What factors are responsible for the instability of the Indian family? Will the family survive the present crisis in modem society? (2001)
The two clauses need different answers. The strains on the Indian family are real and nameable. But “crisis” is not a neutral description: it smuggles in a functionalist assumption about what a stable family looks like, and the Indian evidence does not support it.
The factors producing instability
- Migration. Census 2011 counted 45.6 crore internal migrants; conjugal and filial ties are now routinely maintained across distance.
- Women’s employment. Female labour force participation rose from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18 to 41.7 per cent in 2023-24. The earning wife shifts domestic power from culture to resource; the resulting conflict is read as instability by those who benefited from the old settlement.
- The conjugal bond displacing the filial. Where a man’s first loyalty moves from parents to wife, the joint household loses its anchor.
- Property partition and sibling litigation, intensified once daughters became coparceners by birth after Vineeta Sharma (2020).
- Domestic violence, alcohol and dowry: NCRB recorded 6,450 dowry deaths in 2022.
- Ageing without care. The 60-plus population is projected to exceed 20 per cent by 2050 and to surpass children by 2046; the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (2017-18) found 5.2 per cent of older adults reporting abuse in the past year. The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act 2007 exists because filial obligation no longer runs automatically.
- Economic stress, as the joint household’s insurance function passes to market and state.
Contesting the premise of “crisis”
The thesis has a pedigree. Talcott Parsons (1955) made the isolated nuclear family functionally specialised, so departures look like failure; William J. Goode (World Revolution and Family Patterns, 1963) predicted convergence on the conjugal family, his neglected qualification being that its ideology outruns its structure. Against this:
- Ronald Fletcher (The Family and Marriage in Britain, 1966) argued the family is not declining but improving in quality, its functions growing more demanding as schools and hospitals assist rather than supersede them.
- Anthony Giddens (The Transformation of Intimacy, 1992) reads the same evidence as the pure relationship, sustained by satisfaction rather than obligation: higher separation rates are the price of democratised intimacy, not decay.
- Feminist scholarship, notably Ann Oakley‘s on housework, insists what is in crisis is the patriarchal family, not the family.
- A. M. Shah (The Household Dimension of the Family in India, 1973) removes the baseline the thesis needs: Indian households were always mostly small, complex ones being an upper-caste propertied pattern. There was no golden age to fall from.
Marriage also remains near-universal, with Census 2011 putting divorced persons at about 0.24 per cent of the married population; and the expected nuclearisation never came — nuclear households were 70.34 per cent in 2001 and 70.11 per cent in 2011, flat across a decade of India’s fastest urbanisation.
Conclusion
The family will survive, because it has been reconstituted before and is being reconstituted now — jointness converting from co-residence into a dispersed network of obligation held by remittances and the telephone. What will not survive is the unquestioned authority structure inside it: the assumption that the eldest male speaks for everyone. That is the real content of the “crisis” — a redistribution of power, not a breakdown.