Samāja

How people organise life together: family, village, guild, community, law-in-practice, and social change.

Sensitivity: highest in the framework — describe, never essentialise.

Scope

• Family and kinship forms as historical and changing
• Village institutions and panchayat traditions in historical record
• Guilds and economic institutions (śreṇī and later forms)
• Social stratification, including varṇa and jāti as scholarly and historical topics
• Women’s institutions and social reform; modern change (urbanisation, law, census categories)

Out of scope / common mistakes

• Treating any institution as timeless “essence of India”
• “Unlike the West” as a default frame
• Exam-prep or consultancy-blog summaries of caste
• Using “outcasts” or other dehumanising shorthand

Care rules

Prefer current peer-reviewed scholarship and primary records. Terminology: varṇa vs jāti; “communities positioned outside the varṇa system”; “Scheduled Castes”; Dalit as a chosen political identity — never “outcasts.” Present change over time. Living people: consent and dignity.

Load-bearing concepts

Concept	Orientation	Depth later when…
Śreṇī	Historical guild / corporate economic bodies	Inscription-level claims, dating
Varṇa / jāti	Distinct, historically complex	Structural history or statistics
Panchayat	Local self-governance with varied practice	Specific period or region
Joint family	Real pattern, not universal or frozen	Census trends, causal stories

Topics we plan to cover

Fieldwork clusters (Cheriyal and others); diet surveys that are also social fact.

• Śreṇi: the guilds of early India (essay in preparation)