Ground Report

In India the joint family has endured for as long as many records exist.  Even about 1000 BC, in the time of the Mahabharata, the joint family existed more or less as it exists today.A joint family is a group of people who generally live under one roof, who eat food cooked in one kitchen, who hold property in common, participate in common family worship and are related to one another as some particular type of kindred.   The definition of a joint family needs clarification necessitated by the expression “who generally live and eat together”. Those people who subsisted solely by agriculture, did, as a matter of fact, live and eat together; but in the case of others who were engaged in trade or were in the armed forces or civil services, some members of the joint family remained away from home for an indefinite period. A joint family has always an ancestral seat or locality. However humble an Indian might be, he will always refer to his ancestral village as his home.  As all services were paid for in land in ancient days, every Indian had a small family holding in some village— maybe just a strip of land or for an artisan, just a small house.  This connection of a family with a locality lingers even after the family has finally migrated out of its village.  Such families keep on worshipping the gods of their former locality or come back time and again to keep certain vows made to these gods.The kin group making up a joint family is of two types.  In the northern type those men who trace descent from a common male ancestor form the core of the family; with them are associated women who are brought as brides and the young unmarried daughters of the family. Thus there are three or four generations of males related to the male ego as grandfather and his brothers, father and his brothers, own brothers and cousins, sons and nephews and wives of all these male relatives, plus the ego’s unmarried sisters and daughters.The northern type of family is thus patrilineal and patrilocal and the married women in such a family live in the house of their father-in-law (sasural).In Kerala, another kind  of joint family called ‘tharwad’ exits. In relation to the male ego, the members of such a family are: mother and her sisters and brothers, mother and her sisters and brothers, his own brothers and sisters, Mother’s sister’s sons and daughters, and the children of the ego’s sisters. In this family there are no relations by marriage. The married women with their children  live with their mothers. The husbands in this family also live in the house of their own mothers and are only occasional visitors to their wives and children. ‘Tharwad’ is thus  a matrilineal, matrilocal family. Thus a joint family is a community in itself which provides a person with almost all physical and cultural necessities.