Social Inequality Test - 3

These social resources can be divided into three forms of capital economic capital: material assets and income; cultural capital such as educational qualifications and status; and social capital in the form of networks of contacts and social associations(Bourdieu 1986). Third, they are systematic and structured; there is a definite social inequalities pattern.

Sociologists use the term social stratification to refer to a system by which categories of people in a society are ranked in a hierarchy.

People often harbour prejudices about other social groups. Each of us grows up as a community member from which we acquire ideas not just about our community, our caste or class, our gender but also about others. Often these ideas reflect prejudices. Prejudices refer to preconceived opinions or attitudes held by members of one group towards another.

A person may be prejudiced in favour of members of his/her own caste or group. Without any evidence, they believe them to be superior to members of other castes or groups. Prejudices are often grounded in stereotypes, fixed and inflexible characterisations of a group of people.

The ritually highest caste, the brahmins, were not supposed to amass wealth and were subordinated to kings and rulers ’secular power belonging to the Kshatriya castes.

Strictly speaking, the untouchable castes are outside the caste hierarchy. They are considered to be so impure that their mere touch severely pollutes members of all other castes, bringing terrible punishment for the former and forcing the latter to perform elaborate purification rituals.

Notions of distance pollution existed in many regions of India (particularly in the south) such that even the mere presence or the shadow of an untouchable person is considered polluting.

The first government of independent India under Jawaharlal Nehru appointed a commission to look into measures for the welfare of the OBCs.

The first backward classes commission headed by Kaka Kalelkar submitted its report in 1953. but the political climate at the time led to the report being sidelined.

The OBC issue became a regional affair pursued at the state rather than the central level from the mid-fifties. The southern states had a long history of backward caste political agitation that had started in the early twentieth century.

The Jana or tribes were believed to be people of the forest whose distinctive habitat in the hill and forest areas shaped their economic, social, and political attributes.

The Polavaram dam on the river Godavari in Andhra Pradesh will displace hundreds of thousands of Adivasis, driving them to greater destitution.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy led the anti-sati campaign in Bengal. The widow remarriage movement in the Bombay presidency where Ranade was one of the leading reformers, from Jyotiba Phule ’s simultaneous attack on caste and gender oppression, and from the social reform movement in Islam led by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. Raja Ram Mohan Roy ’s attempts to reform society, religion, and women ’s status can be taken as the starting point of the nineteenth-century social reform in Bengal.

Ranade used the writings of scholars such as bishop joseph butler, whose analogy of religion and three sermons on human nature dominated the moral philosophy syllabus of Bombay university in the 1860s.

Jyotirao Phule wanted girls to be educated but within the precincts of their homes.