Political Community and Group Interests in Modern India

F OR MANY the term modernization suggests a movement away from poverty, ignorance, and isolation to a life of greater equality and prosperity; toward more refrigerators, schools, and democratic politics. Among these are the sociologists and other scholars who couch their approaches to new in the rhetoric of development, modernity, and the concept of Westernization. For others, including anthropologists, the traditional society has its own wisdom, virtue, and nobility, perhaps even corrupted by the changes that may bring refrigerators. For these scholars, each society is a culture which cannot be compared with others in the abstractions of comparative sociology. That model of a goal toward which change is taking the developing nations presupposes some network of comparison between the diverse societies at different stages, or levels, of economic and political growth. In analyzing the development of society on the national level in modern India, we utilize these diverse orientations to comparison, suggesting that comparative sociologists must be keenly alive to the strength of the anthropologist's criticism.* There has been too much indiscriminate borrowing of perspectives and concepts from one culture to another, without sensitivity to the specific historical and cultural contexts in which they occur. This is especially true in that area to which we shall give greatest attention-the achievement of political unity on a national level. From the minute that India's independence was proclaimed, the problem of giving reality to the juridical recognition of nationhood began to plague the Indian official, intellectual, politician, and planner. This problem was the logical result of two facts about post-Independence India: First, during the period of British rule a new Indian elite had arisen, unconnected to traditional sources of legitimate authority and committed to social and economic reform and development in India. It is this elite to which formal, national power was transferred after Independence. Through the operation of the Nationalist movement a centralized and relatively

Group (periodic table) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Indian History and Philosophy · Law · South Asian Studies and Conflicts

• Litigation as a Strategy for Personal Mobility

  Open Access•Robert L Kidder•The Journal of Asian Studies•1974

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• Political Conflict in Ten Villages in India, Pakistan and Ceylon

  Open Access•M J Shepperdson, Mike Shepperdson•Contributions to Indian Sociology•1969

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