Write short note : Changing pattern of Hindu joint family. (1992)
The Hindu joint family is not merely a large household. It is a legal and religious corporation — coparceners holding ancestral property by birth, bound by the obligation to offer pinda to common ancestors. Because it is constituted in law, law has reshaped it most sharply; sociological change runs alongside, and often behind, the statutory kind.
What the institution legally is
- Under Mitakshara, sons, grandsons and great-grandsons take an interest in ancestral property by birth; shares fluctuate with births and deaths and crystallise only at partition. Under Dayabhaga, followed in Bengal and Assam, no right arises until the father dies.
- The karta manages the estate and represents the family; ancestral property is distinguished throughout from self-acquired property, which a man may will away freely.
- The religious basis is the shraddha: the son who offers the funeral cake is the natural heir, which is why sonlessness was a spiritual crisis.
The legal transformation
- The Hindu Succession Act, 1956 made a deceased coparcener’s interest devolve by succession, admitting widow, daughter and mother as Class I heirs — the first breach in the all-male coparcenary.
- The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 made daughters coparceners by birth, equal to sons, in Mitakshara property. In Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020) the Supreme Court held the right to be heritage by birth, available whether or not the father was alive on 9 September 2005.
- Partition suits have moved fission from the domestic sphere to the civil court.
- Yet the Hindu Undivided Family survives as a separate assessable entity in income-tax law, and its use is growing: HUF returns rose from about 9.6 lakh in 2013-14 to roughly 13.7 lakh in 2024-25.
The sociological changes alongside
K. M. Kapadia, in Marriage and Family in India (1955), found jointness no weaker in Navsari town than in its villages, the difference reflecting caste and economic position rather than nuclearisation. M. S. Gore defined the joint family by the priority of the filial and fraternal bond over the conjugal one — and it is exactly this priority that salaried work, women’s education and the companionate ideal have eroded, even where property stays undivided.
Conclusion
The changing pattern is a separation of the institution’s layers: the co-residential joint family has thinned, the functional one of obligation and remittance persists, and the juridical one flourishes as a tax person. That a family may partition its kitchen while keeping its HUF account states the change exactly. The Hindu joint family has been reorganised rather than abolished, and survives most robustly where law gives it an interest in surviving.