Give some of the important studies relating to the structural changes in the Indian family system. (2015)
The empirical study of the Indian family reads as a sequence of corrections, each generation of fieldwork settling one question and opening another: whether law was changing marriage, how jointness should be measured, what unit was counted, and who inside the household was overlooked.
The sacramental ideal under legal change
K. M. Kapadia’s Marriage and Family in India (1955) traced Hindu marriage’s drift from sacrament towards contract while caste endogamy held firm. His survey of Navsari town and fifteen surrounding Gujarat villages found joint families no fewer in town than in the villages — the rural-urban difference a modification of caste patterns by economic factors, not a march to nuclearity. It settled that law was changing marriage; what “joint” meant once households were counted remained open.
Measuring jointness: Desai and Kolenda
I. P. Desai’s Some Aspects of Family in Mahuva (1964) was the methodological turning point. Grading households from zero to the highest degree of jointness by obligation and shared property rather than co-residence, he found three-fifths nuclear in composition yet barely five per cent with no jointness at all — structurally nuclear and functionally joint.
Pauline Kolenda supplied the comparative frame, elaborating a typology of household types and synthesising some twenty-six studies: nuclear households a majority almost everywhere, jointness higher in the Gangetic plain than in central and eastern India, joint households characteristic of upper and landowning castes.
The conceptual correction: A. M. Shah
A. M. Shah’s The Household Dimension of the Family in India (1973), from genealogical fieldwork in a Gujarat village, held the household to be a residential unit and the family a kinship category, replacing nuclear-versus-joint with simple and complex households. His conclusion — that the “breakdown” thesis rests on a statistical illusion, complex households having always been a propertied upper-caste minority — reframed all that came before. Meyer Fortes’s developmental cycle of the domestic group (1958) explains why a snapshot cannot settle it.
The urban and industrial studies
- Milton Singer’s “The Indian Joint Family in Modern Industry” (1968), a study of nineteen leading industrial families in Madras, found jointness adapted to industry rather than destroyed by it, supplying capital and trusted managers.
- M. S. Gore’s Urbanization and Family Change (1968), on the Aggarwal community of Delhi and the fringe areas of Rohtak and Hissar, found urban residence did not automatically nuclearise.
- M. S. A. Rao’s Urbanization and Social Change (1970), on a rural community at the metropolitan fringe, found kin ties surviving urbanisation.
- Ramkrishna Mukherjee, in West Bengal Family Structures, 1946-1966 (1977), applied classificatory and statistical methods to Bengal, arguing for the joint family’s continued viability.
The feminist turn
The later literature moved from counting households to power inside them. Leela Dube’s work on the seed-and-earth metaphor and her “On the Construction of Gender: Hindu Girls in Patrilineal India” (1988) showed how patriliny is installed through childhood discipline. Patricia Uberoi’s Family, Kinship and Marriage in India (1993) argued the family is not a natural unit regulated from outside but constituted by law, ideology and the state. Tulsi Patel’s Fertility Behaviour (1994) placed reproduction inside household strategy; Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own (1994) made effective land rights the key to the intra-household bargain.
What remains unsettled
No study has tracked Indian households longitudinally at scale, so the developmental-cycle problem persists; and newer forms are barely studied — one-person households, about 4 per cent in 2015-16 and projected near 7 per cent by 2050, and the multi-locational migrant household no census represents.
Conclusion
These studies converge on a finding and a warning. The finding: Indian families are increasingly nuclear in residence and persistently joint in function. The warning is Shah’s — until enumeration is kept apart from kinship, our data will answer a question nobody asked.