Analyze household dimensions of family in India. (UPSC CSE Mains 2020 - Sociology, Paper 2)
- Family is a social unit based on kinship, household is a brick-and-mortar dwelling unit. Households and families are basic units of analysing demography. ‘Family’ has no particular definition. It could mean all the generations after a common ancestor (an entire family tree) or parents and children living together as a single unit. A household is typically a group of people who live under one roof, irrespective of their blood or kinship relations. They are mostly families, though. But a significant lot could be students who are flatmates, people who have moved out of home and are living independently or people living in homes for migrant workers as such. Emotional attachment is core feature of family, while commensality is core feature of household.
- Most family studies in India wishfully ignored the significance of household dimensions of family.
- Iravati Karve emphasizes joint family as a residential unit where people are holding property in common.
- But A.M. Shah considers that this perception of joint family does not make a distinction between household and joint family in many situations. People may hold a joint household but necessarily not constitute a joint family. Therefore, instead of joint family one should look into,
- People living in joint families who despite having economic and political independence, still practice and prefer jointness regularly.
- People may be sharing a joint household but fighting with each other over the question of ancestral property and over the question of power, where jointness and emotional integration is missing out.
- People sharing a joint household may not be agnatically related to each other, however they share strong emotional ties. Therefore, this cannot be considered as a joint family rather it is simple a joint household where emotional ties among members are strong
- Marxists scholars like I.P. Desai considers that nuclear families are mushrooming both in rural as well as urban India indicating shift of India from feudalism to capitalism.
- A.M. Shah considers that the kinship organization of the nuclear family is greatly variable that one cannot call it either as a product of modernity or capitalism. Nuclear household existing in the form of -
- Two married siblings staying together after the death of their parents.
- Widow mother or widower father living with unmarried children.
- A brother living with a sister who has left in -laws'' space due to some compulsion.
- Other nuclear households where both husband and wife are staying with or without children are driven by different reasons.
- Therefore, A.M. Shah considers that family should be studied from the perspective of a household. Hence, in India joint households, nuclear households are present that may or may not translate into family in many situations.
Household dimension to family hence offers a new direction to sociological research redefining our earlier perception of family as a property holding body and a political institution where emotional ties among people are strong.
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