India – a truly prismatic society

Around five decades back, political scientist Fred Warren Riggs propounded the theory of
prismatic societies. Sometimes, I am amused by the farsightedness of these thinkers whose
hypotheses have stood the test of time. According to this theory, all societies pass through
three stages of evolution namely fused, prismatic and diffused. This process is analogous to
the splitting of the white light by a prism.

For the general readers, it would be sufficient to understand that there is lot of generalization
in a fused society and lot of specialization in a diffused society. In the prismatic society, some
areas are generalized and some are specialized. Another peculiarity of the prismatic society is
the existence of modern and traditional systems together. For example, you have English
medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, you have great scientists and people who still believe in
supernatural powers, etc.

Some of the articles in today’s paper bring about this characteristic of extreme perceptions in
prismatic Indian society. On one hand, you have an article which says “Woman officer gets
gallantry award” and on the other hand, you have an article which says “Passenger objects to
woman piloting plane“. Aren’t these extreme shades of gender perception?

Many such examples exist if we look for them carefully around us. This wide range of
perceptions poses a great challenge for the administration. With limited amount of resources
and political obligations (desire to come back to power which is not a ‘bad’ desire), it has
become a convention to satisfy the majority pressure group. This is one of the important
reason for the existing state of the deprived section of people in our society. The problem
does not exist in the theory of trickle down effect, the problem is that very little trickles down.
The social, economic and political systems influence the amount that trickles.