The Social Lens: Insights on Institutions, Inequality, and Innovation

Indian social system is influenced by Dharmashastras, which establishes the Chaturvarna Ashram system created by Brahmins and Kshatriyas. Any social movement defines opposition- classes or groups, generally exploiter and exploited but dalit movement is based against the classical notion of “purity and pollution” and the notion of purity and pollution comes from the individual’s birth in a family i.e. it is totally ascriptive in nature. Dalit movements challenge it as Periyar challenged the Brahminical hegemony in cultural, social, religious and political spheres. challenging the Brahminical notion of hierarchy was the first step in Dalit movements through Temple Entry Movement, social justice movement etc. These movements talked for the enforcement of freedom, justice, liberty in the place of ritualistic traditional system where humans are deprived of basic rights to live decent life. Therefore, these movements were giving the model for alternate society based on ‘modern’ and rationa...

The rapidly changing modes of economic production and social norms make the theoretical categories obsolete after same time. Various school of thoughts generate some kind of framework to study the social reality. The generated frameworks generally make some assumptions about the social reality. Sylvia Walby in the book “Theorizing Patriarchy” finds that different feminist schools of thought are not able to show contemporary reality of the society. So, she tries to find out the problems in the dominant schools of feminist thoughts. She has divided the book into eight chapters and in the first chapter “Introduction” lays out the problems of contemporary women and the explanations given by various theories. She finds four different theoretical perspectives in feminist thoughts--  Radical feminism, Marxist Feminism, Liberal Feminism and Dual-Systems Theory. In all the chapters, she discusses the arguments posed by these schools of thoughts and the counter arguments to show problems i...