Page 105 - DSOC201_SOCIAL_STRUCTURE_AND_SOCIAL_CHANGE_ENGLISH

Social Structure and Social Change

Notes In the light of the above data, Kapadia gave two important conclusions: (1) joint family structure is
not being nuclearized, and (2) the difference in the rural and the urban family patterns is the result of
modification of the caste pattern by economic factors.
Aileen Ross (1961: 303) studied the pattern of change in middle and upper class families in an urban
area. She studied 157 families in Bangalore in 1957. Her interviewees were asked to describe the
composition of their households at two periods of time: first, when they were ‘growing up’ (that is, in
their childhood) and second, at the time of ‘the interview’. The answers revealed that at the time of
‘growing up’, 12.1 per cent families were large joint (that is, with three or more generations with
lineal and/or colateral kin), 28.0 per cent were small joint (that is, either a man, his wife, unmarried
children and married sons without off-spring, or a man, his wife, parents, unmarried children and
married sons without offspring, or two married brothers with their wives and unmarried children),
49.1 per cent were nuclear, and 10.8 per cent were nuclear with dependents. At the time of interview,
the structure of the respondents’ households was found to be large joint in 5.1 per cent cases, small
joint in 30.6 per cent cases, nuclear in 43.3 per cent cases, and nuclear with dependents in 21.0 per
cent cases (Ibid: 36-37).

In the urban community, there are more joint families (56.5%) than nuclear families
(43.5%), the proportion being 0.77 nuclear family for every one joint family.

On the basis of these figures, Ross (Ibid: 49) concluded that: (1) the trend of family form in India today
is towards a break away from the traditional joint family form into nuclear family units; (2) the small
joint family is now the most typical form of family life; (3) a growing number of people now spend at
least part of their lives in single family units; (4) living in several types of family during a life-time
seems so widespread that it is possible to talk of a cycle of family types as being the normal sequence
for city-dwellers; (5) distant relatives are less important to the present generation than they were to
their parents and grandparents. They tend to see them less often and have less affection and feelings
of responsibility for them; and (6) the city-dweller son has become more spatially separated from all
relatives (due to small accommodation in the house and the changing attitudes towards individuality
and privacy which make visitors less welcome than in the large joint family), and consequently less
under their influence and control than in the tightly spatially bound joint family.
A.M. Shah studied 283 households in one village (called Radhvanaj) in Gujarat in between 1955 and
1958. This village is situated at a distance of about 35 km from Ahmedabad and had 283 households
and a total population of 1,185 persons belonging to twenty-one castes at the time of study. Of the
total households, 34.3 per cent were small households (with three or less members), 47.0 per cent
were medium-sized households (with four to six members), 15.5 per cent were large households
(with seven to nine members), and 3.2 per cent were very large households (with ten or more members).
In terms of the composition, Shah classified the households into two groups: ‘simple’ and ‘complex’.
Simple households were defined as those which consisted of whole or part of the parental family,
while complex households were defined as those which consisted of two or more parental or part of
the parental families. The parental family was defined as one consisting of a man, his wife and unmarried
children. Shah maintained that a simple household had six possible compositions: (i) a man and his
wife, (ii) either only a man or only his wife, (iii) a man, his wife and his unmarried children, (iv)
unmarried brothers and sisters, (v) a father and his unmarried children, and (vi) a mother and her
unmarried children. Likewise, a complex household had three possible compositions: (i) two or more
parental families, (ii) one parental family plus part of a parental family, and (iii) part of one parental
family plus part of one other parental family.
On the basis of this classification, Shah found that 68.0 per cent households in the village were simple
households and 32.0 per cent were complex households. Since ‘simple’ household in Shah’s analysis
represented a nuclear family and ‘complex’ household represented a joint family, it could be
maintained that Shah’s study also revealed the breakdown of joint family system in rural India.

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