narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

instance, Modi (2002) in her research on love marriage in Delhi notes that although
love-marriage couples dramatically redefine the parameters of ‘Indian’ morality and
‘Indian’ marriage, they do not do this by inhabiting a different social or moral platform
from other young people having arranged marriages. They rarely openly rebel or pit the
legitimating power of the court against that of their families, but rather seek to transform
their own relationship and try to re-inscribe them within the terms which they hope are
acceptable to the wider society. In cases when they fail to portray their love as love-cum
arranged marriage they justify their relationship by claiming their love to be spiritual and
pure. They often allude to the imagery of religious devotion against the social
opprobrium cast upon the popular connection of sexuality and desire with love marriage.
Although there has been a growing trend of an individualist and an industrialist way of
life splitting the joint family into the smaller nuclear setting, the influence of functional
jointness does have a hold over individual decisions, in addition to the broader
community pressure. Indian scholars on kinship and family like Madan (1976) and Desai
(1955) argue that the assertion that industrialization and urbanization will alter traditional
family institutions, is simplistically based on what are believed to have been the
consequences of these processes in the West, for instance, as asserted by Goode
(1963).
Although there is evidence of large families shrinking under the forces of higher
education and occupational mobility, consequent geographical mobility and neolocal
residence patterns (Vatuk, 1972; Madan, 1993: 431), a necessary distinction must be
made between complexity and largeness, between simplicity and smallness of the
family. Desai (1955) was the first sociologist to point out that numerical size gives us no
65