SALIENT FEATURES OF INDIAN SOCIETY

Published in

Vanicademy

5 min readNov 4, 2020

What is society?

As per sociologists, a society is often defined as a gaggle of individuals who have interactions within a standard territory, and share an identical culture. We will now breakdown the keywords — group, territory, interaction and culture for better understanding.

Social Group

It is the approaching together of two or more people that interact and further identify with each other.

Territory

Every Country owns formal boundaries and territory (areas) that the planet recognizes as belonging to the respective country. But, a society’s boundaries don’t necessarily need to be only geopolitical borders.

Interaction

The members of any society must are available in contact with one another. If one group of people within a rustic will haven’t any regular contact with another group, those groups can’t be considered a part of an equivalent society. Language barriers and Geographic distance separate societies within a rustic.

Culture

People belonging to an equivalent society will share aspects of their culture, like language and beliefs. Culture is the values, language, beliefs, behaviour, and material objects that structure their way of life. it’s a defining element of any society.

About Indian society

What makes Indian society so unique from the other within the world is its feature of ‘unity In Diversity.’

As the phrase suggests, the university in diversity is that the celebration of oneness the citizens of India enjoy regardless of their vast culture, geographical, ethnic and social differences. this is often India’s motto and it fuels the human interaction within the state.

Unity in diversity is best showcased in how the citizens of India identify themselves as Indian amid such significant differences. Accommodation without assimilation may be a key feature of our society. Over the years, India has welcomed and interacted with various elements of society without making any of those elements lose its authenticity and roots. Every individual in India enjoys the liberty to practice his or her chosen way of life.

Salient features of Indian society

The Merging Of Tradition With Modernism

Globalization may need to be bought with it a surge of recent values and practices, but traditionalism remains prevalent and preserved in India. The traditions of Indian society have also made its thanks to the surface world through an equivalent gate of globalization.

Let us see a couple of examples: -

Dance and music: Indian dance/music forms are equally popular as its western counterparts. Indo-western fusion has been a well-liked theme in the humanistic discipline.
Gyms may need to become a crucial part of the Indian lifestyle, but yoga has also attained celebrity status.
Nuclear families became common, but children still accept and lookout for oldsters in their adulthood.
International cuisines and food habits are equally popular as local ones.

The Indian Society Is Syncretic And Dynamic

As mentioned earlier, our society promotes accommodation also as assimilation. Over the years, multiple tribes have lost their core indigenous culture thanks to assimilation into the main population of Indian society. Such contacts with different cultures also gave birth to newer practices. The society is dynamic because it is changing a day.

Assimilation examples: -

The number of PVTG (particularly vulnerable tribal groups) is increasing
Many ethnic tribes just like the naga are struggling to guard their culture against the surface world

Syncretism examples: -

Urdu comes from both Arabic and Hindi
The Rashtrapati Bhawan is an architectural splendor created from the fusion of European, Rajput, and Mughal design.
The Sufi movement and therefore the bhakti movement were complimentary to every other.

The Underlying Theme Of Unity Is Diversity

Indian society has challenged the scepticism of the many political thinkers post-independence that were doubtful regarding India’s amalgamation together nation amidst vast differences and large numbers of ethnic groups, languages, culture and variety.

The core values within the constitution, the reorganization by the state-supported language also because the efforts of the govt to guard the interests of minorities has helped keep up this unity.

Examples:

Inter-state migration
Mutual celebration of spiritual festivals despite religious differences
Cosmopolitan culture in metros

Patriarchy

Patriarchy may be a family system within which the supreme decision-making power rests with the male head/members of the family.

Women are treated like second-class citizens during a patriarchal society. this technique is degrading to women; it hinders the social and emotional development of the fairer sex of the society. Gender discrimination may be a universal deterrent for ladies.

The Society is essentially Agrarian And Rural

For quite half the population of India, agriculture remains the only source of livelihood. An estimated 70% of our population lives in rural territories.

Agrarian festivals celebrate the harvest of the crops and are celebrated within the sort of holi, Lohri, Pongal, Onam, sankrant, etc.

Many rural art forms like Madhubani (Bihar), fabric weaves like Khadi, and handicrafts of bamboo are even as popular within the urban areas.

Class And Caste Divide

The modern class structure is that the results of the age-old varna system. Economic reforms have led to flourishing urban areas. Here people are categorized as a supported class (such as income) instead of their social identity. The emerging class system though closely resembles the caste hierarchy. it’s also provided downtrodden sections with a chance for upward social mobility. Co-existence through inter-caste marriages and endogamy are samples of this. The divide is clear within the economic structures(poverty, education, income, asset ownership, trades, and professions, etc.). It holds collective values above the individual achievements

There Is Tolerance And Mutual Respect

The Indian society has survived within the face of diversity, because of its accommodative values of tolerance and mutual respect that have existed from the first times. The multitude of invaders who made India their home cause the blending and co-existence of the many different cultures.
In the ancient period, the Indus valley civilization was a secular society and traded peacefully with societies like Mesopotamia, importing their culture too. Buddhism and Jainism promoted these values through ancient texts. “Sarva-dharma-sam-bhava” represents such secular values.

The co-existence of varied philosophies including atheistic, religious, and materialistic, symbolizes the society that has got to have existed in those times. During the medieval period, the repeated invasions and trade led to the fusion of multiple cultures. The mixing of Nagara and Dravid styles into Vesara style, Arabic and hindavi into Urdu, Bhakti and Sufi movements (Teachings of Kabir, Nanak, Khwaja Chishti, etc.), Dīn-i Ilāhī of Akbar are good examples of mutual respect.