Social Structure

Human world is composed of individuals. Individuals interact with one another for the fulfillment of their needs. In this process, they occupy certain statues and roles in social life with accompanying rights and obligations. Their social behaviour is patterned and gets associated with certain norms and values which provide them guidance in social interaction. There emerge various social units, such as, groups, community, associations and institutions in society as product of social intercourse in human life.

In this scenario, social structure is conceived as the pattern of inter-related statuses and roles found in a society, constituting a relatively stable set of social relations. It is the organized pattern of the inter-related rights and obligations of persons and groups in a system of interaction.

Rural social structure in India

India is a country of ancient civilization that goes back to the Indus Valley Civilization which flourished during the third millennium B.C. Since then except for a brief interlude during the Rig-Vedic period when the urban centres were overrun, rural and urban centres have co-existed in India.

1. Rural and urban centres share some common facets of life. They show interdependence especially in the spheres of economy, urban-ward migration, townsmen or city dwellers’ dependence on villages for various products (e.g., food-grains, milk, vegetables and raw materials for industry) and increasing dependence of villagers on towns for manufactured goods and market Despite this interdependence between the two there are certain distinctive features which separate them from each other in terms of their size, demographic composition, cultural moorings and style of life, economy, employment and social relations. We find that the size of village population is small and density of population is low in comparison with towns and cities. India is rightly called a country of villages. Moreover, about 65 per cent of the total population lives in villages. Further, rural life is characterized by direct relationship of people to nature i.e. land, animal and plant life. Agriculture is their main occupation. For example, in India agriculture provides livelihood to about 60 per cent of the labour force.
2. Long enduring rural social institutions in India are Family, Kinship, Caste and Village. They have millennia old historical roots and structures. They encompass the entire field of life -social, economic, political and cultural – of the rural people. The complexity of social norms and values, statuses and roles, rights and obligations is reflected in them. VILLAGE occupies an important place in the social and cultural landscape of con temporary India. Notwithstanding India’s significant industrialization over the last five or six decades, and a considerable increase in its urban population, a large majority of Indians continue to live in its more than five lakh villages and remain dependent on agriculture, directly or indirectly.
3. Apart from it being an important demographic and structural reality characterizing contemporary India, village has also been an important ideological category, a category through which India has often been imagined and imaged in modern times. The village has been seen as the ultimate signifier of the “authentic native life”, a place where one could see, observe and “realize” India and develop an understanding of the way local people organize their social relationships and belief systems. As Andre Beteille writes, ‘the village was not merely a place where people lived; it had a design which reflected the basic values of Indian civilization. Institutional patterns of the Indian “village communities” and its cultural values where supposed to be an example of what in the twentieth century came to be known as the “traditional society”.

Main Features of Rural Society may be summed up as :

1. Village is a community- The village satisfies all their needs in the village. They have a sense of unity and a feeling of amiability towards each other.
2. Village is a institution- The development of villages is influenced considerably by the life of the village. In this way village is a primary institution.
3. Religiosity- Faith in religion and universal power is found in the life of the villages.
4. The major occupation is agriculture which involves dependence on nature. Farmers worship forces of nature. The life of the village is the joint family system.
5. Family has a strict control and administrative powers over the individual. All the members of the family share the burden of the family occupation. In this way of working together the villagers maintain sense of cooperation among themselves. In the life of the villagers group feeling occupies an important place. They respect the judgment and obey the orders of their elders and the panchayats. Society, caste and panchayat have control over the individual.

The End of the Blog : Social Structure