Page 107 - DSOC201_SOCIAL_STRUCTURE_AND_SOCIAL_CHANGE_ENGLISH

Social Structure and Social Change

Notes Sachchidananda (1977) studied 720 families in 1970 selected from thirty villages in Shahabad district
in Bihar. From each village, he selected twenty-four families on the stratified random sample basis.
The three variables used for stratifying the families were: caste (two levels), size of landholding
(three levels) and sharecropping (two levels). He selected two families from each level-group. The
families in the sample covered 6,675 persons.
Out of the total families studied, 25.8 per cent were nuclear and 74.2 per cent joint (here nuclear
family included the dependents also). Sachchidananda analyzed the relationship between the type
of the family and different variables like caste, education, landholding, and size of the family. He
found that though the number of joint families was high in all the three types of castes—upper (70.0%),
middle (76.0%), and scheduled castes (89.0%)—but contrary to expectations, there were more nuclear
families in upper castes (30.0%) than in middle castes (24.0%) and scheduled castes (11.0%). Relating
education with family pattern, he found that nuclearity tends to rise with the level of education.
While 39.0 per cent families were nuclear where the level of family education was matric and above,
only 24.0 per cent families were nuclear where the level of family education was middle or less. As
regards the relationship between the family pattern and landholding is concerned, he found that as
landholdings increase, the number of joint families also increase, or less the landholdings, less the
joint families and more the landholdings, more the joint families. Lastly, analyzing the range of kin
constituents, he found that 26.0 per cent families consisted of only primary kin, 62.0 per cent consisted
of primary and secondary kin, and 3.0 per cent consisted of primary, secondary, tertiary, and distant
kin.
Pauline Kolenda (1968) used the quantitative data on the composition of households (co-residential,
commensal family units) from twenty-six studies conducted between 1950s and 1970s, including
nine village studies, ten studies of individual castes, and surveys from seven districts. Her findings
are: (1) While the majority of the people may live in joint and supplemented nuclear families, the
majority of households/ families are nuclear in structure. (2) Regional differences are more evident
in the proportions of joint families. There are higher proportions of joint families on the Gangetic
plain than in Central India or Eastern India (including West Bengal). (3) The joint family is more
characteristic of upper and landowning castes than of lower and landless castes. (4) Caste rank is
more closely related to the size and the proportion of joint families. However, Kolenda’s assumptions
require further careful research.
This author also studied the family pattern while engaged in two different research projects (on
“Drug Abuse Among Students” in 1976 and “Rights of Women: A Feminist Perspective” in 1988). In
the first project, 4,181 respondents (students) were studied in one city (Jaipur), while in the second
project, 753 families were studied in eight villages of one district (Jaipur). Both the studies showed
that the joint family system has not completely disappeared, though the number of nuclear families
is large. In the 1988 study, 51.8 per cent families were found joint and 48.2 per cent nuclear.
The Emerging Trends

Taking all the above-mentioned empirical studies together (of Desai, Kapadia, Ross, Shah, Mukherjee,
Gore, Driver, Bombay University, Sachchidananda, Kolenda, and Ahuja), the following conclusions
may be derived regarding the change in family structure in our country:
1. The number of fissioned families is increasing, that is, sons prefer to live separately from their
parents but at the same time continue to fulfil their traditional obligations towards them.
2. There is more jointness in traditional communities and more nuclearity in communities exposed
to outside influences.
3. The size of the traditional family (that is, co-resident and commensal kinship unit) has become
smaller.
4. So long the cultural ideal that a male should look after his parents and his teen-age brothers
and sisters persists, the functional type joint family will be sustained in our society.
It is not possible to specify when the Indian family began to undergo changes. The system never was
completely static of course, and change proceeded slowly throughout the twentieth century. Until
the end of the third decade of the twentieth century, however, there was no political, social or industrial

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