Social reform is organised, deliberate effort to change particular social institutions and practices while accepting the broad framework of the existing order. It is distinguished from revolution, which aims at the transformation of the order itself and usually of the structure of power that sustains it, and it is distinguished from legislation, which may be one of reform's instruments but cannot by itself constitute a reform movement. Reform works through persuasion, example, association, education, propaganda and law, and it typically claims legitimacy from within the tradition it seeks to alter — a feature that makes its rhetoric characteristically restorative even when its intent is innovative.
In the sociology of social movements, following M. S. A. Rao, reform belongs to the category of movements aiming at partial change in the value system, as against revolutionary movements aiming at total structural change and reformative or transformative types in between. The classification matters because it directs attention to a movement's goals, its ideology, its organisational form and the social base it recruits from — the four things a good answer on any reform movement should specify.
The nineteenth-century movements
Colonial rule created the conditions for organised reform: print, English education, a codifying legal system, an urban professional class, and the sting of missionary and administrative criticism of Indian custom. The result was a succession of associations rather than a single movement.
The Brahmo Samaj, founded in Bengal in 1828 by Rammohun Roy and later led by Debendranath Tagore and Keshub Chandra Sen, argued from the Upanishads for monotheism and against idolatry, sati, polygamy and caste restriction. In western India the Prarthana Samaj — with Justice Ranade and R. G. Bhandarkar — pursued a gentler programme of widow remarriage, women's education and the removal of caste disabilities. Dayanand Saraswati's Arya Samaj (1875) took the opposite rhetorical route: back to the Vedas, an infallible original text against which later accretions including hereditary caste and untouchability could be condemned, with the shuddhi ceremony as an instrument of reconversion. Among Muslims, Sayyid Ahmad Khan's Aligarh movement pressed for modern education and a rationalist reading of scripture. In the south, Sri Narayana Guru and the SNDP Yogam organised the Ezhavas of Kerala around temple entry, education and self-respect.
The anti-caste current ran on a different track. Jotirao Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) rejected the reformist strategy of appealing to scripture altogether, reading Brahminical texts as records of conquest and organising the shudras and atishudras around education, non-Brahmin priesthood and the marriage rite performed without a Brahmin. E. V. Ramasami's Self-Respect movement in the Tamil country carried this to its conclusion with self-respect marriages, an explicit rationalism and the refusal of Sanskritic ritual as such.
Two currents of justification
Charles Heimsath's study of Hindu social reform draws out the split that runs through all of this: reformers argued either as rationalists, defending change on grounds of humanity, utility and reason, or as revivalists, defending it as the restoration of an authentic past corrupted by later custom. Rammohun's case against sati cited both scripture and compassion; Dayanand's case against untouchability was entirely textual. The revivalist strategy had a real advantage — it could not be dismissed as foreign imitation — but it carried two costs. It made the reformer hostage to the text, so that whatever the text appeared to sanction became hard to attack; and it fed a defensive cultural nationalism in which criticism of Hindu practice came to look like disloyalty.
A. R. Desai's materialist reading placed the movements in their class setting: reform was substantially the project of an emerging urban intelligentsia and commercial bourgeoisie whose interests lay in a rationalised society and whose horizon rarely extended to the agrarian relations that structured the lives of most Indians.
Women, the state, and the limits of law
The recurring issues were sati, widow remarriage, child marriage, purdah, the age of consent and women's education. The state's legislative record — abolition of sati (1829), the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act (1856), the Age of Consent Act (1891), the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) — looks impressive on paper and was thin in effect, because enforcement depended on complaint and complaint depended on the very families the law was aimed at.
Recent scholarship has complicated the story. Lata Mani showed that in the sati debate both British officials and Indian reformers argued primarily about what scripture permitted, so that women became the ground of the argument rather than participants in it. Partha Chatterjee argued that nationalism resolved the women's question by dividing the world into an outer material domain, where Western superiority was conceded, and an inner spiritual domain of home and womanhood, to be modernised only on nationalist terms — producing the educated but emphatically traditional bhadramahila.
The caste critique
The sharpest critique of nineteenth-century reform came from within India. Upper caste reformers, on this account, took up the woman question and largely avoided caste, because caste privilege was their own; where they did address it they preferred the removal of untouchability to the abolition of the graded order that produced it. Ambedkar put the objection in structural form: reform of practices within a caste order leaves the order intact, and since caste is sustained by endogamy and by scriptural authority, only the destruction of that authority — and intermarriage — could count as reform of caste. He also drew the political conclusion, arguing at Kalaram and at Mahad that a movement of the depressed classes had to be led by them and could not be delegated to sympathetic reformers. This anti-caste counter-current, running from Phule through Periyar to Ambedkar, is best read not as a variant of the reform movement but as its rival.
For the UPSC answer
Define social reform by its scope and method — partial change, from within, by persuasion, association and law — and separate it explicitly from revolution and from legislation. Organise the nineteenth-century material by the rationalist/revivalist split rather than listing organisations, and place Brahmo, Prarthana, Arya Samaj and Aligarh on one side of the caste question with Satyashodhak, SNDP and Self-Respect on the other. Use sati, widow remarriage and the age of consent to show the gap between statute and social practice, citing Mani and Chatterjee for the point that the woman question was fought largely between men. End with Ambedkar's structural objection, which converts a list of movements into an argument.
References & further reading
- Desai, A. R. (1948). Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Popular Prakashan.
- Heimsath, C. H. (1964). Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform. Princeton University Press.
- Rao, M. S. A. (1979). Social Movements and Social Transformation. Macmillan.
- O'Hanlon, R. (1985). Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India. Cambridge University Press.
- Chatterjee, P. (1993). The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton University Press.
- Mani, L. (1998). Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. University of California Press.