SOCIOLOGY OF FAMILY IN INDIA

Introduction
Family received a great deal of interest during the first few decades of the emergence of
sociology and social anthropology in India. Sociological studies of family in India began with
the Indological approach. This approach based its finding on the ancient sacred texts
especially the Hindu sacred texts. This phase was followed by the field based approach which
rejected the text based approach of Indological studies. The field based approach emphasized
on empirical studies on family. It also brought forth the two debates into family studies in
India. They are family versus household debate and joint versus nuclear debate. One major
topic of deliberation within sociology of family in India was Is the joint family
disintegrating? Among all these deliberations within family studies in India the experiences
of women within the family was neglected. Their presence and role within the family was
taken for granted by most studies. It is in the late 80s with the surging womens movement in
India that feminists questioned and addressed womens issues within the family. They broke
the myth of family as a safe haven.
Indological Approach:
Indological approach is the earliest approach in Indian family studies. It is based on the
writings of the sacred texts. The engagement of the British colonial administration with
indigenous systems of kinship and marriage for their administrative purposes was the first
step in understanding family in India. Seeking to understand the principles of Indian legal
systems, the British turned to the Hindu sacred texts and also to the Shariat for the Muslim
population. But their concentration was on the Hindu texts on the basis of which they
formulated rules. This approach is called the Indological approach. It has established the
Hindu joint family as the typical and traditional form of family in India, has located it within
the discursive domain of the law and defined its special features.
Henry Sumner Maine (1822-1888) was one of the leading proponents of the Indological
approach. Relying on classical text sources of Hindu law along with ethnographic and
administrative reports of his time he projected the Hindu Joint family as the typical Indian
Family. According to him it was also a living example of the earliest or ancient form of
human family. As this type of family was constituted by a group of persons related in the male
line; subject to the absolute authority of the senior most male member, Maine termed this
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family as patriarchal family. He further believed that the monogamous conjugal family
based on contract over time will eventually replace this patriarchal joint family based on
status.
This theory of Maine influenced many of the early generation of Indian sociologists. G. S.
Ghurye, K.M Kapadia, Irawati Karve are some of the Indian Sociologists influenced by
Maines thesis. They have followed the Indological approach to study family in India.
Early Indian sociologists on family following the Indological approach presented the Hindu
joint family as the ideal Indian family overlooking the existential realities of family life in
India. They took the Hindu joint family as the basic unit of study and also appealed for the
maintenance and perpetuation of the joint family through adjustments and sacrifices from its
members. According to these scholars the joint family system has been a potent factor in the
continuance of cultural traditions. It is within the joint family system that the Indian family
traditions were valued above everything, however meaningless they may appear. The life of
the members of the family was maintained through super-ordination and subordination to
each other. The individual lost its identity within the family giving way for family values.
It is the advent of British Empire, growth of cities and other such factors, according to the
Indological approach, that brought changes in the structure and values of Indian joint family.
In the 1950s, there was a self conscious empirical shift in the Anthropological-Sociological
study of family in India, from an overwhelmingly Indological approach to a field based
approach. The Hindu joint family emerged as a unique and complicated institution, especially
under a closer scrutiny based on the field view. Rather than lamenting the lost family world of
the Indological type, the family that lived with and lived by was the subject of large
number of studies between 1950s and 1960s. Indian family sociology during this period was
heavily engaged in exploring the census officials inference that the joint family was
disintegrating.
Field Based Studies
To begin with the field based approach rejected the text based approach of the Indological
School. According to them there is an inherent methodological fault in the studies based on
sacred texts. For them the appropriate method of carrying sociological studies is through field
based empirical research. According to these scholars the household is functionally the more

important group and it should be the basic unit of observation in a sociological study of
family.
According to the proponents of the field based approach the Indological proposition that joint
family is the ideal and mostly found family type in India is misleading. They have
demonstrated through careful analysis of demographic material that the size of the Indian
household was on an average always relatively small, and that there is little hard evidence to
support the view that there has been significant change in the balance of nuclear and joint
households from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. They further write that
there is a multiplicity of household and family types instead of just the stereotyped ideal of
joint and nuclear family types.
Further they also disagree with the Indological view that there is a process of disintegration of
joint family to nuclear family due to urbanization and industrialization. Field based
researchers pointed out that the concept of disintegration of jointness arose because of the
faulty definitions of jointness adopted by the Indologists. They were of the opinion that
nuclear family always existed in India even before urbanization and industrialization. They
also delineate that even after these two processes took hold in India there still exists joint
families in large numbers. Field based researchers proposed that for a proper understanding of
family system in India there is a need to differentiate between household and family. Field
based approach therefore was concerned more with two issues. They were the question of
is the joint family disintegrating and the household vs. family debate. I.P.Desai, A.M. Shah,
T.N. Madan and Pauline Kolenda are some of the proponents of this approach.
Field based sociologists opined that in order to understand family in India and the impact of
modernization and urbanization on it, the proper object of study should be the household
dimension of family rather than family itself. The first step for this is to distinguish between
family and household. According to the Oxford dictionary of Sociology, household refers
to group of persons sharing a home or living space, who aggregate and share their incomes,
as evidenced by the fact that they regularly take meals together i.e. the common cooking-pot
definition. According to the Anthropological Dictionary households are economic units
based on common residence. Membership of which comprises a family or domestic group that
may also include hired laborers and domestic servants. Family according to the field based
view is a grouping of households of agnatically related men, their wives and unmarried sisters
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and daughters. It is the relationship between the members of a household among themselves
that determines the type of the family of that household. Therefore for field based scholars a
household is a nuclear family if it comprises of one couple and their unmarried children; or
of the husband, wife and unmarried children, not related to their other kin through or by
property, or income or the rights and obligations pertaining to them and as are expected of
those related by kinship. A household is a joint family which has greater generation depth
(i.e. three or more) than the nuclear family and the members of which are related to one
another by property, income, and mutual rights and obligations. Based on these
understandings the field based scholars argued that majority of the households in India, which
are compositionally and residentially nuclear, are in reality actively joint with other
households. Even in terms of individuals, majority of them are under the influence of
jointness in one or other way. This reinforces the prevalence of joint family and the
proposition that jointness does not rest on the size of a family.
Further field based scholars wrote that the Hindu joint family is always changing and cannot
be constructed as an idealized and static institution. According to them trends of change
moved in more than one direction both from a quantitative and qualitative angle. The problem
they pointed out with the Indological approach is that they have taken the quantitatively
predominant trend as the direction of change. According to these scholars, though the range of
relationship has contracted in the changed circumstances, the joint family as a set of
relationships and as a functioning unit is alive much more than is commonly supposed.
According to them, the joint family is still persisting because of the advantages that members
of it get from its existence. These advantages may range from daily economic benefit to
emotional and physical support during economic, health and other situations of need.
According to them the idea that with industrialization the individual breaks from the family in
search of better opportunities and self growth is not entirely true in Indian context. For these
scholars, individuals move to the urban areas in search of better opportunities for improving
their family conditions. For many times the man who works in the urban area sends most of
his income back home for joint spending of the family. He also takes many of his kins and
siblings to the urban area and helps getting them employed once he is settled. He may also
accommodate his kins in his own house in the urban area for their education. For many such

reasons they argue that the joint family does not necessarily break with industrialization and
migration.
They also point that though the traditional ideal of maintaining a joint household with several
sons and their wives and their children is aspired by every Hindu, yet, because of various
reasons very few actually achieve this aspiration. One of the reasons according to them is the
difficulty in maintaining harmony between the expectations of the multiplicity of roles that
one has to perform in such a big household.
To conclude, they opine that even if there is separation of households, still they often
constitute a single family. They may participate in rituals and ceremonies together and are
expected to help each other in crisis. Here again these behaviour is not compulsory. This
family feeling further withers with the passing of generation and the whole process starts
again which is termed as the theory of developmental cycle of family.
Womens Changing Role and Family Structure
In the 1960s and 1970s there was also considerable research on the educated, urban middle
class womans dual role at home and at work, analyzed in terms of role conflict, emphasizing
more on morphological structures and behavioural aspects. One of the central themes of these
writings was regarding womens employment, their increased access to the outside world and
its effect on the traditional family structures. These writings portrayed womens economic
freedom as a threat to preservation and continuation of family structure and sanctity.
These scholars pitted womens employment and education against marriage and family
values. They pointed that growing individualism within women because of economic
independence is threatening the sacred institution of marriage and challenges the familistic
value orientation. These sociologists actively constructed a role conflict between the new role
of women as provider and their role as housekeeper and other related roles. They argued that
the time and effort it takes on the part of a woman to perform the duties of an employee
makes it necessary to reduce her work at home and consequently the time spent on it. This
working women syndrome, scholars wrote, reduces the time to teach children Indian cultural
values and traditions thereby hindering spread of familial ideologies to the next generation.
This phase was followed by feminist research on family in India. According to feminist
researchers, sociologists in India were so concentrated in the study of transition of family

from joint to nuclear that, serious analytical engagement with the issue of hierarchy and
power existing within the family, especially with regard to gender was neglected.
Feminists pointed that early Indian sociologist for all purposes assumed the Hindu joint
family of classical, sanskritic usage as the Indian family. In all three preceding phases
sociologists glorified the notion of traditional Indian joint family. The mainstream studies
feminists pointed excluded the kinship ideals and practices of non-Hindus, Dravidians, lower
castes and non patrilineal communities. They argued that sociological studies on Indian
family have focused more on kinship norms rather than on pathology, deviance and
breakdown which was equally a reality of Indian families. Thereby according to them, family
scholarship failed to inform or confront practical challenges of social activism and public
policy. According to the feminist scholars, in all these studies of family, the price women paid
for maintaining the unity and their varying often difficult experience within it was neglected.
Feminists brought to light the wide gap that existed between the everyday worlds of women
and sociological knowledge. The most immediate task for them, at that time seemed to be to
underline the invisibility of women in sociology of family.
Feminist Theorization of Family in India
Though there are several kinds of discourses in India, in which women and family are central
themes, yet it is only after the 1970s that more serious studies on this was generated. The
taking up of the issue of dowry related violence by womens movement stimulated a serious
interest in the academia to deal with womens experiences within the family. Indian feminists
from then on have persistently been engaged with the understanding of the nature of Indian
family leading also to a critique of the family structure as it existed.
The rise of feminist theory brought into focus a complete new set of questions and political
issues, with special attention to the household as the site of production and reproduction, and
also of the primary socialization of children. Much feminist work targeted the family in terms
of the structure of marriage alliances and the nature of conjugal relations, unequal distribution
of resources between men and women, gender division of labour, discrimination in access to
health, education, food and clothing, property rights, son preferences within family and
kinship structures, practices of oppressive personal laws, domestic violence and many other
such issues occurring within the family structure due to gendered familial ideology.

Feminist studies exposed the structural inequality within the family and rejected the violence
and exploitation that occurs due to this inequality. This analysis of the masculinist
organization of the family provided a window to a whole arena that remained muted for long.
Feminist writings on the structures of kinship, family and marriage show how marriage brings
a total shift in a womans life and is often a painful experience. According to these scholars
son preference in ingrained in Indian families. It is believed that the birth of a son will send
the father to heaven. The lineage is transferred through the male line. Girls thus grow up as
secondary to their brothers and with the notion of temporary membership within the natal
home. Rituals, lullabies and folk songs send the message from childhood to women about the
inevitability of marriage. The rituals and ceremonies associated with marriage socialize the
girl to play subordinate to the husband and his family. Marriage thus is a poignant experience
for a woman. The woman is expected to discard all her loyalties to her natal family whereas
her identity as an outsider is not easily forgotten within the affinal family.
Further, these scholars reveal that gender division of labour is ingrained in children very early
in childhood within the family. Little girls are expected to help in domestic work such as
cooking, looking after infants and other such things. Boys on the other hand are reprimanded
if they show any interest in the above works. Girls are expected to learn to bear the pain and
deprivation, eat anything that is given to them, and acquire the quality of self denial. This is a
part of the training for the reality that they are likely to confront in the marital house. Indian
women feminists pointed thus are prepared within the family to experience subordination in
all aspects of their life, especially marital life. Feminist analysis of gender socialization within
family structure is an important contribution which can also be used to explain why women
tolerate violence within and outside homes. It helped understand the ways in which family is
an active agent in the oppression of women. It also helped contest the mainstream notion of
family as a harmonious and egalitarian family structure.
The demand upon women to bear sons to seal their place within their marital home, the lower
status of a brides family upon marriage, restrictions on widow remarriage and widow burning
for reasons of property, polygamy on the part of male and demand on women to be
completely pativrata are some of the aspects of womens life within the family that was
brought forth. Feminist scholars also focused on the neglected area of the relations between
different women within the family and how they are structured.
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Intersection of family and caste system and its effect on women was also researched upon.
Feminist scholars were the ones who first brought to light the links between family structure
and the rules of kinship and caste. They argued that, caste system entails boundary
maintenance for keeping up the purity of the caste structure. The onus of this boundary
maintenance falls on women because of their role in biological reproduction. Therefore family
and kinship provide mechanism to socialize its members especially women to maintain caste
boundary. Any violation of these boundaries entails violence on women in the name of family
honour. Rationality of the family honour subordinates women and gives men the power to
exercise control on womens self and sexuality.
Thus, according to feminist scholars the process of gendered socialization in India primarily
takes place through rituals and ceremonies, the use of language, and practices within and in
relation to the family. For them gender roles are conceived and enacted within the family and
kinship structure.
Feminist scholars also emphasized on womens agency within kinship and family structures.
According to them even within this oppressive structures women are not just passive,
unquestioning victims but also question their situation, express resentment, use manipulative
strategies, utilize their skills, turn deprivation and self denial into sources of power, and
attempt to carve out a living space. They wrote that family and kinship systems not only
subordinates women but also can act as important sources of support and potential security.
However, they cautioned that glorification of family as only a safe haven and ignoring the
inequalities within, as was done by the early sociologists, will only lead to a distorted
understanding of family.
Conclusion
To conclude, in the first three phases in the sociology of family in India there has been a
tendency to highlight the harmonious and functional aspects of family. In contrast, feminist
studies have also brought out the conflictual, oppressive relations within family and its
differing consequences for men and women. They have described the ways in which family
economics through sexual division of labour have pushed women to dependence and further
exploitation. They have also shown how gender based socialization have relegated women to
the domestic sphere and placed them lower in the family hierarchy. Feminists have also

pointed out the ways in which the family structure perpetuates and supports violence against
women.
Yet, it needs to be noted that never actually has the existence of family itself as a social
institution been challenged in India. Even the feminists who vehemently criticized the family
structures have actually restricted themselves to revealing the problems within the processes
of family rather than rejecting it a necessary social institution.