Introducing Indian Society

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Sociology Class XII (Indian Society), Chapter 1.

The one subject you already "know" before the first class

Nobody expects a six year old to know Chemistry or Geography on the first day of school. But that same six year old already knows who counts as family, whom to greet first, what is "normal" at a wedding and what gets you told off in a market. By eighteen you have picked up a huge amount about the society around you without ever sitting in a class on it. This chapter asks an uncomfortable question: if you already know so much, what is left for Sociology to teach you? The answer is that what you know is real, but it is only one angle on society, and you must learn to see past it.

No one starts from zero

Other subjects are learnt because they are taught, at school or at home. Knowledge about society is different. It arrives while you grow up, so it feels "natural" or "automatic". That gives Sociology a strange advantage and a strange disadvantage at the same time.

Why unlearning is needed. Your prior knowledge, your common sense, comes from the social group and social environment you were socialised into. Your family, neighbourhood, school and community shaped your opinions, beliefs and expectations about society, mostly without you noticing. These beliefs are not necessarily wrong. The problem is that they are partial.

"Partial" has two meanings

The textbook uses the word partial in two different senses, and exam questions test both.

Put the two together and you get the full picture. Common sense lets you see only a part of social reality, and the part you see is tilted towards your own group. Sociology does not say common sense is always wrong. It says common sense is a starting point that must be examined, not a conclusion that can be trusted.

Pause and predict: a classmate says, "Sociology is easy because I already know how society works." Which part of the chapter does this contradict?

Check your answer: the part about prior knowledge being a disadvantage. What your classmate knows is common sense, and common sense is partial. The first job of a Sociology student is to unlearn the incomplete and biased parts of it, so familiarity actually makes the subject trickier to start, not easier.

Two views. For the exam: common sense is partial and must be unlearned, and the initial stage of learning Sociology consists mainly of such unlearning. Another reading: some sociologists, especially those in the phenomenological tradition, argue that everyday common sense should not just be cleared away. It is how people actually make sense of their lives, so it is a worthy object of study in its own right. Both views agree on one thing: you cannot treat your own common sense as the last word.

Self reflexivity: looking at yourself from the outside

Sociology can show you what you look like to others. It teaches you to look at yourself "from the outside", which is called self reflexivity or simply reflexivity. Normally your gaze is directed outward, at other people. Reflexivity is the ability to turn that gaze back on yourself.

There is a condition. The self inspection must be critical, which means quick to criticise and slow to praise oneself. A student who looks inward only to feel good about their own group is not being reflexive. A student who asks "How might my family's income, language or neighbourhood be shaping what I think is normal?" is.

Why it matters. Reflexivity is the tool that makes unlearning possible. You cannot unlearn what you cannot see, and you cannot see the limits of your own viewpoint until you can imagine how it looks from another position.

The social map: where are you in society?

A map tells you where a place is by locating it among other places. A social map does the same for a person. It places you among the groups of society and among the web of social relationships that connect those groups. The textbook builds one for a seventeen or eighteen year old.

No single row defines you. Each one places you at a different point, and together they show how your identity is tied to larger groups. Sociology goes further than description. It tells you what kinds of groups exist in society, how they relate to each other, and what this might mean for your own life.

Personal troubles and social issues: the idea from C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills, a well known American sociologist, argued that Sociology can map the links between "personal troubles" and "social issues". The two are different in scale and in how they get their meaning.

The link in one line: one person's worry about a job → many people with the same worry → a social issue (not enough jobs for the number of people looking).

Take the job worry. Read alone, it is your private anxiety, and you may blame yourself for not studying harder. Read across a whole generation, it is a pattern, and patterns need social explanations. Sociology teaches you to move between the two scales. This is why a student who cannot find a seat in a good college is facing a personal trouble, while the shortage of seats for all applicants is a social issue.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: personal troubles are individual worries, and social issues are about large groups, and the distinction belongs to C. Wright Mills. In reality: Mills built this idea into what he called the "sociological imagination", the habit of seeing how private lives and public history connect. You will meet the same habit in every chapter of this book. The question to ask is always: whose problem is this, one person's or a whole group's, and what in society produces it?

Pause and predict: a family finds that rising prices have made it hard to pay the monthly bills, and the same complaint is heard across the whole neighbourhood. Is this a personal trouble or a social issue?

Check your answer: it begins as a personal trouble for each family, but because large numbers of households share it and it has causes beyond any single family, it is also a social issue. Mills would say the sociologist's work is to show the link between the two.

A preview of the whole book

This book introduces Indian society from a sociological rather than a common sense point of view. It is the first of two textbooks. This volume covers the basic structure of Indian society. The second volume looks at social change and development in India. The roadmap below is worth memorising, because NTA likes to ask which chapter deals with which theme.

The two big forces behind the sweeping economic changes in India, as Chapter 4 explains, were colonialism and then developmental policies. Keep these two names in mind as the "engines" of change you will see throughout the book.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Next: The Demographic Structure of the Indian Society starts the study of Indian society with its population, the most basic social fact.
• Later in this book: Social Institutions: Continuity and Change, The Market as a Social Institution and Patterns of Social Inequality and Exclusion apply the personal troubles and social issues idea to caste, tribe, family, markets and inequality.
• Class XI link: Sociology and Society introduces the discipline itself, and Terms, Concepts and Their Use in Sociology covers the group and status terms you use when you build a social map.