Variation in Family Forms

A recurring debate in Indian sociology concerns whether the country's families are shifting from a joint pattern to a nuclear one. As with much common-sense belief that sociology tests against evidence, the picture turns out to be more complicated than a simple story of decline. Nuclear families were never absent from India -- they have long existed, particularly among poorer castes and classes who could not sustain a large joint household. At the same time, the sociologist A.M. Shah has argued that in the decades after Independence the joint family arrangement, far from disappearing, actually became more common. Shah connects this to rising life expectancy: between 1941-50 and 1981-85, life expectancy rose from about 32.5 to 55.4 years for men and from about 31.7 to 55.7 years for women. As more people lived into old age, the proportion of elderly persons (60 years and above) in the population grew -- and Shah's question was where these elderly people actually lived. His answer, based on his research, was that most of them lived in joint households. This is still a broad generalisation, and sociology's task is precisely to test such generalisations with careful, comparative, empirical study rather than accept them, or their opposite, on faith.

Family forms also vary in who heads the household. When men migrate to cities for work, the women left behind often take on the task of managing agricultural land and provisioning the family single-handed, becoming its sole providers in practice; such arrangements are called female-headed households. Widowhood can produce the same outcome, as can situations where a man remarries or migrates and stops sending money back to his first wife, children and dependents, leaving the woman to sustain the household alone. Among the Kolams, a tribal community found in south-eastern Maharashtra and northern Andhra Pradesh, a female-headed household is not an exceptional coping arrangement but an accepted, normal family form. …