What has been the impact of globalisation on the cultural aspect(s) of the family? (2009)
Globalisation has altered the Indian family less in structure than in culture — the values it holds, the rituals it performs, the identities it claims and the desires it licenses. The change is not the homogenisation early accounts predicted, but a selective reworking in which global forms are absorbed and simultaneously used to reassert Indian difference.
Values: the individualisation of choice
- The companionate ideal has spread: marriage is increasingly justified by compatibility and emotional fulfilment rather than by alliance between two descent groups. Anthony Giddens (The Transformation of Intimacy, 1992) calls this the pure relationship, sustained only while it satisfies both parties.
- Its Indian form is a compromise, not a rupture. Patricia Uberoi analyses the “arranged love marriage” — a couple’s own choice, subsequently ratified by parents — as the culturally legitimate settlement between romantic desire and parental authority. Endogamy survives inside the new idiom; matrimonial portals expand the pool of choice while filtering it by caste and community.
- Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim name the underlying process: individualisation makes the family a project to be negotiated rather than a status to be occupied.
Ritual and consumption
- The wedding has become a spectacle: multi-day, professionally designed, destination-based, and increasingly staged for circulation as image. Ritual has not declined; it has been commodified and expanded. The commodity form has entered the ceremony without displacing its kinship function.
- Global brands, imported festivals and child-centred consumerism reorganise family spending and shift household authority: children socialised by advertising become consumption experts, reversing the direction of instruction between generations.
Media and the transnational imaginary
- Arjun Appadurai (Modernity at Large, 1996) gives the frame. Mediascapes supply images of possible lives, ethnoscapes the moving populations that carry them; imagination becomes a social practice, so a small-town family rehearses a life it has only seen on a screen. Aspiration globalises well before income does.
The transnational family and the reassertion of tradition
- Migration produces families distributed across countries. India received about 129 billion US dollars in remittances in 2024, the largest inflow to any country, and the Ministry of External Affairs counts an overseas Indian population above 35 million — kinship operating as an economic institution across borders.
- Aihwa Ong’s flexible citizenship describes the resulting strategy: passports, schooling and residence are distributed among family members to manage risk and opportunity.
- The striking cultural finding is that diaspora families often become more ritually observant than families at home — religion and kin custom become the portable markers of identity abroad. Roland Robertson’s glocalisation names the mechanism: the global is realised only in particular local forms.
- There are costs. Global care chains export women’s care labour: nurses and domestic workers sustain other people’s families while their own children are raised by kin. Kin terminology erodes with language shift, as terms distinguishing father’s brother from mother’s brother give way to generic English ones, flattening a classificatory system.
Conclusion
The homogenisation thesis is too simple. Globalisation has not produced a Western family in India; it has widened the repertoire from which families construct themselves, and the forces that individualise choice also supply the means to advertise tradition. What has genuinely changed is the basis of authority: the family must now justify its claims to its own members rather than presume them. That cuts towards freedom and towards a new anxiety about identity alike.