ABSTRACT
M. N. Srinivas’s areas of academic interest covered changes that had been occurring in villages, culture, caste, and social relations as a whole. His book Social Change in Modern India published in 1966, posed some of the fundamental questions related to social change, its direction, orientations and sources of orientations, which inform us on the trajectories of social change in India. Scholars have made substantial efforts to study the mobility of different caste groups in rural India to understand the pattern of changes that have evolved over a period of time. The availability of public works in rural India, more specifically the employment generation programme of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is often projected not only as an avenue for coming out of poverty but also from caste ties for Dalits. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book
