Discuss the changing nature of family in Indian cities with suitable examples.

 Continuity and change: The institution of family: There are two types of families in India the traditional joint or extended family and the nuclear family. In the beginning, the theories of Durkheim, Tonnies and Lewis Worth about change in society from simple to complex was applied in India too wherby nuclear family was brought to be associated with industrialization and urbanization. This logic was extended to mean that joint family is an institution of the rural social structure.

However, urban studies in India have proved that joint families are found in urban areas ass well. Sociologists such as Kapadia (1956), Gore (1968), A.M. Shah and other showed that there is no correlation between urbanization and separate’ nuclear households. They observed a cyclical change from nuclear to joint to nuclear family over a time period. The institution of family in India has experienced a series of changes over the 20th century. The impact of political freedom, nation building, planned economy, urbanisation and industrialisation on the Indian family occupied scholars until the 1970s, but this interest declined somewhat in the 1980s. 

While the debate on disintegration of the family, i.e., decline of joint and rise of nuclear families/households, was an analytical one, the idea of the household dimension of the family was a conceptual advance, supported by descriptions of the process of the phases of developmental process of the household. While the household, as a unit of analysis, was based on commensality and co-residence, the jointness of the Hindu family was derived from corporate ties through common property and rituals. Analysis of the process of household development gives a dynamic view of the institution, but it focuses more on the form and structure rather than the content of its relations…..

Women’s and feminist research since the 1970s has focussed on the relations in the family and the household in moving beyond its forms and structures. The research on dynamic, unequal and negotiated relations in the family has questioned the family as a homogenous category for all its members, especially in the spheres of property, work, development, reproduction and violence. Globalisation, rapid increase in the volume of national and international migration, unprecedented changes in transport, telephony, and mass communication, particularly through audio-visual media and information and communication technology: all these and more have brought about complex ways of adaptations by social institutions, especially of family, kinship and marriage.

While India is apparently embracing the western cultural traits with open arms, it is simultaneously going through a process of returning to the cultural,including ritual, roots. The twin processes of Sanskritisation and westernisation have impacted the lives of men and women in varying ways and in turn the form and practice of family life. The family is assuming global, national, cosmopolitan, western, and modern forms in some quarters, while retaining some of the conventional forms in others. Family ties, in this context, are still quite significant to its members, becoming manifest through everyday life, especially through cultural forms such as ritual, food, care, concern, contact, and communication. 

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