M. S. A. Rao occupies a distinctive place in Indian sociology as the scholar who turned social movements from a subject of political narrative into a field of sociological analysis. Indian sociology in its formative decades studied structures — caste, village, kinship, family — and change was usually treated as something that happened to those structures from outside. Rao reversed the emphasis: he asked how collective action by subordinated groups itself produces social transformation, and he built the conceptual apparatus — a typology of movements and a theory of relative deprivation — that made comparison across Indian movements possible.
His second major contribution lay in urban sociology and migration. At a time when the discipline was overwhelmingly rural in orientation, Rao insisted that urbanisation was not merely the growth of towns but a process reorganising rural society itself, and he did much to institutionalise the study of Indian cities.
Life and academic career
Rao taught for most of his career in the Department of Sociology at the University of Delhi, where he became Professor of Sociology and a formative influence on a generation of researchers working on movements, urbanisation and migration. His early monograph Social Change in Malabar examined the transformation of a Kerala region under colonial administration, commercialisation and reform — a study of land relations, matriliny and caste in flux that set the pattern of his later concerns. He was an energetic editor and institution-builder, assembling the readers and edited volumes through which whole subfields acquired teachable shape.
What counts as a social movement
Rao worked with a deliberately tight definition. A social movement, for him, requires three elements together: sustained collective mobilisation, whether through formal organisation or informal networks; an ideology of change, a shared diagnosis of what is wrong and a programme for putting it right; and an orientation towards change in the existing social order. This rules out sporadic riots, momentary agitations and purely individual mobility strategies. It also makes leadership, communication and ideology central rather than incidental — grievance without articulation, in his account, produces no movement.
The corresponding outcome concept is social transformation, distinguished from routine change by its scope: alteration in the structural relations of a society, not merely in behaviour or attitude.
The typology of movements
Rao classified movements by the degree of change they seek and achieve, a scheme that remains the standard starting point in Indian syllabi:
- Reform movements aim at partial change within the existing structure. The framework of caste, family or religion is accepted; specific practices are attacked. Nineteenth-century movements against sati, child marriage and untouchability, and the temperance and temple-entry campaigns, belong here.
- Transformative movements seek middle-level structural change — a restructuring of particular institutions or of the position of a group within the hierarchy, short of overturning the whole order. Backward-class movements demanding a redefinition of ritual and political status, and land-reform mobilisations, are the paradigm cases.
- Revolutionary movements aim at radical and total reorganisation of the social order through a fundamental redistribution of power, usually by force. Peasant insurrections such as the Telangana and Naxalbari mobilisations illustrate the type.
Two features of the scheme deserve notice. It is a continuum, not a set of sealed boxes: movements migrate between types as ideology radicalises or leadership is absorbed into the political mainstream. And Rao distinguished the aims of a movement from its consequences, since reformist demands can have transformative effects and revolutionary rhetoric can end in modest reform.
Relative deprivation and mobilisation
Rao's most influential theoretical move was to import relative deprivation — developed by Robert K. Merton and elaborated by W. G. Runciman — into the study of Indian movements. Objective poverty and exploitation, he argued, do not by themselves generate mobilisation; the most deprived are frequently the most quiescent. What matters is the perception of deprivation, formed by comparison with a reference group felt to be similarly placed and yet better off.
This yields the paradox Rao used to explain the timing of Indian movements. Some improvement in conditions — education, cash income, migration, political representation — widens horizons and raises the reference group, so that mobilisation intensifies precisely when things are getting better. Rising expectations outrun rising attainment. Deprivation must further be interpreted as unjust and remediable, which is the work of ideology and leadership, and translated into a group identity. Rao thus assembled a sequence: structural inequality, comparison with a reference group, awareness of relative deprivation, ideological articulation, and organised mobilisation.
Backward-class and Dalit movements
The empirical heart of Social Movements and Social Transformation is the study of backward-class mobilisation, drawing on movements in Kerala and in northern India. Rao showed how caste groups that had gained economically or educationally, yet remained low in ritual rank and excluded from power, converted that gap into collective claims — for temple entry, for recognition of a higher status, for educational and later governmental provision, and eventually for political representation as a bloc. Caste associations, in his analysis, became the organisational vehicle of modern interest politics, and the caste idiom proved entirely compatible with democratic mobilisation rather than being dissolved by it.
He read Dalit movements with the same instruments while noting their distinct logic. Where backward-class movements sought a better position within the ritual hierarchy, Dalit movements under Ambedkar's influence increasingly rejected the legitimacy of that hierarchy itself — repudiating the Hindu ritual idiom, asserting a separate identity, and pursuing conversion, constitutional safeguards and political power. That distinction places Dalit assertion closer to the transformative and revolutionary end of his continuum.
Sanskritisation, westernisation and mobility
Rao treated M. N. Srinivas's sanskritisation and westernisation not as descriptions of cultural drift but as strategies of collective mobility, and insisted on their limits. Sanskritisation — adopting the ritual practices, dietary restrictions, dress and mythic genealogies of higher castes — operates within the hierarchy and depends on recognition being granted by others, which dominant groups frequently withhold. Its success also generally requires a prior improvement in secular position. Westernisation — English education, modern professions, urban employment, association with reformist and colonial institutions — offered a parallel and often faster route, because it drew on a source of status outside the ritual order altogether and connected directly to state resources. Many movements, Rao showed, ran both strategies at once, sanskritising their ritual life while pressing for modern education, and some later abandoned the sanskritic route entirely for political mobilisation.
Urbanisation, the metropolitan fringe and migration
Urbanization and Social Change studied a rural community on the fringe of an expanding metropolis, and made the case that urbanisation must be studied as a process reaching into the village rather than as a property of cities. Rao distinguished settings by the mode of urban impact: villages from which men commute daily to urban work while families and land remain behind; villages transformed by industrial establishment and in-migration of outsiders; and villages progressively engulfed by the physical expansion of the city, where agricultural land converts into real estate and cultivators become landlords, rentiers or the urban poor. Each produces its own pattern of change in caste relations, occupation, family form and land value.
His work on migration treated internal and international movement together and stressed the social mechanisms behind it: kinship and caste networks channelling migrants to particular destinations and occupations, chain migration, remittances reshaping the sending village, and the reconstitution of caste and regional identity in new settings — including among overseas Indian communities.
Criticisms
The typology has been criticised as descriptive rather than explanatory: it classifies outcomes but says less about why a movement takes one path than another, and its categories blur in practice. Relative deprivation, applied loosely, risks becoming unfalsifiable, since some comparison can be found after the fact for any mobilisation, and it under-weights the political opportunity structure, state response, resources and repression that later movement theory placed at the centre. His frame is largely caste-based, and fits the newer environmental, women's and identity movements less comfortably; feminist scholarship in particular notes the absence of gender from his accounts of mobilisation. Marxist critics argue that emphasising perceived deprivation over class exploitation depoliticises the analysis.
Legacy
Rao made social movements a legitimate and central object of Indian sociology, and his edited volumes gave the field its first comprehensive survey. The vocabulary of relative deprivation, reference groups and the reform–transformative–revolutionary continuum remains the default framework in Indian teaching and examinations, and his insistence on studying urbanisation from the village outwards anticipated decades of later work on rural–urban linkage, peri-urban change and migration.
For the UPSC answer
Rao is the theoretical anchor for every Paper II question on social movements, so open with his three-part definition — mobilisation, ideology, orientation to change — and then set out the typology with one Indian example per type, noting that the categories form a continuum. Relative deprivation is the concept to develop at length: state the paradox that mobilisation rises as conditions improve, because the reference group shifts, and credit Merton for the concept while crediting Rao with its Indian application. Distinguish backward-class movements seeking status within the hierarchy from Dalit movements rejecting its legitimacy, and use sanskritisation and westernisation as competing mobility strategies to link Rao to Srinivas and Ambedkar in a single paragraph. In urbanisation questions, his fringe-village typology gives concrete material on land conversion and commuting. Finish with the standard critique — thin on state response and political opportunity, silent on gender — to lift the answer from description to assessment.
References & further reading
- Rao, M. S. A. (1979). Social Movements and Social Transformation: A Study of Two Backward Classes Movements in India. Delhi: Macmillan.
- Rao, M. S. A. (ed.) (1979). Social Movements in India, 2 vols. New Delhi: Manohar.
- Rao, M. S. A. (1970). Urbanization and Social Change: A Study of a Rural Community on a Metropolitan Fringe. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
- Rao, M. S. A. (ed.) (1974). Urban Sociology in India: Reader and Source Book. New Delhi: Orient Longman.
- Rao, M. S. A. (1957). Social Change in Malabar. Bombay: Popular Book Depot.
- Rao, M. S. A. (1972). Tradition, Rationality and Change. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.