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Joint Families in Rural Karnataka, South India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Polly Hill
Polly Hill
Affiliation:
Clare Hall, Cambridge
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Extract

The main purpose of this brief article on the importance of the joint family in six villages in Anekal Taluk, Bangalore District, Karnataka State, is to recommend a simple statistical method of measuring the ‘incidence of jointness’ among the resident population; it also presents the results of my enquiry.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , February 1980 , pp. 29 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

The fieldwork on Which this article is based was undertaken between September 1977 and August 1978 during sabbatical leave from Cambridge. I am grateful to the Managers of the Smuts Fund for grants towards my expenses. I shall express my great gratitude to the numerous people who assisted me in the villages on another occasion.Google Scholar

1 The six villages (Bukkasagara, Hullahalli, Mahantalingapura, Nanjapura, Srirampura and Vabasandra), which had a total population of about 2,600, are situated between about 15 to 20 miles south of Bangalore city and are mainly dependent on crops grown on dry land. While a few Anekal villages are closely linked economically to Bangalore city, owing to the regular commuting of a fair proportion of men, I found no difficulty in selecting villages, none of which lay on motorable roads, which are mainly dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.Google Scholar

2 Subtitled A Field Study in a Gujarat Village and a Review of other Studies (University of California Press, 1973; also Orient Longman).Google Scholar

3 The agricultural labour force includes most women and many children.Google Scholar

4 ‘Dowry and Bridewealth and the Property Rights of Women in South Asia’, in Goody, Jack and Tambiah, S. J.Bridewealth and Dowry (Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 78.Google Scholar

5 The most serious of several objections to following those authors who define joint households as including one or more married sons is that parents are very seldom abandoned by all their married sons. I am here regarding resident sons-in-law as the equivalent of married sons.Google Scholar

6 See Kolenda, Pauline M. ‘Region, Caste and Family Structure: A Comparative Study of the Indian “Joint” Family’, in Singer, Milton and Cohn, Bernard S. (eds), Structure and Change in Indian Society (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968).Google Scholar

7 I found that the households in the six villages could be readily classified in six groups (with sub-divisions if required) according to whether they were basically two generational joint households, fraternal joint households, other two generational households, simple (nuclear) households, one-person households or ‘other’—and that very few fell into the ‘other’ class.Google Scholar

8 Owing to housing shortage, it is common for houses, even if small, to be partitioned when separation occurs; each section usually has its own front door, and is here considered as the equivalent of a house proper.Google Scholar

9 It is assumed that sets of four or more married brothers would never form two joint households, for there were no actual instances of this.Google Scholar

10 Taking account of the ownership of many types of property, including farmland, livestock, carts, bicycles, wells, etc; of the composition and size of the household, including the number of economically active members; and of other relevant information, such as non-farming occupations—most households, other than those headed by women in which no married couple resided, were classified into four groups, rich (on village standards), medium, poor and very poor. No attempt was made to estimate the total incomes of individual households (unfortunately an altogether too common practice in India) since villagers do not themselves think in terms of such aggregates, since the degree of under-employment of agricultural labourers is unascertainable, and for other compelling reasons.Google Scholar

11 Sonless couples commonly relieve their situation by adopting boys or by incorporating sons-in-law into their households (iltam); occasionally sonless husbands marry a second wife, sometimes polygynously.Google Scholar

12 But much higher than in A. M. Shah's Gujarat village, where there were no such households. The Household Dimension, p. 30.Google Scholar

13 See p. 35 below. The Adi Dravida are a lower caste than the Adi Karnataka, but there were only 18 such households in the six villages, against 135 Adi Karnataka households.Google Scholar

14 The employment of bonded labourers was made illegal in 1975, during the Emergency, the freed labourers being compensated; however, a few of them are now resuming such work and the temporary bonding of boy labourers (the sum borrowed being automatically liquidated by a few years' service) was quite common in some of the Karnataka villages in 1978.Google Scholar

15 This is partly due to the failure of those concerned to register their changes in land-ownership and partly to the deterioration in the standards of record-keeping since the recent replacement of hereditary accountants (shanbhogs) by ill-paid, overworked officials.Google Scholar

16 See Hill, Polly, Rural Hausa (Cambridge University Press, 1970)Google Scholar and Population, Prosperity and Poverty (Cambridge University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

17 Even in rich households all married couples often sleep in the same room, which would be unthinkable in polygynous West Africa where each wife has her own sleeping quarters.Google Scholar

18 See Hobson, Sarah, Family Web (London: Murray, 1978), for an accurate description of the day-to-day life of a single, rich, joint household in Karnataka where (see p. 39) men were apt to beat their brother's wife as well as their own.Google Scholar

19 Thus a son in a joint household in Bangalore city has the right of access to his father's bank statement—a right which is not reciprocated.Google Scholar

20 It happens that there were only 8 Brahmin households in the six villages, 4 of which were headed by ex-shanbhogs.Google Scholar

21 The wealth classification of a potential joint household which is not an actual joint household relates, of course, to the house in which the parents reside.Google Scholar

22 See Shah, , The Household Dimension, p. viii.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., p. 50.

24 The estimated number of living male migrants (exclusive of youths who were temporarily working as bonded labourers and of those who had been adopted elsewhere) was only about 10 per cent of the resident male population of the six villages—despite the proximity of Bangalore city, with its expanding population of nearly 2 million. There was a significant volume of migration into the villages from other rural areas, about 12 per cent of all households being headed by ‘immigrants’—and this despite the fact that Anekal is an exceptionally densely populated Karnataka taluk.Google Scholar