Modernisation is the name given to the large, patterned transition by which a society organised around agriculture, kinship, custom and ascribed status becomes one organised around industry, markets, formal organisations and achieved status. As used in the 1950s and 1960s it was more than a description: it was a theory claiming that the transition follows a recognisable sequence, that its elements hang together as a package, and that societies which have not yet made it will make it if the right stimuli are supplied.
The word must be kept apart from two neighbours. Modernity is a condition or social formation; modernisation is the process of arriving at it. Westernisation, in M. N. Srinivas's usage, refers to the adoption of the culture and technology of a particular Western power — the British in India — and is therefore a historically specific borrowing, not a universal law of development.
Indices of modernisation
The literature converged on a familiar set of indicators: industrialisation and the shift of the workforce out of agriculture; urbanisation and the growth of cities as centres of anonymity and choice; the spread of literacy and formal schooling; the reach of mass media; increased social and spatial mobility; secularisation of law, education and public reasoning; and a shift in personality from fatalism to achievement orientation. Daniel Lerner's Middle Eastern study proposed a chain in which urbanisation raises literacy, literacy expands media exposure, and media exposure widens political participation, with empathy — the capacity to imagine oneself in another's position — as the psychic hinge of the whole sequence.
Rostow, Parsons, McClelland
W. W. Rostow gave the process an economic stage theory: traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, take-off, the drive to maturity and the age of high mass consumption. Talcott Parsons supplied the analytical grammar through his pattern variables, which contrast ascription with achievement, particularism with universalism, diffuseness with specificity, affectivity with affective neutrality, and collective with self orientation. Modernisation, in this reading, is the migration of a society's dominant institutions from the first term of each pair to the second, accompanied by structural differentiation — the splitting off of specialised economic, political, educational and religious roles from the undifferentiated household. David McClelland relocated the engine inside the person, arguing that the need for achievement, instilled in childhood and detectable in the imagery of a culture's stories, precedes and predicts economic growth.
The critique
The objections are as important as the theory. It was Eurocentric: the end point was an idealised portrait of the mid-century United States, and every other history was read as a delay. It was unilinear, treating a single sequence as necessary when Japan, Russia and later East Asia industrialised through routes that did not resemble Britain's. It was ahistorical about colonialism — underdevelopment was attributed to internal tradition rather than to the drain of surplus, deindustrialisation of crafts and forced commercialisation of agriculture that colonial rule imposed. Dependency theory, in Andre Gunder Frank's formulation, inverted the argument: metropolis and satellite belong to one system, and the poverty of the periphery is produced by the same process that enriches the core. In India, A. R. Desai attacked modernisation theory for its silence on class, property and imperialism, and for offering a technocratic vocabulary that concealed who gained. The theory also handled tradition badly, treating it as inert resistance rather than as a resource that groups actively use.
The Indian illustration
Yogendra Singh's Modernization of Indian Tradition is the classic Indian response. He distinguishes structural from cultural modernisation and argues that in India the two have been uneven — institutions of the state, industry and education modernised faster than the normative order — producing what he calls a pattern of adaptive change in which modernity is absorbed into tradition rather than replacing it. Caste associations contest elections; a software engineer consults an astrologer over a marriage date; reservation policy uses modern bureaucratic instruments to address a ritual hierarchy. Srinivas made the parallel point at village level by separating sanskritisation — mobility within the traditional ritual idiom — from westernisation, and showing that the two often advance together, since western education and government employment supplied the means for lower castes to claim higher ritual rank. Tradition and modernity, on this evidence, interpenetrate rather than succeed one another.
For the UPSC answer
Present modernisation first as a coherent theory, naming Lerner's chain, Rostow's five stages, Parsons's pattern variables and McClelland's achievement motive, so the examiner sees that you know what is being criticised. Then deploy the critique in a fixed order — Eurocentrism, unilinearity, the neglect of colonialism, and dependency — with A. R. Desai for the Indian voice. Close with Yogendra Singh on the interpenetration of tradition and modernity and Srinivas's separation of sanskritisation from westernisation, since this is the payoff that distinguishes an Indian sociology answer from a summary of American theory. A single concrete example, such as caste associations working through electoral politics, is worth more than another list of indices.
References & further reading
- Lerner, D. (1958). The Passing of Traditional Society. Free Press.
- Rostow, W. W. (1960). The Stages of Economic Growth. Cambridge University Press.
- McClelland, D. C. (1961). The Achieving Society. Van Nostrand.
- Singh, Y. (1973). Modernization of Indian Tradition. Thomson Press.
- Srinivas, M. N. (1966). Social Change in Modern India. University of California Press.
- Frank, A. G. (1967). Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. Monthly Review Press.
- Desai, A. R. (ed.) (1971). Essays on Modernization of Underdeveloped Societies. Thacker.