Dr. S. Albones Raj
One of the assertions, indeed a fait accompli, which have the least risk
of being contested, is that multi-culturality has been an abiding character of
Indian society. Advocates for cultural pluralism and cultural homogeneity
abound and - highly polemicized issues as they are – had given rise to a welter
of ‘theories’ of cultural nationalism and hegemony. On the other end of the
continuum are several students of social philosophy for whom pluralism and
modernity (or even post-modernity) are coterminous (Giddens 1996, Oomen 1985).
Monism - for all its irrepressible appeal to laymen of social sciences - is a
much debunked stream of thought in epistemology and in sociology proper. As an
epistemological framework, monism and its variants have little use in a
“Science” which seeks to problematize social reality. Phenomenology and its sociological version –
symbolic interactionism – share the distaste for monism, more specifically to
the reductionist and the determinist variety. As evidenced in Sociology of the
family – a branch of sociology devoted to the study of family and also in
cultural studies, monism is perceived to be a sterile approach with little
substantive dividends to offer. Both esoteric and lay literature on Indian
society hold cultural pluralism to be a predominantly an urban trait and this
is also reflected in the encounterist semiotics of city-dwellers. Thus many
families in urban India keep discovering the diversity of the urban mosaic and
respond to the same in a uniquely selective fashion – a thesis akin to that of
Ishwaran (1975). The Urban family in India is no single entity; it is at best a
pattern of patterns. The urban family is undoubtedly under pressure from
various quarters and forces, some of which are cultural, while others are
politico-economical. Some of them are exogenous and others stem from within.
Interestingly enough, the urban family faces the challenge of demand for change
even while it faces the challenge of identity-retention. This paper seeks to
identify and classify these factors and, so in doing, attempts to lay the
foundation for a quasi-grounded and middle-range theory of family transition in
urban India. This article makes no claim to being the last word in sociology of
family. Nonetheless, this article seeks to raise certain substantive issues
and, in the process, to indicate the future directions which research on family
could profitably take. The paper admittedly takes the methodological stand of
the classical sociologists, but does not seek to challenge the post-modernist
attempts on this area of inquiry.
An overwhelming number of Indian
scholars had chosen to study family in 50s and 60s, nonetheless scholars from
the West have also enriched this field with their own insights. K.N.Kapadia
introduced family studies to the Indian academia in early 50s. His pioneering
and generic work on family, marriage and kinship opened up new vistas for
sociologists and anthropologists in India. He saw a triangular relationship
amongst the three. As a leading culturologist of his time, he premised his
analysis with the conviction born of field observations that family could not
be studied in isolation. Exemplifying this approach, his work Family, marriage and kinship served as
a source book on Indian family for many students of Indian family. D’Souza’s
work on Mother-right families(1959) in
Konkan coast and in Kerala illumined the transition witnessed in two
communities, namely, Navayats and
Moplahs. Close on the heels of Kapadia’s
work, Ross and I.P Desai published their observations on Indian joint family.
While Ross drew largely upon his American experiences and his short exposure to
Russian family, I.P Desai and contended
that the criteria of nuclearity and joint-ness
need to be revisited in the light of fresh evidences and presents strong case in
favor of joint family being the predominant form in Indian cities. Iravati
Karve’s work on Kinship system in India highlighted, inter alia, the broad principles governing the kinship system in
India. She attempted to situate the Indian family in a broader framework of
kinship network. She saw continuities and discontinuities in Indian family
system. Raman Unni and Fr.Puthenkalam S.J had attempted to highlight the unique
features of families in South-West region. Unlike the approach of Kathleen
Cough, they took upon the task of bringing out the variety which characterized
the families in this part of India. Fr.Puthenkalam , to his merit, sought to
highlight the structure of Christian families in Kerala.
Sociology of Family: An Overview
Sociologists’ romance with family
dates back to Auguste Comte, who essayed to relate the changing forms of family
to the evolutionary transition of societies from theological thinking to
positivistic thinking. Comte’s singular quest for an ‘elixir’ for re-building families
in his blue-print for social re-construction has indeed made scholars to credit
him to have been the first social philosopher for bringing family to the centre
stage of sociological discourse (Comte 1986). Early anthropologists
Morgan(1943) and Taylor (1945) - through their largely speculative, albeit
seemingly historical, analysis – initiated a debate on the origin and
development of patriarchal -monogamian family.
Peter Murdock perhaps was the first anthropologist to grapple with the
conceptual issues related to family and proposed that family was a cultural
universal, despite the interesting variety which it exhibits (1949). Engels
(1972) and Zeretksy (1976) made a valiant attempt to advance a
politico-economic explanation and thus tracing its origin to the rise of
private property in the true Marxian tradition. The first inkling of a
political sociology of family could be discerned in the writings of these
Marxian scholars. Parsons, Bales (1955) and Anshen (1959) ventured into a
functionalist treatment of family and they proffered a spirited defense of the
nuclear family as the most appropriate and functional form for an
industrialized society. Although the views of the American functionalists gave
rise to a hitherto unsettled polemic on the reported relation between the type
of family and the concept of modernity, they did manage to highlight the macro
forces at work, shaping the destiny of family as an indispensable social group.
Goode, an archetypal macro-sociologist, evinced keen interest in socio-historical
inquiry on family and the changes it witnessed on account of revolutions which
swept societies at different points in time. This classical study, described by
many as an important corner-stone in the field of historical sociology, is also
an important treatise on social change (1963).
Three broad yet important trends, which
could be discerned from the scholarly preoccupations beginning from 60s and 90s
in Euro-American societies, are the specific focus on family structure in
ethnic communities and migrants, a gendered approach to family and the tacit
acceptance of empiricism as the most valid approach to the study of family.
Emergence of criminal subcultures, which was presumed to be the causa prima for the anomie ‘let loose on
the society’, exercised the attention of American scholarship on family. These
studies shed useful light on the pattern of socialization at home and in the
community. The parent-sibling interaction and the role of peer group had
claimed much space in their rather elaborate description of the family unit
(Silva and Smart, 1999, Purdy 1967, Barret and McIntosh 1982, Herskovits 1968,
Leibow 1967, Hannerz 1969, Smith 1962, Lewis 1959). Black studies in US and
ethnographic studies of Indian families also belong to this broad genre of
studies. Gough’s study on Nair families of Kerala, however, stands out
prominently from the rest for the strident attempt it makes to redefine
matrifocality (Gough 1958).The gender perspective sought to challenge what then
was called as “stereotyped assumptions and conceptions” about family, and made a strong plea for re-defining family and
an equi-gendered social order. Attempts to trace sexual exploitation of women
to the patriarchal family structure and to the gender-specific socialization
imparted at home, highlighted as to how the subjugative culture is sustained
and reproduced. Gender studies –
initially handicapped by its own cloistered approach, because of its historical
affinity with feminism, but later on widened its scope to include homosexuals
and transgender in its ambit – wisened up to the problems and issues of all
sexually marginalized sub-groups and communities (Calhoun S 1997, Calhoun C
1997, Siba and Smal l 1971, Laing 1971, Delphy and Leonard 1992, Abbot and
Wallace 1992, Jenness 1971, Benston 1972, Gonzlez 1970, Sheeran 1993).
Durkheimian strain of empiricism has been firmly on the sociological saddle in
the domain of family research. However, historical researches of the Weberian
variety also vie for space. Compilatory works, which seek to collate piecemeal
investigations on family across cultures have also bourgeoned. Morgan’s
published works on family (1975, 1995), besides offering a large spectrum of
insights, represent a broad theoretic framework on family. Goode’s work on
world revolutions and their impact on family also belongs to this class of
empirical investigations on family. Conceived in qualitative terms, Laing’s
study of family and insanity has also contributed richly to the corpus of
knowledge on family, especially when faced with a crisis. The Indian academic
scenario had, by and large, the same set of concerns and issues as their
cognitive epi-center. However, ethnographic portraits of family by
anthropologists demarcated them starkly from a largely survey-oriented
sociology conférer.
Indian scholarship on Family:
M.S Gore set the mood for many scholars
India, wanting to study the impact of urbanization on family. M.S.Gore articulated what has long been
hypothesized by many. To him, the urban family in India has its own dynamics
and joint families are not only found in urban India but also found to thrive
by reinventing itself. However, he concurred with his contemporaries that urban
families exhibit an amazing variety and are structurally and functionally
different from those found in rural India. Striking a concordant note with
M.S.Gore, Morrison and Nimkoff identified some of the fundamental problems a
student of Indian family face in conceptualizing family in the Indian context.
Realizing the need for systematizing and codifying the study of Indian
families, Khatri sought to embark upon an ambitious epistemological project on
codifying knowledge vis-à-vis the
methodological approaches employed by scholars in India and abroad. A theme dearer to Gore was taken by Sudha Kaldat,
namely, urbanization and its impact on family. Edwin Driver chose to study the
family structure in one of the biggest tribal belts of India, namely, Central
India. Vasanth Pethe was a keen student of the inner dynamics of Indian family.
The life cycle approach adopted by him brought him closer to Mandlebaum, who
expatiated a similar approach to Indian family in his book, society in India.
The advantage of such an approach is the opportunity it offers to take a closer
analytical view of the natural changes to which the Indian family is subjected.
Concerned about the increasing number of divorces and family disorganization, Fonseca,
a Sri Lankan scholar elected to study the same in India. This task of his was
guided by a fairly documented fact that many Asiatic societies and their
experiences in this sphere of social life are similar, if not identical. That
Christianity would have meant radical changes to the traditional Indian joint
families was a theme of investigation for Panos Bardis. Bardis did not find any traces of significant
impact on the family structure. He observed that Christianity managed to touch
only the peripheral aspects of Indian family, leaving the core more or less
intact. Kanti Pakrasi investigated the impact of involuntary migration on the
family structure among refugees in West Bengal . Involuntary migration tends to
uproot families and in innumerable ways it does alter the structure and
organization of the family. Some of the changes are so far-reaching that
present structure has no resemblance to what it was once - before the forced migration.
