Ram Mandir Movement: Reclaiming Bharatiya Social Work

For seven decades, millions of ordinary citizens sustained one of the most extraordinary mobilizations in modern democratic history - organizing villages, counseling individuals through hardship, administering vast resources across a subcontinent, advocating in courts and legislatures, building collective identity across caste and regional boundaries, and systematically documenting a civilization's memory. Professional social work scholarship never noticed. This book corrects that absence. Through rigorous scholarly analysis, this volume demonstrates that the Ram Mandir Movement systematically employed every major social work method - casework, group work, community organization, social welfare administration, social action, and research - at a scale the profession rarely imagines possible. Millions of volunteers sustained commitment across decades without monetary compensation. Organizational infrastructure coordinated action across 250,000 villages simultaneously. Legal advocacy persisted across 134 years of unbroken litigation. The result is the Dharma-Seva-Samaj Framework: the first comprehensive indigenous theory of Bharatiya social work, grounded not in imported Western concepts but in seva, samaj, sanskriti, samrasta, and dharma as living, documented practice. For social work educators, practitioners, researchers, and students ready to ask what the profession might become when it finally comes home to Bharatiya soil.