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The following trends may be noticed in the modern Indian family:
(1) The joint family is undergoing a phenomenal structural change in the urban and suburban areas, and the preference of the urbanite Indian is distinctly for the nuclear family. Even if the male in a family wishes to stick to his household, circumstances and, sometimes, the woman in his life may compel him to opt for a separate living.
The reasons behind the break-up of the joint family system are not only the urbanite education that inspires individualism among its members, but economic compulsions too. In search of work, the man has to look for new pastures and he may finally settle in regions that are far away from his ancestral home.
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His wife accompanies him for his welfare, and there ends the ‘common-roof arrangement. Whatever effects the break-up of the system may have upon members of a joint family in particular, and upon society in general, the fact remains that authoritarian trends have disappeared from the family set-up. There is no patriarch and no absolute control over the choice of education, the choice of occupation and the choice of mates by individual members.
The family set-up is more democratized and between the husband and the wife there is more co-operation on the basis of equality than was not found before. However, the following surveys made by different institutions on the joint family system will tell different tales as to its desirability or otherwise – A report was recently published by scientists working in King George’s Medical College, Lucknow stating that cases of neurosis, chiefly women’s, are increasing in urban India because of the break-up of the Joint Hindu family.
The cases of neurosis in urban and rural areas work out to a ratio of 2:1 respectively. Women neurotics outnumber men and, even among women, the greater number of neurotics is the married ones. According to the scientists, the joint family system gives a therapeutic milieu for minor emotional disturbances by virtue of its collectiveness, the capacity to neutralize burdens and responsibilities and the constant group interactions which cannot be found in a nuclear family.
The scientists further observe that since that Muslim woman is subjected to more of restrictions than her Hindu counterpart, she is more susceptible to neurosis than, in fact, a woman belonging to any other religion in India.
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However, the Tata Institute of Social Science made a study on the working of the Joint Hindu family system and its effects upon youngsters. Extracts of the study reports show that young people in joint families are prone to drug addiction because of their exposure to a more liberal and individualistic atmosphere at home.
(2) The urban or the modern family has placed the woman in a distinctly different position from what it had been earlier in the rural set-up. The woman is now educated like the man, and one remembers that it all began with writings such as those of Mary Wollstonecraft who, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women, advocated for women’s education and attacked Rousseau for his maintaining that women’s education should always be relative to that of men.
In our country, too, in the last century or so we had persons like Raja Rammohan, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Sister Nivedita and Annie Besant, who worked untiringly for bringing women upto the level of education that men enjoyed and today’s picture is, according to official Government publications (see India 1977-78), 69% of the girls in the country belonging to the age group of 6 to 11 years are in schools, although only 12% in the age group of 14-17 are in secondary education.
These figures have to be taken in the context of total adult illiteracy in India which, according to the Census of 1971, was 75.5%.
Although only 11.86% of the women in India are engaged in some occupation or the other, and 5.98% are engaged in agriculture alone, the number of working women in urban centres is on the rise. In the initial stages, there was some misgiving about her going to work brushing shoulders with men, and an urban occupation, except that of teaching, was taboo for her, now-a-days many women are as qualified as men, and are as capable as the unfair sex in field of Governmental, commercial, administrative, Judicial and educational activities.
While the Constitution embodies a Directive Principle of State Policy that men and women should get equal work for equal pay, different avenues are opening out for women’s employment and, in fact, in certain spheres women are found to be better suited to the job than men.
The Hon’ble Justice Mrs.P.Khastgir, a judge of the Calcutta High Court, recently made a statement that women make better judges than men since their innate qualities of tenderness can be blended with their wisdom, tact and patience, thus placing the litigant in a secure position. The former Union Railways Minister, Sri Madhu Dendavate, once observed that if women become booking clerks, they will ensure that there is less of corruption in railway booking transactions.
However, the entire attitude of urban society towards women has changed. A woman can have an independent living of her own, and she is no longer obliged to marry. Social and religious sanctions against the unmarried woman are restricted to mere repetitions of habits; and though gossip is an eternal leisure time engagement with human beings, and primarily with women, no unmarried woman need today crumble under the shame of being a spinster and, therefore, being childless.
In India, even today in the rural centres, the superstition as to a childless woman is so affecting that people do not like her to take part in ceremonies on auspicious occasions; a similar attitude is adopted towards widows. In urban areas, these attitudes have changed considerably and, according to the Census of 1971, there are 11.92 crores of women in India who have never been married, although this figure refers, for the larger part, to rural women.
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Even religious leaders have taken a liberal attitude towards unmarried women and, in cities, it is no longer regarded as religious duty for the woman to have a husband and procreate for him. In villages, a rigid system still prevails under which a family would face the peril of social obstracism if minor girls are not given in marriages by its elder members before the religious limit of the age of sixteen is crossed by her.
Gradually, perhaps because of financial stresses as also due to increased Government interest taken in family welfare, even this position is being rectified, and one must remember that, by the Marriages Act that came into force in 1978, no girl under 18 years of age can be given in marriage. This has been done by the Government not to erase religious superstitions but to keep the size of the population in check.
(3) The modern urban family still continues to perform the essential functions of social life between the husband and wife by giving them the legitimate scope for enjoying sex, for pro-creating and for having a home. The other functions of the family like those of domestic drudgery and educating the child have been taken over by several agencies like the primary school and the church, several economic agencies, sports clubs and the Government.
While the school and the church take charge of the child’s educational and cultural needs, the Government provides protection on public lines, and commercial houses help domestic chores with different gadgets that make life much easier.
In our cities, the mother no longer finds it a problem to treat a large number of guests at a short notice, since mixers, mincers, specialized cookers and dried and canned food can effectively answer her problems. Yet with all these advantages, the family has lost the protection that it used to enjoy in difficulties when life was large and accommodative of the outer circle of relatives.
Besides that, living in big cities is a big problem with high rents and premiums attached to contracts of tenancy. Many families live in conditions of having to share only one bedroom for at least four to five persons and its direct consequence,-apart from the health hazards, is to unbalance the mental equilibrium of the husband and the wife in the family.
In large metropolitan cities, several families of modest standing have to live in slums, or in very similar abodes. Observations were made by Dr.N.Ganguly of the Department of Zoology, Calcutta University, on the point.
According to Dr.Ganguly, overcrowding, as a general rule, leads to abnormality among human beings and animals. Surveys were made by him in 1976 of life in over-crowed slums in Central and East Calcutta. The surveys show that shortage of space, illiteracy and low moral standards almost go hand-in-hand. People under conditions of overcrowding do not follow accepted norms of social behaviour and live under constant stress.
Attracted by crime films and obscene literature, they develop a tendency to commit sex crimes and a yearning for spinning ‘quick money’. Dr. Ganguly finds that a Central Calcutta slum has a woman as the leader, who is a smuggler and also involved in immoral traffic. Even children are taught how to commit petty crimes. Most adults suffer from typhoid, cholera, irregular blood pressure, skin diseases, impotence and mental disorders.
(4) The state has entered the privacy of family life with both regulatory as well as beneficial measures and the philosophy of the Government in this regard is that, in its attempt to create the conditions of a welfare state, it must lend co-operation to the family so that it can make its adjustments to the changing needs of the times.
While the Muslim in India can take more than one wife according to his personal law which remains still untouched by state edicts, the Christian and the Hindu must compulsorily embrace the monogamous system, and for them bigamy is punishable.
For the Hindu, the idea is statute-imposed and not religion based; his religion enjoins upon him the obligation to provide the wife with food and clothing and also to secure a union of the hearts of the spouses; but he is not made to promise that he would not have another woman in life.
The Christian concept of marriage of one man with one woman to the exclusion of all others has been imported into the fabric of his personal laws. The Marriage Amendment Act of 1978 also brings in further restrictions in the form of banning of child marriages, and the marriageable age has been pushed further by proscribing the marriage of girls under 18 and boys under 21 years of age. The Abolition of Dowry Act seeks to remove the notorious dowry system from the country.
The socialistic state of India is increasingly becoming conscious of its duties of providing facilities for education of children and in the State of West Bengal, education of children up to the twelfth form has been made free. Child-welfare clinics are being, opened in different urban centres, and Family Welfare Units in urban, as well as rural parts of the country, are engaged in educating the mother about the duties of the family towards the child. Of course, the primary task of the Family Welfare Scheme, with its symbol of the red triangle, is to impress upon the people the advantages of having two or three children only.
Juvenile courts for the offender of tender age and reformatories where they are given corrective treatment are other instances of the interest that the State is taking in tackling delicate social problems. Women who are engaged in immoral traffic are now sought to be reclaimed and rehabilitated by society instead of being thrown aside as dirt, and under the patronage of the State, some women’s organizations in Calcutta and Bombay are actually winning over a number of them to the healthy mode of life.
Prostitution was banned in India since 1956 and recently has the Union Ministry of Education and Social Welfare made it clear once again that Government has no intention of granting licences to prostitutes. The Government of India is a signatory to a Convention, signed in 1950, relating to the suppression of immoral traffic and the exploitation of the prostitution of others.
(5) The modern family places much emphasis upon romantic love and the importance of pre-nuptial emotions between persons who are to become spouses, for the modern line of thinking in psychiatry as well as in social studies is that sex values and sex-adjustment is a factor of primary importance to a happy family life. When B.C.Gruenberg wrote in 1947 on How can We teach About sex, the idea of sex education was in every sense novel in the Western countries, and the very thought of it was absolutely outrageous on the Indian soil.
Today, in urban educational institutions, a hesitant thought is being given to the feasibility of the idea and we are, perhaps, not far away from its implementation. Magazines like Femina, the Illustrated Weekly of India and a few others are making endeavours along this line, but the proper appeal of these magazines is still to the adult.
In cities, in any case, more people are coming to realize the importance of allowing the young to choose their mates, rather than the elders make the selection mechanically and in terms of a possible alliance with a prestigious family, without having any regard for the compatibility of the parties to the marriage.
It is being understood by the relatively educated that happiness in married life is not based on mere sexual co-habitation but on the proper understanding between the mates and that a happy family requires spouses who are placed under minimum possible mental stress and strain. The Family Welfare Scheme introduced by the Government affords easy and cheap means to the couple of making use of contraceptives and keeping the size of the family limited for the enjoyment of the couple.
However, the increasing consciousness of sex values in family life has to some extent effaced the sacrosanct look of this social organization, and partners in marriage are learning to place sex pleasures above all other family duties. Some couples in the Western countries are thinking in terms of merely “living together” without going through the unnecessary formality of a wedding. Co-ed dormitories in those countries have also given a free scope to boys and girls of living in the company of each other without any restrictions.
Group-sex relations are practised by small groups of three to six persons, and the advocates of this system consider the suppression of selfish interests as its principal advantage. None of these methods has found open recognition in society, not even free sex relations in a co-ed dormitory.
In India, these developments have not become prominent event in very modern metropolitan centres, although the tendency of some Indians to ‘ape the West’ can account for certain aberrations in traditional family behaviour of small sections of urbanites. In any case, the legal sanction given to the Hindu for ‘divorce’ has considerably upset the stability of the family structure in a span of only about 20 years since 1956 when the Hindu Marriage Law was codified by the Indian parliament.
The Muslim male has always enjoyed the right of divorce, but this right is not equally applicable in favour of the female. The Roman Catholic considers that marriage is indissoluble, since it is solemnized in heaven. Not that the protestant does not have an equally sacred view of marriage, but the Indian Marriage Act allowed the Christian to sue for divorce even half a century earlier than the Hindu acquired the right.
In the United States, the National Centre for Health Statistics published its report in 1974 and observed that the rate of divorce is alarmingly on the increase in that country and the average annual increase has been about 5% from 1963 to 1968, and about 8% since that year. While there were 400,000 divorces in 1960 in that country, more than 940,000 divorces took place in the year 1973-74.
In India, the Census of 1971 shows that 11.79 crores of males and 12.05 crores of females have been married at least once; out of this number there are about 537,000 male divorcees and 837,000 female divorcees in the country. The total population in the country in that year is shown as 54.79 crores.
In other words, with a population about three times that of the United States, the number of divorcees in our country is about 11/2 times that of America though in U.S. terms, the percentage of Indian divorces is not alarming; but considering the fact that India is still traditional in several aspects of social life, the relatively high number of divorces does not tell a happy tale. Statistics are not available on private sexual immorality, clandestine romantic love and extramarital affairs, but these factors are surely accounting for the rising number of divorces in our country particularly among city-dwellers.
Besides that, the relatively higher scope for the urbanite to avoid detection and the comparatively easy availability in towns of women, who would professionally entertain casual customers, encourages sexual immorality and the Indian wife’s determination thereafter to have recourse to matrimonial actions in a court of law is understandable.
The statutory grounds for divorce and dissolution of marriage are adultery and other depraved sex offences, cruelty, desertion, impotence, virulent diseases, insanity and religious conversion by one of the spouses. Court records show that in the majority of the cases the complaint is over adultery or other sex lapses by one of the spouses and cruelty.
A recent amendment to the Marriage Laws made in 1977 permits the Hindu spouses to mutually agree to dissolve their marriage. The earlier statutory obligation of going through a three-year waiting period has also been done away with. Magazines like the Femina have, however, opened up the section of the marriage counseller who tries to give personal advice or advice by post upon problems that rock the foundations of marriage.
Yet there is no denying the fact that divorces, whether upon genuine grievances or collusion between adventurous persons who are bored with married life, are in the increase.