Trace the impact of urbanisation on the Hindu family. (1984)
Louis Wirth’s “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938) predicted that size, density and heterogeneity would replace kinship with secondary association, and William J. Goode’s World Revolution and Family Patterns (1963) generalised this into a convergence towards the conjugal family. Indian evidence has repeatedly falsified the simple version. Urbanisation is not one force but a bundle of distinct mechanisms, and tracing its impact means separating them, since they pull in opposite directions.
The mechanisms and what each does
- Housing and space. The tenement, the one-room chawl and the rented flat impose a ceiling on household size that no ideology overrides. This is the single most powerful nuclearising mechanism, and it operates hardest on the poor.
- Separation of home from workplace. In the village the family was also the enterprise; in the city wages are earned individually outside it. The common hearth loses its productive base, and the karta’s authority loses its economic sanction.
- Migration and the split household. The city recruits individuals, not families. The result is not a nuclear family but a multi-locational one — earner in the city, wife, children and parents in the village. The Migration Survey of 2020-21 put India’s migration rate at 28.9 per cent, with employment the leading reason among male migrants.
- Education and the conjugal bond. Schooling, co-education and later marriage raise the wife’s standing and shift emotional weight from the filial to the conjugal tie — the change M. S. Gore identified as the real solvent of jointness.
- Women’s employment. Urban female labour-force participation remains far below rural (28.0 against 47.6 per cent in 2023-24), and where women do work, the joint household is often retained because grandparents provide childcare.
- Anonymity. Caste-neighbourhood sanction weakens; commensal restrictions collapse in canteens and buses; but marriage and ritual remain under kin control.
- New marriage markets. Matrimonial advertising, widened endogamous circles and inter-regional alliances alter how spouses are found without altering the rule of caste endogamy.
What urbanisation did not do
- M. S. Gore’s Urbanization and Family Change (1968), on the Aggarwal community of Delhi with the rural and fringe areas of Rohtak and Hissar, found urban residence did not automatically nuclearise; M. S. A. Rao’s Urbanization and Social Change (1970) found kin ties surviving at the metropolitan fringe; Sylvia Vatuk found the kinship organisation of the old mohallas of Meerut indistinguishable from that of the surrounding countryside.
- Chain migration means the city is entered through kin. Established relatives supply lodging, credit and job information, so urban success increases the value of the kin network rather than dissolving it.
- Caste associations, hostels and community trusts reconstitute caste in the city as an interest group, sustaining the endogamous field on which jointness depends.
- The arithmetic confirms it. Census 2011 recorded India 31.16 per cent urban, with average household size of 4.66 in towns against 4.94 in villages — a gap far too small to describe as the collapse of one family form into another.
Conclusion
Urbanisation has changed the Hindu family’s form and internal balance — smaller and more fragile households, a stronger conjugal bond, functions surrendered to school, market and state — without dissolving its kinship substance. Wirth travels badly to Indian cities, which remain dense with primary ties. What the city produced is not the isolated nuclear family but the dispersed joint family.