Discuss different forms of Kinship system in India. (2021)
The forms of Indian kinship are not a list but the output of a few generating principles — descent, alliance, residence and terminology — about whose priority Indian sociology has never agreed. Reading the map with Irawati Karve, Louis Dumont or T. N. Madan changes what counts as a form.
The principles that generate the forms
- Descent assigns membership, property, name and ritual duty. Most Indian groups are patrilineal and virilocal; a small but theoretically outsized matrilineal belt runs through Kerala, Meghalaya and Lakshadweep.
- Alliance fixes whom one may marry: north India multiplies exogamy (village, gotra, the four-gotra rule, sapinda) while the Dravidian south prefers marriage back into known kin. That exogamy is still violently enforced: Shakti Vahini v. Union of India (2018) held that khap panchayats may not obstruct marriages between consenting adults.
- Residence decides whether a bride retains access to her natal household, and so her fallback position; terminology records all three, since merging cross-cousins with siblings names the unmarriageable.
Karve’s zones against Dumont’s alliance
Karve (Kinship Organisation in India, 1953) read terminology and marriage rules against linguistic regions, yielding northern, central, southern and eastern zones, on the claim that the two coincide because both record the same settlement history. The scheme invites explaining kinship by linguistic descent, and she conceded the eastern zone is no zone at all.
Dumont (“Hierarchy and Marriage Alliance in South Indian Kinship”, 1957) supplies the explanation her map lacks. In the south affinity is inherited: marriage repeats across generations, so lineages stay permanent wife-givers and wife-takers and affinity is a durable category, not an event. In the north marriage is kanyadan, an unreturnable gift, so wife-givers rank below wife-takers.
Madan’s Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir (1965) adds a third correction: working from the chulah, he showed jointness to be a phase a household passes through, not a type. A form must be dated, not only located.
Forms the Hindu-centric typology under-covers
- Muslim kinship permits parallel-cousin marriage, which Hindu exogamy forbids, and nikah is a contract with mahr, not a sacrament; yet Imtiaz Ahmad showed Ashraf, Ajlaf and Arzal reproduce caste-like endogamy.
- Christian kinship in Kerala runs along Syrian and Latin lines, with dowry and church-defined prohibited degrees; tribal systems — Khasi and Garo matriliny, Gond and Munda clan exogamy, Toda fraternal polyandry, bride-price — sit outside the gotra grammar.
Conclusion
There is no Indian kinship system, only a field of forms held apart by descent and alliance and held together by caste endogamy. Karve locates the forms, Dumont explains them, Madan dates them; the non-Hindu cases mark the limits of all three.