Revision summary
Globalisation thickens cross-border flows of goods, capital, people, and images. India’s policy hinge is 1991, with IT, Gulf, and media as social cables. A new middle class rose on older caste and English advantages. Families became trans-local more often than they became purely nuclear. Caste gained rights language and still organised marriage and housing. Culture cosmopolitanised and polarised in the same television decades.
Model answer
Introduction
Globalisation is the thickening of cross-border flows of goods, capital, people, images, and rules so that distant events shape local life faster than before. In India after 1991 that process did not abolish caste or joint family; it rearranged class, consumption, and authority inside those older beams.
Body
What globalisation is
- Economically it is trade liberalisation, foreign investment, and global production chains; socially it is also media, migration, and the travel of tastes and rights language.
- It is not a single date, but 1991 is India’s policy hinge; phones, WTO, and Gulf and IT diasporas were the social cables.
- Unlike simple ‘westernisation’, it includes South–South labour (Gulf), East Asian goods, and Indian capital going out, so the impact on structure is multi-directional.
Caste, class, and the household
- A new urban middle class of software, finance, and retail sits on older caste capital: English and networks still filter who rides the global wave.
- Dalit and OBC assertion used global human-rights talk and diaspora funds even as markets reproduced caste in hiring, marriage, and housing.
- Joint families did not vanish; they became trans-local, with a son in Dubai or Bengaluru wiring money to a village household that still arranges marriage by jati.
- Women’s cash work, discussed in the neighbouring question, is part of this household rewrite: authority shifts without the caste marriage market dissolving.
Culture, region, and reaction
- Consumer culture, malls, and branded youth styles thinned some ritual everydayness in metros and created a paying audience for both Bollywood globalism and television religiosity.
- Hindutva and regional identitarian politics grew in the same decades as cable TV; globalisation can nationalise anxiety as much as it cosmopolitanises taste.
- Uttar Pradesh shows the split: Noida’s service class and the state’s pilgrimage-and-caste countryside sit in one federal market.
- A fair discussion therefore treats Indian social structure as re-stratified, not flattened: class thickens, caste mutates, family stretches, and culture polarises.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD F[Cross border flows] --> C[New class English filter] F --> H[Translocal family] F --> K[Caste mutates] F --> R[Cultural polarisation]
Conclusion
Globalisation is intensified worldwide interdependence of markets, media, and migration. In India it grew a new middle class, stretched the family across borders, and gave caste both new languages of rights and new market skins. The structure opened without becoming a caste-free, nuclear, secular replica of the West.
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Did globalisation destroy caste?
No. It changed how caste works in cities and markets, and it fed both assertion and exclusion. Marriage and housing remain strongly caste-organised.
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Is globalisation only an economic process?
Economics is the engine, but the social-structure question is about family, status, and culture, which move with media and migration as much as with tariffs.
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