Social Movements: Peasant, Dalit, and Women's Movements

Social movements in India have historically challenged agrarian exploitation, caste oppression, and gender inequality, often overlapping in membership and rhetoric even as they pursued distinct goals. The Tebhaga movement (1946-47) in Bengal, in which sharecroppers demanded two-thirds rather than half of the harvest, and the Telangana peasant armed struggle (1946-51) against feudal Nizam-era landlordism, are foundational case studies in the sociology of agrarian mobilisation, illustrating how class interest, caste hierarchy, and colonial-era land revenue systems interacted to produce organised resistance.

D.N. Dhanagare and other sociologists studying peasant movements have emphasised the importance of distinguishing between spontaneous, localized uprisings and sustained, ideologically organised movements led by parties such as the Communist Party of India, arguing that movement success depended heavily on the presence of external organisational leadership capable of translating diffuse grievance into coordinated political action.

Dalit movements, building directly on Ambedkar's political and sociological legacy, have moved through distinct phases: the early Mahar movement and Depressed Classes conferences of the 1920s-30s, the post-independence formation of the Republican Party of India, the radical Dalit Panther movement of the 1970s in Maharashtra explicitly modelled on the Black Panther movement in the United States, and the contemporary Bahujan movement associated with the Bahujan Samaj Party, each representing different strategic responses to caste exclusion ranging from cultural assertion to electoral mobilisation.

The Indian women's movement similarly evolved through phases: an early reform phase in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often led by male reformers addressing sati, child marriage, and widow remarriage; a nationalist phase incorporating women into the freedom struggle; and a distinctly autonomous phase from the late 1970s onward, catalysed partly by the Mathura rape case (1972) and the subsequent anti-rape campaign, that directly challenged patriarchal state and legal structures rather than seeking incorporation into male-led reform or nationalist agendas.

Sharmila Rege's Dalit feminist standpoint theory critiqued both mainstream sociology's inattention to caste within gender analysis and mainstream feminism's inattention to caste-based differences among women, arguing that testimonies (savitribai-phule-style writing and Dalit women's autobiographical narratives) constitute crucial sociological data that formal survey-based sociology has systematically overlooked, a methodological intervention with lasting influence on Indian sociology of gender and caste.