UPPSC 2022 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 61 of 150

Correct — D, G. S. Ghurye. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye (1893–1983), who headed the sociology department at the University of Bombay and is conventionally called the father of Indian sociology, elaborated the rurban idea in his study Anatomy of a Rururban Community (1963), which followed his earlier survey of the same settlement, After a Century and a Quarter: Lonikand Then and Now (1960). The idea itself is simple and important: between the self-contained village and the industrial city lies a large class of settlements that are neither — places with urban occupations, urban services and urban contacts but a still-rural social structure. Ghurye's argument was that Indian society should be read as a rural–urban continuum rather than a rural/urban dichotomy, because caste, kinship and ritual travel with people into towns instead of dissolving at the city boundary. One honest qualification the exam does not ask for but a student should carry: the term 'rurban' was not coined in India. It goes back to the American rural sociologist Charles J. Galpin in the early twentieth century and was developed further by Sorokin and Zimmerman; Ghurye is the scholar who elaborated it for Indian conditions, which is exactly what the question asks.

• (a)Yogendra Singh — Yogendra Singh's contribution is the study of social change in India through the framework of tradition and modernity — his best-known work is Modernization of Indian Tradition, which analyses how modernising forces interact with the older hierarchical, holistic and continuous structure of Indian tradition. That is a theory of change, not a theory of settlement types, and rurbanization is not his idea.
• (b)H. Spencer — Herbert Spencer was a nineteenth-century English social theorist known for the organic analogy — society compared to a living organism with differentiated parts — and for the evolutionary 'survival of the fittest' strain of thought later labelled social Darwinism. He wrote about the general evolution of societies from simple to complex, not about Indian settlements, and the rurban concept has no place in his work. His presence here is the standard trick of dropping one Western classical theorist among Indian sociologists.
• (c)M. N. Srinivas — The most tempting wrong answer, because M. N. Srinivas is the sociologist most associated with the Indian village. But his enduring concepts are Sanskritisation (a lower caste raising its ritual status by adopting the practices of a higher one), Westernisation and the dominant caste — ideas about mobility and power inside the village, not about the blurring of the rural–urban boundary. Srinivas studied villages; Ghurye is the one who elaborated the rurban category.

Classical sociology treated 'rural' and 'urban' as two opposed types of community — the village as small, homogeneous, face-to-face and tradition-bound, the city as large, heterogeneous, impersonal and specialised. The rurban idea rejects that clean split. It says settlements lie along a continuum: a small town with a bus service, a degree college, a mandi and a daily flow of commuters to a nearby city is functionally urban in its economy while remaining rural in its social organisation. G. S. Ghurye elaborated this for India, arguing that urbanisation here does not erase caste and kinship but carries them into the town, so the sharp rural/urban dichotomy borrowed from Western sociology fits India badly. The idea matters beyond theory, because India's census recognises 'census towns' — places that meet urban criteria of size, density and non-agricultural employment without ever being notified as towns — and these are the rurban settlements in administrative form.

Three of the four names can be eliminated by what each is famous for, which is how this family of questions is meant to be solved. Herbert Spencer is not an Indian sociologist at all and belongs to a different century and a different problem. Yogendra Singh is tagged to modernisation of tradition. M. N. Srinivas is tagged to Sanskritisation, Westernisation and the dominant caste — and he is the trap, because the word 'village' pulls the eye towards him. That leaves G. S. Ghurye, whose range is the widest of the four (caste and race, tribes, cities, sects, Indian costume) and who wrote the book that carries the term in its title. The lesson for revision is to store each Indian sociologist as a name plus one or two signature concepts, because UPPSC asks precisely at that level.

• G. S. Ghurye (1893–1983) headed the sociology department at the University of Bombay and is conventionally described as the father of Indian sociology.
• Ghurye elaborated the rurban idea in Anatomy of a Rururban Community (1963), which followed his earlier study of the same settlement, After a Century and a Quarter: Lonikand Then and Now (1960).
• 'Rurban' describes a settlement that is neither wholly rural nor fully urban — the basis of the rural–urban continuum, as opposed to a sharp rural/urban dichotomy.
• The term originated with the American rural sociologist Charles J. Galpin in the early twentieth century and was developed by Sorokin and Zimmerman; Ghurye is the Indian scholar who elaborated it.
• Signature concepts of the distractors: M. N. Srinivas — Sanskritisation, Westernisation, dominant caste; Yogendra Singh — modernisation of Indian tradition; Herbert Spencer — organic analogy and social Darwinism.
• A policy echo of the same idea, not to be confused with the sociology, is the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission, approved by the Union Cabinet in 2015 and launched in February 2016 to bring urban amenities to clusters of villages.

• Choosing M. N. Srinivas because he is the best-known sociologist of the Indian village; his concepts are about caste mobility, not settlement type.
• Confusing the coiner of a term with its elaborator — 'rurban' originates with Galpin in the United States, while Ghurye elaborated it for India.
• Reading the question as being about the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission; the scheme borrows the word, but the question asks about the sociological idea.

UPPSC asks this as a bare name-to-concept recall — 'the idea of X was given/elaborated by' — and rotates the same four or five sociologists across years; UPSC rarely names sociologists in prelims and prefers the policy side, asking about the Rurban Mission or about how the census classifies urban settlements.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The concept of the 'rural–urban continuum' implies that

  • (a)rural and urban societies are two mutually exclusive and wholly distinct types
  • (b)settlements shade into one another along a gradient, so many places are partly rural and partly urban in character
  • (c)every village must eventually become a city
  • (d)urban areas are defined solely by their total population

  Answer(b) settlements shade into one another along a gradient, so many places are partly rural and partly urban in character — this is precisely the rurban idea, set against the older rural/urban dichotomy.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission seeks to

  • (a)resettle rural populations in existing large cities
  • (b)provide urban-standard amenities and economic infrastructure to clusters of villages while retaining their rural character
  • (c)develop a hundred greenfield smart cities
  • (d)give an interest subsidy on housing loans taken in rural areas

  Answer(b) provide urban-standard amenities and economic infrastructure to clusters of villages while retaining their rural character — the mission develops 'rurban clusters' rather than moving people to towns.