The growing impact of urbanisation, secularisation, and westernisation has wreaked havoc on the traditional joint family. Once, three or four patrilineally-related generations, all lived under one roof (some still do), working, eating, worshipping, and cooperating. The transition to the nuclear family has been an extremely complex and difficult process. It is never easy to break the existing lines of hierarchy and authority without pain and angst.

The Munjal family: Even in this frenetic age three generations of the family share close personal ties

Yet sociologists believe that the splintering of joint families does not necessarily represent the rejection of the joint-family ideal. "The establishment of a new home does not mean the severance of ties with kin groups of the husband and wife,'' notes sociologist M.N. Srinivasan in his book India: Social Structure. The nuclear family has often been the response, he says, to a variety of conditions, including the need for some members to move from village to city, or from one city to another to take advantage of employment opportunities.

Two rituals that have become quite popular with Hindus embody the new family, notes Vinay Kumar Srivastava, an anthropologist from Delhi University. One is fasting for the longevity of the husband. The other is the worship of Lakshmi and other gods of material prosperity. ''The popularity of the first indicates the importance that conjugal relationships have gained in a nuclear household, which were not so in a traditional joint family,'' says Srivastava. ''Second, wealth has come to occupy the centrestage of life.''

G.K. Birla and family: One of new generation of Birlas. The extended family exists, but in the background

The birth of the nuclear families has removed, to a large extent, the stresses and strains of day-to-day living between the different units of family, especially the celebrated mother-in-law and daughter-in-law conflicts, or fights between the wife and her husband's sisters, and between her and her husband's brothers' wives. What it's also inadvertently done is to allow many women to explore their potential in the workforce, though they inevitably have to balance their professional lives with responsibilities at home. The needs and ambitions of the nuclear family also imply that women have to work to maintain the family's standard of living.

Driven by the explosion of jobs in media, telecommunication, finance, and marketing, India has also seen the birth of the urban singleton, the professional man or woman who has created a solitary life divorced from every traditional norm of the Indian family. Some adapt, others don't. Even at the lower rungs of the income ladder, droves of young men looking for jobs and a better tomorrow have left the safety net of community and family and travelled to the city, often alone and isolated.

But habits, and family, don't vanish overnight. Even in this frenetic age, members of the joint family come together during the propitiation of dead ancestors or during important family functions like marriages, worship of family deities, the birth of a child, the donning of the sacred thread-there are many such factors that act as an adhesive to the family, even in this, the age of leaving your family.

-Ashish Gupta

The Great Divide

Deep Fissures: A unified national polity remains elusve still

Barely six months ago, August 8, 2001, to be precise, two young lovers were hanged to death from the roof of a house in Uttar Pradesh by their own family members in front of hundreds of onlookers. They had committed the cardinal sin of falling in love despite belonging to two different castes. While the boy, Vishal, was a high-caste Brahmin, the girl came from the much lower Jat community. That's just another horrific example of the stranglehold that the ubiquitous caste system has over large swathes of Indian society.

In a society so strongly driven by differences of caste, religion, language, gender, ethnicity, occupation as well as the north-south divide and a multiple of other factors, it would be a complete fallacy to talk about a single great divide. There is of course the most obvious one-the rich-poor divide propounded and perpetuated by many left-leaning scholars-but that's just one. You can easily see the diversity in India's social system in the patterns of rural as well as urban settlements, and well, in simple daily life. Nowhere else in the world do modern malls have cows grazing in the parking lot. Nowhere else in the world will you find bullock carts going the wrong way on expressways. In kinship, marriage rites and customs, inheritance, and the general mode of living, there appear to be sometimes unbridgable gaps between various kinds of Indians. There is perhaps no other society on earth that boasts of so many divisions. There is also perhaps no other society on earth that somehow pulls together despite these divisions.

The foundation of the modern Indian divide is the existence of ancient fissures in a contemporary setting. For instance, most sociologists maintain that the existence of a high degree of congruence between caste and agricultural hierarchy enabled the landholders to exploit the tenants as much as they could-rack renting, eviction and forced labour were, and still are, usual features of rural life. But the system wasn't as brutally split then as it is now. ''Even in traditional Indian society there was a system of gradations in caste rather than a bipolar system,'' says Andre Beteille, former professor of sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.

Most upsetting to social observers is the fact that even after 50 years of Independence, the Indian political system has failed to create a unified national political identity, which could, if not submerge, manage the divisive bonds of religion, caste, region, language and ethnicity. If anything, the self of identity that a maturing democracy gains is giving new life to old divisions and creating fresh ones. The north-south divide, which rears its ugly head from time to time, is a simmering, sub-surface phenomenon that never really dies. Linguistic divisions between states have in the last two decades increasingly threatened to become flashpoints. As northerners become distinctly strident about their identity, many southerners see themselves as guardians of a distinct sub-identity within the national fabric. The uniqueness of this identity is best exemplified by the fact that the nation's largest political party is a non-starter in the south, and the second-largest is fast approaching that status. And of course there is the east, and the north-east...

Like an onion, the great Indian divide is multilayered. The poor and the rich present a ubiquitous starkness to life that is so much typically Indian. But beyond that, there are the divisions of 1,500 dialects, 18 officially-recognised languages and several religious communities including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Parsis. India can only be a land of composite culture, a loose unity in diversity, it can never-ever-have a single great divide. The layers of onion will only grow, and multiply.

-Ashish Gupta