THE CHANGING FACE OF THE INDIAN FAMILY

Few scenarios give us quite such an insight into one’s own life changes as when meeting old acquaintances, particularly after the years layer, one  onto the next with each careless rip of the calendar, and memories begin blurring at the edges.  In their excited exclamations and the retelling of their personal histories, one takes a step back in time to that starting point when one had shared a time together. As the conversation becomes more animated you bring out the memories of joy and sorrow from the bundle of one’s personal history, and once again laugh or cry over them, as if they had occurred but yesterday.

This April, on one of those auspicious wedding dates, which announces itself with the sight of caparisoned horses on the streets and endless traffic jams on the arterial roads leading to wedding sites,  I  attended the wedding of someone from my larger kin.  Since it was nearly a quarter of a century since I was meeting this particular set of relatives, I was filled with a delicious sense of anticipation and the desire to see how they had been sculpted by time.

It was, of course, fabulous to meet them. We exchanged hugs, excited this and that’s trying to recall when we had last met while filling the lapse of years with the key events that had marked the passage of time  – a marriage, a mundan  ( hair tonsuring )ceremony, a wedding, an anniversary and so on.

Yet, even as the overflowing joyousness bubbled over, a parallel narrative went into play mode in my mind.  These women and men I was meeting now were of a certain age.  The children of my father’s cousins, they were framed within a certain profile. They belonged to a mofussil India of the 60s and  70’s when the world view was conservative and judgmental. Joint families ruled and women were allotted limited roles which were centred around raising their children and doing the household work.  The families were large, with most of my father's cousins having  5-6 children at the very minimum. There was rampant discrimination in the raising of daughters and sons, and in instances where a family had a lone son amongst  several daughters; the child was terribly spoilt by doting elders  and often grew into a most insufferable adult.  

The destiny of daughters was built on a different plane, pivoted around a unipolar viewpoint, which was to get them married whilst buttressing them with a suitable education and some arty qualifications that would enhance their worth in the marriage market.  In keeping with this single point agenda reserved for their daughters, they were brought up amidst  suffocating sets of do’s and don’ts, restricted movements and few chances if ever, of meeting anyone from the other sex, lest it spoil her precious virginal innocence. And yet if the marriage didn’t work out, which though a rare instance as women were programmed into running the course no matter how unhappy, it was she who lost status and stability. 

One of my father’s  cousins’  daughter,  Preeti went through a typical arranged marriage back in 1971 i.e she was married at 20 years of age, without ever having met her future groom. Within a month of her marriage, she had filed for the annulment of the wedding as he had married under false pretences and was a closet homosexual .  This unwitting karmic twist to her life had unfortunate ramifications. It skewed her life,   blighting forever the carefree soul she once was. After the divorce, she developed a paranoid fear of commitments in a relationship and by extension the institution of marriage, confining herself instead into a righteously promoted seraglio, where she interacted only with women.  However, her educational qualifications, which had been extended to postgraduate level by default, as she was not  getting a groom, helped her to stave off this challenge in her life.  She went to another town for a job in a college,  distancing herself from her own city in Madhya Pradesh , where she had become the unwilling target of people’s misplaced sympathy.

This world of suffocating conformity was further muddied by poor living standards as incomes were earned from the trading business, where the male head kept a tight control expenses, with a particularly hawk eyed vigil on what the women were spending.

Fast forwarding to circa 2017.  The wedding I attended was that of the grand daughter of my father’s cousin, now long deceased . She was  a 30 years old professional who had chosen her own partner. The marriage was being conducted in grand style with a choice of cocktails that these same women now all past their middle age, including Preeti were drinking with a certain abandon, as if embracing  pleasures that had still not lost their novelty. Their daughters and sons were also  introduced. Their lives had a rather disconcerting disconnect with their  mofussil towns, as they had left them behind to move to places like Delhi and Mumbai in pursuit of more lucrative careers , that afforded the opportunity to explore individual  choices.

Their daughters aged between their 20s  and 30s, had become lawyers and engineers. They were confident, experimental and  sure of what they wanted.

Most had found their own partners, and one of them had divorced her spouse,  without fearing the stigma that her own aunt Preeti had battled all her life.

The young men,   around the same ages as the girls, were pursing careers carved by individual choices. Some had gone into businesses, and the corporate world,  while another had chosen the army, but left it , when the battle cry was pitted against a  love for the  preservation of  wildlife.

The lone son Lalit of one of the cousins, born after his three sisters had been spoil thoroughly by his parents as the heir apparent. He grew up to  make a mess of the  business he had inherited, certainly drove his wife to the brink by having several dalliances, and as life moved on and Lalit moved into middle age, his wife seemed to extract sweet revenge by becoming a very successful entrepreneur who opened a Takeaway restaurant in their town in UP. Their  son and daughter have both joined her in the business, where she still hold the reins by putting her own secret masala in the dishes and whose vision and success is recognized by the city’s Rotary club and the hospitality industry as a path finder. 

And so the journey of the generations in my larger kin, juxtaposed against the shifting rewards and challenges of a contemporary India,   continues…..

By  Amita Sahaya