains among the most excruciating poverty in the world.

has the Dalit movement been revolutionary or reformist? View 1: Revolutionary in intent and, in part, in practice. It set out to abolish caste oppression and economic exploitation altogether; it offered whole alternative ways of living, up to religious conversion; and it was redemptive for individuals, transforming how people saw themselves. View 2: Reformist on the whole. It mobilised along caste lines rather than abolishing caste; the changes it won were real but limited, and the gains went especially to the educated sections among Dalits, leaving the mass of the poorest largely where they were. What both agree on: The movement has permanently placed the questions of equality, self-dignity and untouchability in the public sphere, where they can no longer be ignored.

8.6.2 Backward Class Castes Movements

The emergence of the backward castes and classes as political entities has occurred both in the colonial and in the post-colonial contexts. To see why, one has to look at how the colonial state itself worked.

The colonial state often distributed patronage on the basis of caste. Jobs, recognition and representation were sought and granted in the name of a caste. It therefore made sense for people to stay within their caste for their social and political identity in institutional life — the caste had become the address at which the state could be petitioned.

It also had a second effect. Similarly placed caste groups were pushed towards uniting with one another, forming what has been termed a horizontal stretch — an alliance reaching sideways across many castes of roughly similar standing, rather than upwards through the ritual hierarchy.

Caste thus began to lose its ritual content and to become more and more secularised for the purpose of political mobilisation. Recall the discussion on secularisation in Chapter 2: the form survives, the sacred content thins, and the institution is put to a new, worldly use.

caste as a political resource Western accounts of modernity predicted that as a society industrialises and democratises, ascriptive identities such as caste would fade from public life. The Indian evidence is more interesting. Caste did not disappear; it changed function. Emptied of much of its ritual meaning, it became an efficient vehicle for political mobilisation — a ready-made network of trust, kinship and shared grievance in a democracy where numbers count. Sociologists therefore speak of the secularisation of caste rather than its disappearance.

Q. If caste is losing its ritual content, why does it become more visible in politics?

A. Because the two changes are connected. Once caste is no longer primarily about ritual purity, it can be used for something else — organising voters, claiming a share of jobs and seats, and forming alliances with similarly placed castes. What weakens as a religious hierarchy survives as a political community.

The making of a category

The term Backward Classes has been in use in different parts of the country since the late nineteenth century. It began to be used more widely in the Madras presidency from 1872, in the princely state of Mysore from 1918, and in the Bombay presidency from 1925.

From the 1920s, a number of organisations united around the issue of caste sprang up in different parts of the country. These included the United Provinces Hindu Backward Classes League, the All-India Backward Classes Federation, and the All India Backward Classes League. By 1954, 88 organisations were counted as working for the Backward Classes.

That figure is worth reading slowly. Eighty-eight organisations is not a spontaneous outburst; it is a dense institutional field. Long before the debates on reservation that you hear about today, the backward castes had built an organisational machinery for making claims on the state.

Moving the constitution of the Advisory Committee on fundamental rights, minorities and related matters, G.B. Pant argued that particular care had to be taken of the Depressed Classes, the Scheduled Castes and the Backward Classes, and that everything possible must be done to bring them up to the general level. He put the reason in a single image: “The strength of the chain is measured by the weakest link of it.” Until every link was fully revitalised, he said, the body politic would not be healthy.

In 2019, the Government of India introduced 10 per cent reservation in education and government jobs for economically weaker sections among the upper castes. Compare the basis on which this provision selects its beneficiaries with the basis suggested in the argument quoted above. What is being treated as the source of disadvantage in each case — social and educational backwardness, or economic position? Discuss the sociological difference between the two criteria, without arguing for or against any party or government.

8.7 The Tribal Movements

Different tribal groups spread across the country may share common issues — land, forests, the loss of both. But the distinctions between them are equally significant, and it would be a mistake to speak of “the tribal movement” in the singular.

Many of the tribal movements have been largely located in the so called ‘tribal belt’ in middle India: among the Santhals, Hos, Oraons and Mundas in Chota Nagpur and the Santhal Parganas. This region constitutes the main part of what has come to be called Jharkhand.

We cannot go into a detailed account of the different movements here. We take Jharkhand as an example of a tribal movement with a history that goes back a hundred years. We also touch briefly on the specificity of the tribal movements in the North East, without dealing comprehensively with the many differences that exist between one tribal movement and another within that region.

Fig. 8.13

Fig. 8.13 – Adivasi protesters opposing displacement.

8.7.1 Jharkhand

Jharkhand is one of the newly formed states of India, carved out of south Bihar in the year 2000. Behind the formation of this state lies more than a century of resistance. A state that appears on the map in one year is often the deposit of many decades of movement.

The social movement for Jharkhand had a charismatic leader in Birsa Munda, an adivasi who led a major uprising against the British. After his death, Birsa became an important icon of the movement; stories and songs about him can be found all over Jharkhand.

The memory of Birsa’s struggle was also kept alive by writing, and here an unexpected agency enters the story. Christian missionaries working in south Bihar were responsible for spreading literacy in the area. Literate adivasis then began to research and write about their own history and myths. They documented and disseminated information about tribal customs and cultural practices.

The effect was not merely literary. This helped create a unified ethnic consciousness and a shared identity as Jharkhandis — an identity that had to be made, out of many separate tribes with separate histories, before it could be mobilised.

Q. How can a shared identity be “created”? Isn’t it simply there?

A. Not by itself. The Santhals, Hos, Oraons and Mundas had their own languages, customs and histories. What turned many peoples into one people was the work of writing down, remembering and circulating a common past — plus a common experience of dispossession. Identity here is an achievement of the movement, not merely its raw material.

A leadership, and a grievance

Literate adivasis were also in a position to get government jobs. Over time, therefore, a middle-class adivasi intellectual leadership emerged. It was this leadership that formulated the demand for a separate state and lobbied for it, both in India and abroad.

Within south Bihar, adivasis shared a common hatred of dikus — migrant traders and moneylenders who had settled in the area, grabbed its wealth, and impoverished the original residents.

The grievance had a material shape. This is a mineral-rich region, and most of the benefits from its mining and industrial projects had gone to dikus, even as adivasi lands were being alienated. The land that carried the wealth was taken; the wealth went elsewhere; the people who had lived on it stayed poor.

Adivasi experiences of marginalisation and their sense of injustice were mobilised to create a shared Jharkhandi identity, and to inspire the collective action that eventually led to the formation of a separate state.

adivasi vs diku Adivasi refers to the original inhabitants of the region — the tribal communities of the area. Diku is the name they gave to the outsider: the migrant trader and moneylender who settled among them and took over their wealth and land. The pair does not describe two ethnic groups so much as a relationship of dispossession.

land alienation A family in a mineral-rich district has cultivated a small plot for three generations. They hold no clear paper title; the land was always understood to be theirs. When a project is sanctioned, the plot is surveyed and acquired. Compensation is calculated on the record, and the record does not show them. The father now works as a daily-wage labourer at the same site, on land that used to be his field. Nothing illegal has occurred at any step. This is land alienation — the process by which tribal communities lose their land not chiefly by force but through survey, record and law.

What the movement agitated against

The issues against which the leaders of the movement in Jharkhand agitated were:

  • acquisition of land for large irrigation projects and firing ranges;
  • survey and settlement operations, which were held up, and camps that were closed down;
  • collection of loans, rent and cooperative dues, which were resisted;
  • nationalisation of forest produce, which they boycotted.

Read that list again and notice its logic. Every item on it is an instrument of the state or the market by which land, forest and produce pass out of adivasi hands. The movement did not resist development in the abstract; it resisted the specific procedures through which dispossession was carried out.

Fig. 8.14

Fig. 8.14 – The long road to Jharkhand.

8.7.2 The North East

The process of state formation initiated by the Indian government following the attainment of independence generated disquieting trends in all the major hill districts of the region.

The reason lay in what the tribes of the region already possessed. Conscious of their distinct identity and of their traditional autonomy, they were unsure of being incorporated within the administrative machinery of Assam. To be made a district of a larger state is, for a people accustomed to governing itself, a demotion.

Writing about the North East, the sociologist Tiplut Nongbri argues that the rise of ethnicity in the region is best understood as a response — a way of coping with a new situation created by the tribes’ contact with a powerful and alien system. Long isolated from the Indian mainstream, these communities had been able to maintain their own worldview and their own social and cultural institutions with little external influence. She notes a significant shift in the movements themselves: while an earlier phase showed a tendency towards secessionism, that trend has been replaced by a search for autonomy within the framework of the Indian Constitution (Nongbri 2003: 115).

That shift is worth dwelling on. It tells us that a movement’s demand is not fixed; it is shaped by what the political system on the other side is willing to concede and to accommodate.

the Jharkhand movement vs the tribal movements of the North East | Feature | Jharkhand | The North East | |—|—|—| | Setting | The ‘tribal belt’ of middle India — Chota Nagpur and the Santhal Parganas | The hill districts of the North East, incorporated within the administrative machinery of Assam | | Core grievance | Alienation of land and forest; the benefits of mining and industry going to dikus | Loss of traditional autonomy and of a distinct identity under a new administrative structure | | Making of identity | A Jharkhandi identity built through literacy, writing and the memory of Birsa Munda | The rise of ethnicity as a response to contact with a powerful alien system | | Leadership | A middle-class adivasi intellectual leadership emerging from government employment | Leaderships drawn from communities long accustomed to their own institutions | | Direction of demand | A separate state within India — achieved in 2000 | From an earlier tendency towards secessionism to a search for autonomy within the framework of the Constitution |

Why tribal movements resist the old–new division

One of the key issues that binds tribal movements from different parts of the country is the alienation of tribals from forest lands. In this sense, ecological issues are central to tribal movements — just as cultural issues of identity are, and just as economic issues such as inequality are.

This brings us back to the question about the blurring of old and new social movements in India.

Q4. Movements are sometimes divided into “old” and “new”. Does that division work in India?

A. Not cleanly. The division assumes that “old” movements are about class and the distribution of power, while “new” ones are about identity and quality of life. Indian movements refuse to separate. Chipko was about subsistence, ecology and political voice at once. The new farmers’ movements broadened their agenda to include environment and women’s issues. Tribal movements combine the loss of forest land (an ecological and economic issue) with the assertion of adivasi identity (a cultural one). In India, the old questions and the new questions arrive in the same movement.

8.8 The Women’s Movement

8.8.1 The 19th Century Social Reform Movements and Early Women’s Organisations

You are already familiar with the nineteenth-century social reform movements that raised various issues concerning women. Chapter 2 dealt with them, as did the earlier book. Our question here is what happened next — what came after the reformers.

The early twentieth century saw the growth of women’s organisations, at the national and at the local level. Three names are ready to hand: the Women’s India Association (WIA), founded in 1917; the National Council for Women in India (NCWI), founded in 1925; and the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), founded in 1926.

Many of these organisations began with a limited focus, but their scope extended over time. The AIWC, for instance, began with the idea that ‘women’s welfare’ and ‘politics’ were mutually exclusive — that a body working for women should keep out of political questions altogether.

That position did not hold. A few years later, one of its Presidential addresses asked plainly: “Can the Indian man or woman be free if India be a slave?” How, it went on, could women remain silent about national freedom, which was the very basis of all great reforms? (Chaudhuri 1993: 149.) Welfare, it turned out, could not be separated from politics after all.

Fig. 8.15

Fig. 8.15 – An early twentieth-century women’s conference.

Was this a social movement?

It can be argued that this period of activity did not constitute a social movement at all. It can be argued otherwise too. This is a good place to put the definition of section 8.1 to work.

Recall the features that characterise a social movement. This period of activity did have organisations. It did have an ideology, a leadership, and a shared understanding among its participants. And it did have the aim of bringing about changes on a public issue.

What these organisations succeeded in doing, together, was to create an atmosphere in which the women’s question could no longer be ignored. Whether or not one calls that a movement, it is the precondition of one.

did the early women’s organisations amount to a social movement? View 1: Yes. They possessed every feature by which sociologists identify a social movement — organisation, leadership, ideology, a shared understanding, and the aim of changing a public issue. Their combined effect was to place the women’s question permanently in public debate. View 2: Not quite. Their membership was narrow and largely elite; several began by declaring politics outside their scope, and they worked through petition and conference rather than through sustained mass mobilisation. What both agree on: Whatever the label, this was the period in which the women’s question acquired a public existence that could not afterwards be withdrawn.

8.8.2 Agrarian Struggles and Revolts

It is often assumed that only middle class educated women are involved in social movements. Part of the struggle has been to remember the forgotten history of women’s participation.

Women participated along with men in struggles and revolts originating in tribal and rural areas in the colonial period. You have already met two of these in section 8.5 — the Tebhaga movement in Bengal, and the Telangana armed struggle against the erstwhile Nizam’s rule. To these must be added the Warli tribal’s revolt against bondage in Maharashtra.

The point is not that a new set of movements has been discovered. It is that movements you have already studied look different once you ask who else was in them. A history of the peasant movements that leaves out the women who marched in them is not merely incomplete; it produces the false impression that political action is the property of the educated.

Q. Why does it matter who is remembered as having participated in a movement?

A. Because memory shapes claims. If only educated middle-class women are remembered as active, then the language of the women’s movement can be dismissed as the concern of a small class. Recovering the participation of peasant and tribal women establishes that the demand for equality has never belonged to one section alone.

8.8.3 Post 1947

An issue that is often raised is this: if there was an active women’s movement before 1947, what happened afterwards?

One explanation has been that many of the women activists who had been involved in the nationalist movement got involved in the task of nation building — they moved into the institutions of the new state rather than out of them. Others cite the trauma of Partition as responsible for the lull.

The second phase

In the mid-1970s there was a renewal of the women’s movement in India. Some call it the second phase of the Indian women’s movement. Many of the concerns remained the same, but there were changes both in organisational strategy and in ideology.

Apart from these organisational changes, there were new issues that were focussed upon — violence against women, for instance. Over the years, numerous campaigns have been taken up on it.

Fig. 8.16

Fig. 8.16 – A street demonstration against dowry deaths.

Some of the results of these campaigns are so ordinary that you may never have noticed them. You may have observed that application forms at school carry both the father’s and the mother’s names. This was not always true. Likewise, important legal changes have taken place thanks to the campaigning of the women’s movement. Issues of land rights and employment have been fought alongside rights against sexual harassment and dowry.

Look carefully at a few ordinary documents — a school admission form, a bank form, a ration card application. Which of them ask for a mother’s name, and which do not? Note down what you find. A form is a small piece of evidence about what a society considers a person’s proper identity.

Fig. 8.17

Fig. 8.17 – Phases of the women’s movement in India.

All women are not alike

There has been a recognition, too, that while all women are in some way disadvantaged vis-a-vis men, all women do not suffer the same level or the same kind of discrimination.

The concerns of the educated middle class woman are different from those of the peasant woman, just as the concerns of the Dalit woman are different from those of the ‘upper caste’ woman. Gender, in other words, does not float free of class and caste; it is lived through them.

the same law, two situations A law against sexual harassment at the workplace is passed. In a city office, an employee can point to a written complaints procedure, and her colleagues know it exists. In a stone quarry a hundred kilometres away, the workers are hired daily through a contractor, keep no employment record, and know that a complaint is likely to end their work. Nothing about the law is different in the two places. What differs is the position from which each woman must use it. This is why the women’s movement came to insist that all women do not suffer the same kind of discrimination.

A gender-just society

There has also been greater recognition that both men and women are constrained by the dominant gender identities. Patriarchy does not merely give men power; it also issues them a script.

For instance, men in patriarchal societies feel that they must be strong and successful. It is held not to be ‘manly’ to express oneself emotionally. This is a constraint too, even though it is not the same constraint as the one it imposes on women.

A gender-just society would allow both men and women to be free. This of course rests on the idea that for true freedom to grow and develop, injustices of all kinds have to end — one cannot free half a society while leaving its other hierarchies untouched.

NoteDefinition

A gender-just society is one in which both men and women are free of the constraints imposed by dominant gender identities. The idea rests on two important factors: educated women with multiple roles, and an improved sex ratio.

Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana This is a programme of the Government of India directed at two linked problems: the decline in the number of girls relative to boys, and the gap in girls’ education. It works by promoting the survival, protection and schooling of the girl child, and it is an important effort in the actualisation of a gender-just society — addressing precisely the two factors on which that idea rests, an improved sex ratio and educated women with multiple roles.

8.9 Conclusion

As we reach the end of this book, it is worth going back to where we began — in our first sociology book, in Class XI. We had begun there by discussing the dialectical relationship between the individual and society: society shapes the individual, and individuals, acting together, shape society in turn.

Social movements perhaps show this relationship better than anything else in the discipline. They arise because individuals and social groups seek to change their conditions — the conditions that society has handed them.

And notice what happens when they do. In the act of trying to change their conditions, they change both themselves and the society. The hill villager who stands before a contractor, the sharecropper who claims two-thirds of the crop, the woman who signs her own name on a form: each is remade in the act of demanding.

Fig. 8.18

Fig. 8.18 – A social movement is where the dialectic becomes visible.

Q. Is this chapter’s real subject social movements, or society itself?

A. Both, and that is the point. A movement is the moment at which a society’s structures become visible, because someone has begun to push against them. Studying movements is one of the clearest ways of studying society.

8.10 Summary

8.1 Features of a Social Movement

  1. The rights we take for granted — the weekly holiday, the eight-hour day, equal pay, social security, the vote — were won through long collective struggle. Universal adult franchise, guaranteed by the Indian Constitution, was itself resisted elsewhere; in England, Chartism campaigned for parliamentary representation, and the suffragettes were violently opposed.

  2. A social movement is sustained collective action over time, marked by some degree of organisation (a leadership and a structure), by shared objectives and ideologies, and by the aim of bringing about — or preventing — change on a public issue. A spontaneous, disorganised protest is not a social movement.

  3. These features are not constant; they may change over the life of a movement.

  4. Because change threatens both entrenched interests and entrenched values, counter movements arise in defence of the status quo: the Dharma Sabha against Rammohun Roy’s campaign against sati, opposition to girls’ education and widow remarriage, withdrawal of children from schools, suppression of peasant movements, retaliation against Dalit movements, and counter movements against the extension of reservation.

  5. Protest is only the most visible activity. Movements also build shared understanding through meetings, run campaigns of lobbying with government, media and makers of public opinion, and develop distinct modes of protest — processions, black cloth, street theatre, songs and poetry; Gandhi’s ahimsa, satyagraha, khadi and the charkha; picketing and the defiance of the salt laws.

8.1.1 Distinguishing Social Change and Social Movements

  1. Social change is continuous, ongoing and unplanned — the sum of countless individual and collective actions across time and space. Social movements are directed at specific goals through long, deliberate, organised effort.

  2. Sanskritisation and westernisation are instances of social change; the efforts of the nineteenth-century social reformers were social movements.

8.2 Sociology and Social Movements

  1. Sociology has been interested in social movements from the beginning: it grew up amid the French Revolution and the upheaval of the industrial revolution, when labourers and artisans who had migrated to the cities protested against inhuman living conditions, and food riots in England were suppressed by the government.

  2. Elites saw such protest as a threat to the established order. Durkheim’s concern with social integration — expressed in his writings on the division of labour, religious life and suicide — reflected this anxiety; social movements appeared as forces leading to disorder.

  3. Scholars influenced by Marx read collective action differently. E. P. Thompson showed that the ‘crowd’ and the ‘mob’ were not anarchic hooligans but people with a moral economy — their own shared sense of right and wrong. The urban poor had good reasons to protest, and protested publicly because no other way of expressing their anger against deprivation was open to them.

8.3 Types of Social Movements

  1. Movements are classified as (i) redemptive or transformatory, (ii) reformist, and (iii) revolutionary.

  2. Redemptive: aims to change the personal consciousness and actions of its members — Narayana Guru and the Ezhava community in Kerala.

  3. Reformist: changes existing social and political arrangements by gradual, incremental steps — the 1960s movement for the reorganisation of states on the basis of language; the Right to Information campaign.

  4. Revolutionary: radically transforms social relations, often by capturing state power — the Bolshevik revolution in Russia; the Naxalite movement in India.

  5. Most movements mix all three, and may shift orientation over time; as a movement institutionalises, it moves towards social movement organisations.

  6. Classification is always a matter of interpretation: 1857 was a ‘mutiny’ or ‘rebellion’ to the British and ‘the first war of Independence’ to Indian nationalists.

8.3.2 Old and new social movements

  1. Old social movements saw the reorganisation of power relations as the central goal, were organised along class lines, and worked within the frame of political parties — the Indian National Congress led the Indian National Movement; the Communist Party of China led the Chinese Revolution.

  2. New social movements are said to be about quality-of-life issues, such as a clean environment, rather than the distribution of power; they turn on identity politics, cultural anxieties and aspirations, and unite participants across class boundaries (urban feminists and poor peasant women; regional movements for statehood).

  3. Rajni Kothari attributes the surge of movements in India in the 1970s to dissatisfaction with parliamentary democracy: the institutions of the state having been captured by elites, the poor join non-party political formations to pressure the state from outside. Civil society now covers both the old (parties, trade unions) and the new (NGOs, women’s, environmental and tribal groups).

  4. Globalisation — transnational firms, WTO regulations, global environmental and health risks — makes many new movements international in scope; old and new work together in alliances such as the World Social Forum.

8.4 Ecological Movements

  1. The dominant model of development has been criticised for the unchecked use of natural resources and for assuming that all sections will benefit: big dams and industries displace people, and industrial pollution harms those nearby.

  2. The Chipko Movement in the Himalayan foothills: as Ramachandra Guha shows in Unquiet Woods, villagers — including a large number of women — hugged oak and rhododendron trees to stop government forest contractors felling them. Their subsistence (firewood, fodder, daily necessities) depended on the forest.

  3. The conflict set the economy of subsistence against the economy of profit, and raised ecological sustainability as well: deforestation had caused devastating floods and landslides, as after the 1970 floods in the Alaknanda valley. Chipko also expressed hill villagers’ resentment against a distant government in the plains.

  4. Economy, ecology and political representation therefore underlay Chipko together; ‘red’ and ‘green’ issues were interlinked. Since 2014, the Government of India has taken up the Integrated Ganga Conservation Mission (Namami Gange) and the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.

8.5 Class Based Movements

  1. Peasant movements: agrarian struggles date from pre-colonial days; between 1858 and 1914 they were localised and disjointed — the Bengal revolt of 1859-62 against indigo planters, the ‘Deccan riots’ of 1857 against moneylenders. Under Gandhi they became partly linked to the Independence movement: the Champaran Satyagraha (1917–18) and the Bardoli Satyagraha (1928, Surat District), a ‘non-tax’ campaign.

  2. Peasant organisations arose between 1920 and 1940: the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (1929) and the All India Kisan Sabha (1936). At Independence came the two classical cases — the Tebhaga movement (1946–47), sharecroppers demanding two-thirds of the produce instead of the customary half, supported by the Kisan Sabha and the CPI; and the Telangana movement (1946–51) against feudal conditions in the princely state of Hyderabad, led by the CPI.

  3. New farmers’ movements began in the 1970s in Punjab and Tamil Nadu: regionally organised, non-party, anti-state and anti-urban, involving farmers (market-involved as producers and purchasers) and demanding ‘price and related issues’. Their methods included blocking roads and railways. Having broadened their agenda to environment and women’s issues, they are seen as part of the worldwide ‘new social movements’.

  4. Workers’ movements: factory production began in the early 1860s in the port towns of Calcutta, Bombay and later Madras; tea plantations in Assam date from 1839. Labour was cheap because the colonial government regulated neither wages nor working conditions.

  5. Early worker protest was spontaneous rather than sustained. The war brought food shortages and price rises: around 30 recorded strikes in Bombay’s textile mills in September–October 1917, strikes by jute workers in Calcutta, by workers of Buchingham and Carnatic Mills in Madras, and by Ahmedabad textile workers for a 50 per cent wage increase.

  6. The first trade union was founded in Madras in April 1918 by B.P. Wadia; Gandhi founded the Textile Labour Association the same year; the AITUC was formed in Bombay in 1920, with communist, moderate and nationalist groupings. The INTUC was formed in May 1947, and the 1947 split led to further divisions along party lines; regional parties formed unions from the late 1960s. The recession of 1966–67 and the railway strike of 1974 made the confrontation between state and unions acute, and the workers’ movement became part of the wider struggle for civil liberties.

8.6 Caste Based Movements

  1. Dalit movements cannot be explained by economic exploitation or political oppression alone. They are struggles for recognition as fellow human beings, for self-confidence and self-determination, and against the stigmatisation implied by untouchability — a struggle to be touched.

  2. ‘Dalit’, used in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and other languages for the poor and oppressed, was given its present sense in the early 1970s by neo-Buddhist followers of Babasaheb Ambedkar. It denies pollution, karma and any justification of caste hierarchy.

  3. There is no single unified Dalit movement, but a common quest for equality, self-dignity and the eradication of untouchability runs through the Satnami Movement, the Adi Dharma Movement, the Mahar Movement, the mobilisation among the Jatavas of Agra, and the Anti-Brahman Movement.

  4. Dalit literature insists on its own imagery and calls for social and cultural revolt. Sociologists find Dalit movements to contain reformative, redemptive and revolutionary elements; on the whole, it is argued, the movement has been reformist in its results.

  5. Backward Class Castes movements: the colonial state distributed patronage by caste, encouraging people to organise within and across castes — a ‘horizontal stretch’. Caste thereby lost ritual content and became secularised for political mobilisation. The term ‘Backward Classes’ spread from the late nineteenth century (Madras 1872, Mysore 1918, Bombay 1925); organisations multiplied from the 1920s, and 88 were counted working for the Backward Classes in 1954.

8.7 The Tribal Movements

  1. Tribal movements share issues but differ greatly. Many lie in the ‘tribal belt’ of middle India — Santhals, Hos, Oraons and Mundas of Chota Nagpur and the Santhal Parganas — the region that became Jharkhand.

  2. Jharkhand, carved out of south Bihar in 2000, rests on more than a century of resistance. Birsa Munda, an adivasi who led a major uprising against the British, became its icon. Literacy spread by Christian missionaries enabled adivasis to write their own history and myths, creating a shared Jharkhandi identity, and a middle-class adivasi leadership formulated the demand for a separate state.

  3. Adivasis shared a hatred of dikus — migrant traders and moneylenders who took the region’s wealth — while the benefits of mining and industry went to outsiders and adivasi land was alienated. The movement agitated against land acquisition for irrigation projects and firing ranges, survey and settlement operations, the collection of loans, rent and cooperative dues, and the nationalisation of forest produce.

  4. The North East: post-Independence state formation unsettled the hill districts, whose tribes, conscious of their distinct identity and traditional autonomy, were unsure of incorporation within Assam’s administration. Nongbri reads the rise of ethnicity as a response to contact with a powerful alien system, and notes a shift from an earlier secessionist tendency to a search for autonomy within the framework of the Constitution.

  5. The alienation of tribals from forest lands binds these movements together, making ecological, cultural and economic issues inseparable — and blurring the line between old and new social movements in India.

8.8 The Women’s Movement

  1. After the nineteenth-century social reform movements came women’s organisations: the Women’s India Association (1917), the National Council for Women in India (1925) and the All India Women’s Conference (1926). The AIWC began by treating ‘women’s welfare’ and ‘politics’ as mutually exclusive, but soon insisted that national freedom was the basis of all reform.

  2. Whether or not this period was a social movement can be argued both ways; it had organisations, ideology, leadership and shared understanding, and it created an atmosphere in which the women’s question could not be ignored.

  3. Women were not only middle class and educated: they took part in the Tebhaga movement, the Telangana armed struggle and the Warli tribal’s revolt against bondage.

  4. After 1947 there was a lull — activists moved into nation building, and the trauma of Partition is also cited. The mid-1970s brought a renewal, the second phase, with changes in organisational strategy and ideology, and new issues such as violence against women; campaigns won legal changes, and fought for land rights and employment alongside rights against sexual harassment and dowry.

  5. All women are disadvantaged relative to men, but not all suffer the same kind of discrimination: the concerns of the middle class woman, the peasant woman, the Dalit woman and the ‘upper caste’ woman differ.

  6. Dominant gender identities constrain men too, who are expected to be strong and unemotional. A gender-just society would free both, and rests on two factors — educated women with multiple roles, and an improved sex ratio; the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana is an effort in this direction.

8.9 Conclusion

  1. Social movements display the dialectical relationship between the individual and society with which the study of sociology began: people act collectively to change the conditions society has given them, and in doing so change both themselves and their society.

8.11 Key Terms

  1. adivasi — the original inhabitant of a region; the term used for India’s tribal communities, as in the Jharkhand movement.

  2. ahimsa — non-violence; one of the modes of protest Gandhi brought into the freedom movement.

  3. Backward Classes — a term in use since the late nineteenth century for castes and groups recognised as socially and educationally disadvantaged, around which many organisations were formed from the 1920s.

  4. charkha — the spinning wheel, used by Gandhi as a symbol of self-reliance and of resistance to mill-made cloth.

  5. Chartism — a social movement in England that demanded parliamentary representation, including universal male suffrage and the right to stand for election without owning property.

  6. civil society — the broad term covering both old social movements (political parties, trade unions) and new formations such as NGOs, women’s groups, environmental groups and tribal activists.

  7. collective action — action taken together by many people; when it is sustained and organised, it becomes a social movement.

  8. counter movement — a movement that arises in defence of the status quo, to oppose the changes a social movement is seeking.

  9. Dalit — a term used in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and other Indian languages for the poor and oppressed; given its present sense in the early 1970s by neo-Buddhist followers of Babasaheb Ambedkar, it denies pollution, karma and caste hierarchy.

  10. Dalit literature — writing by Dalit authors that uses their own imagery and experience, and calls for social and cultural revolt.

  11. diku — the outsider: the migrant trader or moneylender who settled in adivasi areas and took over their land and wealth.

  12. ecological movement — a movement arising out of the costs of a model of development that depletes natural resources and displaces people, such as the Chipko Movement.

  13. ecological sustainability — the use of natural resources in a way that does not destroy them, so that forests, rivers and land remain available as wealth that benefits all.

  14. ethnicity — a shared cultural identity; in the North East, its rise is read as a response to a tribe’s contact with a powerful alien system.

  15. gender-just society — a society in which both men and women are free of the constraints imposed by dominant gender identities; it rests on educated women with multiple roles and an improved sex ratio.

  16. globalisation — the growing interconnection of economies, cultures and risks across borders, which makes many new social movements international in scope.

  17. horizontal stretch — the coming together of similarly placed caste groups into a single political alliance, cutting sideways across the ritual hierarchy.

  18. identity politics — political mobilisation based on a shared identity and on cultural anxieties and aspirations, rather than on class alone.

  19. jotedar — a substantial landholder in Bengal, on whose fields sharecroppers laboured.

  20. karma — the doctrine of moral consequence used to explain and justify a person’s position in the caste hierarchy; a doctrine the term ‘Dalit’ explicitly rejects.

  21. khadi — hand-spun, hand-woven cloth, worn by Gandhi in support of Indian cotton-growers, spinners and weavers.

  22. land alienation — the process by which tribal communities lose their land, chiefly through acquisition, survey, settlement and law.

  23. leadership — the persons and bodies that direct a movement, take decisions and speak for it; one of the defining features of a social movement.

  24. moral economy — the shared understanding of right and wrong — of fair prices and rightful claims — that informs the actions of a protesting crowd.

  25. new social movements — movements said to be about quality-of-life issues, identity and culture rather than the distribution of power; often international in scope and cutting across class.

  26. non-party political formations — organised groups outside the party system, joined by people left out by formal politics in order to pressure the state from outside.

  27. old social movements — movements that saw the reorganisation of power relations as their central goal, were organised along class lines, and functioned within the frame of political parties.

  28. patriarchy — a social arrangement of male dominance which also constrains men, requiring them to be strong, successful and unemotional.

  29. redemptive (transformatory) social movement — a movement that seeks to change the personal consciousness and actions of its individual members.

  30. reformist social movement — a movement that seeks to change existing social and political arrangements through gradual, incremental steps.

  31. revolutionary social movement — a movement that seeks to transform social relations radically, often by capturing state power.

  32. sati — the practice against which Rammohun Roy campaigned, and whose defenders formed the Dharma Sabha as a counter movement.

  33. satyagraha — the insistence on truth as a form of resistance; Gandhi’s method of protest, used in campaigns such as Champaran and Bardoli.

  34. sharecropper — a cultivator who works another’s land and gives the owner a share of the crop as rent; the Tebhaga movement demanded that this share be reduced to one-third.

  35. social change — continuous, ongoing change in society, the sum of countless individual and collective actions, with no single goal or leadership.

  36. social integration — the binding of individuals into a society by its structures; Durkheim’s central concern, and the reason he saw movements as disorder.

  37. social movement — sustained collective action, with some degree of organisation, a leadership, shared objectives and an ideology, aimed at bringing about or preventing change on a public issue.

  38. social movement organisation — what a movement becomes as it institutionalises, moving from mass mobilisation to a settled organisational form.

  39. suffragette — a woman activist who campaigned for the right of all adult women to vote.

  40. trade union — an organisation of workers formed to bargain collectively over wages and conditions; the first in India was established in Madras in April 1918.

  41. untouchability — the practice of stigmatisation and exclusion against which the Dalit movement is directed; its abolition is one of that movement’s central goals.

8.12 Points to Ponder

  1. If a social movement wins its demand and then becomes an organisation with offices and procedures, has it succeeded or has it ended? Can a movement survive its own victory?

  2. Sociologists distinguish social change from social movements by saying that change is unplanned and movements are deliberate. But if a movement’s effects outlive its intentions — as the reformers’ campaigns did — how much of the change that follows can really be credited to the movement?

  3. The features of a social movement include sustained collective action, organisation, leadership and shared objectives. If a protest today can be assembled in an afternoon on a phone and dissolved by the evening, does the definition need rethinking, or does it simply tell us that such a protest is not a movement?

  4. Chipko’s participants defended a forest they depended on for firewood and fodder. Is a movement less “environmental” because it is also about survival? What would an environmental movement look like that had no material interest behind it at all?

  5. Counter movements arise because change threatens both interests and values. Which of the two do you think is harder for a movement to overcome — the people who lose something, or the people who believe the old arrangement was right?

  6. India’s tribal, peasant, women’s and Dalit movements each combine questions of economy, culture and political voice. Does this mean the old–new distinction is simply wrong, or that it was built for a society very different from ours?

8.13 NCERT Questions

  1. Imagine a society in which there has been no social movement. Discuss what such a society would be like, and describe how you imagine it.

  2. Write short notes on:

    1. the Women’s Movement
    2. the Tribal Movements

  3. In India it is difficult to make a clear distinction between the old and the new social movements. Discuss.

  4. Environmental movements often also contain economic and identity issues. Discuss.

  5. Distinguish between peasant movements and the new farmers’ movements.

8.14 Objective Questions

  1. Which of the following is NOT a defining feature of a social movement?

    1. Sustained collective action over time
    2. Some degree of organisation, including a leadership and a structure
    3. Spontaneous, disorganised expression of anger
    4. Shared objectives and ideologies [1 mark]

  2. A movement that seeks to change the personal consciousness and actions of its individual members is called:

    1. reformist
    2. redemptive
    3. revolutionary
    4. counter movement [1 mark]

  3. The Dharma Sabha, formed by the defenders of sati, is an example of:

    1. a reformist movement
    2. a social movement organisation
    3. a counter movement
    4. a non-party political formation [1 mark]

  4. The historian E. P. Thompson argued that the ‘crowd’ and the ‘mob’ possessed:

    1. social integration
    2. a moral economy
    3. a horizontal stretch
    4. identity politics [1 mark]

  5. The Tebhaga movement (1946–47) was a struggle of sharecroppers for:

    1. the abolition of land revenue
    2. two-thirds of the produce instead of the customary half
    3. remunerative prices for agricultural produce
    4. the nationalisation of forest produce [1 mark]

  6. Fill in the blank: The first trade union in India was established in April 1918 in Madras by __________. [1 mark]

  7. Fill in the blank: Similarly placed caste groups uniting with one another for political purposes has been termed a __________. [1 mark]

  8. True or False: According to Rajni Kothari, the surge of social movements in India in the 1970s was caused by growing satisfaction with parliamentary democracy. [1 mark]

  9. True or False: Ramachandra Guha’s account of the Chipko Movement appears in his book Unquiet Woods. [1 mark]

  10. Match the following:

Column A Column B
a. Narayana Guru i. All India Trade Union Congress, 1920
b. Birsa Munda ii. The Ezhava community in Kerala
c. B.P. Wadia iii. The Jharkhand movement
d. Gaura Devi iv. First trade union, Madras, 1918
e. Emile Durkheim v. The Reni forest, Chipko
vi. Social integration and the division of labour

[1 mark]

  1. Match the organisation with the year of its founding:
Column A Column B
a. Women’s India Association i. 1926
b. National Council for Women in India ii. 1936
c. All India Women’s Conference iii. 1917
d. All India Kisan Sabha iv. 1925

[1 mark]

  1. Assertion (A): A spontaneous protest that ends the same day cannot be called a social movement. Reason (R): A social movement requires sustained collective action marked by some degree of organisation.
  1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
  2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
  3. A is true, but R is false
  4. A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
  1. Assertion (A): The term ‘Dalit’ denies the ideas of pollution, karma and a justified caste hierarchy. Reason (R): The term refers to those who have been broken and ground down deliberately by those above them.
  1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
  2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
  3. A is true, but R is false
  4. A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
  1. Assertion (A): Many of the new social movements are international in scope. Reason (R): Firms are often transnational, binding legal arrangements such as WTO regulations are international, and environmental and health risks are global in nature.
  1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
  2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
  3. A is true, but R is false
  4. A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
  1. Assertion (A): The classification of a social movement is always a matter of interpretation. Reason (R): What the British colonial rulers called a ‘mutiny’ in 1857 was called ‘the first war of Independence’ by Indian nationalists.
  1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
  2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
  3. A is true, but R is false
  4. A is false, but R is true [1 mark]

8.15 Check Your Concepts

  1. Define a social movement, naming any three of its defining features. [2 marks]

  2. What is a counter movement? Give one example from the chapter. [2 marks]

  3. What is meant by a ‘moral economy’? [2 marks]

  4. State what is meant by a ‘social movement organisation’. [2 marks]

  5. Who are the ‘dikus’, and why did adivasis in south Bihar resent them? [2 marks]

  6. Name the two factors on which the idea of a gender-just society is said to rest. [2 marks]

  7. Why is the Dalit movement described as a struggle for recognition and not merely a struggle against economic exploitation? [2 marks]

  8. Differentiate between social change and a social movement, with one example of each. [4 marks]

  9. Distinguish between redemptive, reformist and revolutionary social movements, giving one Indian example of each. [4 marks]

  10. Explain, with examples from the chapter, why counter movements arise whenever a social movement seeks to change society. [4 marks]

  11. “Protest is only the most visible thing a social movement does.” Describe three other kinds of activity through which a social movement works. [4 marks]

  12. Explain why caste came to be used as a resource for political mobilisation, and what is meant by the ‘horizontal stretch’. [4 marks]

  13. Study Table 8.1 in section 8.5 (Landmarks in the early industrial and trade union history of India). Roughly how many decades separate the beginning of factory production in India from the founding of the first trade union? What does this gap suggest about the relationship between protest and organisation in the workers’ movement? [4 marks]

  14. Explain how a shared Jharkhandi identity was created, and why the chapter treats that identity as an achievement of the movement rather than as its starting point. [4 marks]

  15. Why does the chapter argue that all women do not suffer the same kind of discrimination? Explain with an Indian example. [4 marks]

  16. “Environmental movements in India are never only about the environment.” Evaluate this claim with reference to the Chipko Movement. [6 marks]

  17. Compare the sociological reading of collective protest that grows out of Durkheim’s concern with social integration with the reading offered by scholars influenced by Marx. What does each see, and what does each miss? [6 marks]

  18. “In India it is difficult to hold apart old and new social movements.” Discuss this statement using the farmers’, tribal and women’s movements as evidence. [6 marks]

  19. Trace the development of the workers’ movement in India from the early strikes to the splits of the post-Independence period, and explain how the division of unions along party lines affected the movement. [6 marks]

  20. How far do you agree that the Dalit movement has been reformist in its results, even where it was revolutionary in its aims? Support your answer with evidence from the chapter. [6 marks]

  21. Explain, with reference to Rajni Kothari’s argument, why people who feel unrepresented by political parties turn to non-party political formations. What does the growth of such formations tell us about a democracy? [6 marks]

8.16 Passage-Based Questions

  1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    For nearly three years, the residents of a hill settlement have been meeting on the last Sunday of every month in the village school. A committee of seven, elected each year, decides what the settlement will do next; a retired postmaster speaks for it when officials come. Their demand has not changed: no felling contract on the slope above the village until the effect on the springs below is assessed. Some members argue for a written petition to the district administration; others want to sit outside the forest office until they are heard. Last winter, a rival association was formed by those who supply timber to the depot, and it has been petitioning the administration to let the contract proceed.

    1. Identify the features that make the residents’ action a social movement rather than a protest.
    2. What is the timber suppliers’ association an example of, and why do such formations arise?
    3. Which of the three types — redemptive, reformist or revolutionary — best describes the residents’ action, and why? [6 marks]

  2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    In a mineral-rich district, a family has cultivated a small plot for three generations. They have no paper title; the land was simply known to be theirs. When a large project is sanctioned, the plot is surveyed, recorded and acquired. Compensation is paid to those whose names appear in the record, and their names do not. The father now works as a daily-wage labourer at the project site, on the ground that was once his field. Traders and contractors who moved into the district a generation ago have prospered from the same project.

    1. Name and explain the process the passage describes.
    2. Using the chapter, explain why tribal movements treat ecological, economic and cultural issues as inseparable.
    3. Which two demands raised by the Jharkhand movement does this situation illustrate? [6 marks]

  3. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    Two women in the same district read the same newspaper report about a new law protecting workers from harassment at the workplace. One works in a district office: there is a notice board, a written procedure, and a supervisor who has been told to display it. The other is hired each morning by a contractor at a road-building site; no register carries her name, and she knows that a complaint made today may mean no work tomorrow. The law is the same for both.

    1. What sociological point about the women’s movement does this passage illustrate?
    2. Explain why a legal right may not translate into an equal outcome for all women.
    3. Name one issue, mentioned in the chapter, that the women’s movement has taken up alongside the question of harassment. [6 marks]

  4. Study the table and answer the questions that follow.

    Year Landmark
    Early 1860s Factory production begins in India
    September–October 1917 Around 30 recorded strikes in the textile mills of Bombay
    April 1918 First trade union established in Madras
    1920 All India Trade Union Congress formed in Bombay
    May 1947 Indian National Trade Union Congress formed
    1. What does the sequence in the table suggest about whether organisation came before or after collective protest?
    2. Why were the earliest factories established in port towns such as Bombay, Calcutta and Madras?
    3. Explain one consequence, for workers, of unions coming to be organised along the lines of political parties. [6 marks]