Throw light on the factors of continuity and change in Indian Society.

Factors of continuity

• Kinship and marriage rules—endogamy, gotra avoidance, patriliny in much of the north—reproduce caste and family even when young people work in cities.
• Ritual calendars, pilgrimage, and life-cycle samskaras keep a Hindu (and parallel Muslim, Sikh, Christian) sacred time that outlives regimes.
• The village as a moral unit, jajmani remnants, and local dominance of landowning groups persist in rural Uttar Pradesh even after zamindari abolition.
• Language, food, and regional honour (izzat) carry identity across migration; the migrant in Mumbai still marries ‘back home’ more often than textbooks predict.
• Hierarchy as a habit of mind—who sits, who serves, who speaks—survives in offices and campuses after the Constitution has banned untouchability.

Factors of change

• Colonial census, courts, and railways froze some identities and opened new labour markets; that double movement is the first modern change-factor.
• The Constitution, universal franchise, and reservation (Articles 15–17, 46, 330–342) made caste a legal-political resource and a target of reform at the same time.
• Industrialisation, Green Revolution, and urbanisation shifted occupation away from caste-as-craft; class and education now cut across old tables of work.
• Women’s education, the 2005 Hindu Succession amendment, and paid work weaken the classical joint family even where the joint household still shares a kitchen.
• Print, cinema, television, and the phone spread new models of self; globalisation after 1991 adds consumption and diaspora as change-factors.

How the two lock

• Sanskritisation (M. N. Srinivas) is change in the service of continuity: a caste climbs by copying higher ritual, not by abolishing caste.
• Politicisation of caste (Kothari) turns a primordial-looking label into a secular vote bloc; continuity of name, change of use.
• Communal polarisation can revive religious boundaries even as the economy modernises; change of technology need not mean change of hate.
• A full light therefore treats Indian society as structured persistence under legal and market shock, not as a simple journey from tradition to modernity.