This is the first of the three-part analysis of the changing dynamics of Indian family system and values by a former Social Editor of India's leading financial daily.

Social values are the legacy of a shared way of living and thinking in a community. These are passed on from generation to generation. Have these values in their journey from generation to generation hit a hump in this century, especially in the last two decades?

 If so, which roadblocks are where these truckloads of values turn turtle?

As someone born in the mid-60s in a Nair household in Kerala, I write from that limited perspective using some of my experiences to understand the changes. 

The hierarchy of age and status in the joint family:

The family elder was supreme a century ago. Not anymore.

The elders in the family stood on a pedestal of power in my parents’ generation in my state of Kerala. It would be the matriarch or the eldest maternal uncle who called the shots in a Nair household a century ago. Their word was law. They often turned tyrannical and even exploitative of their siblings and their children in the joint family setup.

Those were the circumstances when my parents were growing up. But I was born into a nuclear family and never had to be in a joint family. I was the main subject of my doting parents' attention. I was also privileged to have a mother who was a housewife; she spent all day with her children, playing with them, and cooking for them. Parents were benevolent 24X7 caregivers. And their word did count a lot. Defiance was uncommon but there was no fear in the household.

A happy Indian joint family as shown in the Indian Hindi films

Then came my children three decades ago. Both my husband and I were forever at work away from the house.  The mother was replaced by the full-time maid. When the kids got lucky their grandparents spent some time with them.  But with the smartphone and laptop generation that came a decade later, guilt-ridden parents like me tried to substitute our time and presence with toys, and other material objects which can be purchased with money. As mobiles and laptops were introduced into our lives and their potential for damage and addiction was yet unknown, they looked like convenient tools to engage children.

As the children grew up, they found solace in inanimate things like laptops, video games, hobbies like sports, and music, and some human resources like friends, servants, and tutors.  Counselors and therapists became an integral part of the lives of many kids in the last decade.

Parents recognised the fact that they can’t be there for their children and in the last two decades they have been looking for healthy substitutes in the form of boarding schools. Admissions in boarding schools in the country and schools offering away-from-home study experience are rising. Currently, there are 45,369 boarding schools in India as per Central Government data of the UDISE. About 30 years ago the number hadn’t touched five digits.

Cultural Erosion and Rootlessness:

Another thing that happened in the last three decades is the total separation of the new generation from their cultural roots especially if they were a second generation of interstate migrants. I’m the first generation born to interstate urban migrants from Kerala growing up in different parts of India. My children are the second generation. In between the two generations, I and my children have lost our native culture, language, traditions, festivals, songs, and even family relationships outside the nuclear family.  And of course, they have lost us.

 Courtship and Marriage 

The second roadblock encountered by family values is in the matter of courtship and marriage.

The growing trend of Indian nuclear family

Growing up in the 1960s, my mother and her sisters were married to people selected by parents and elders. Some were married to their cousins as was the practice. The girls (and boys) married without any fuss.

So, my parents also had an arranged marriage. Growing up in the '70s and '80s, I was still under the influence of the then-trending belief system that said that people once they are born, go to school, and college, get jobs, and marry and bear children. That was reinforced through the most popular source of entertainment cinema and the film songs on All India Radio which painted rosy and romantic pictures of love after marriage around the clock. There could be love before marriage too but marriage was invariable in any case.

Many of my classmates in college dropped out to get married. However, the majority of them married after their education, and some like me, after getting jobs. I dreaded entering an unknown territory unarmed with a job.

Divorces: Since dating and mixing with the opposite sex was still taboo in my youth, there was a lot of buzz around marriage, wedding saris, and the parlour visit on the wedding day, (For people like me, that was the only time I was visiting a parlour!) photo shoots, marriage video cassettes… (CDs were yet to come).

Unfortunately, many of these marriages did not end happily and Kerala has been recording a high incidence of divorce in the past few decades.

Music composer A R Rahman and his wife Saira Banu who are ending their 29-year marraige

Marriages started falling from their pedestals of romantic fantasy like nine pins and shattering into pieces. In 2006 about 8000 divorce applications were filed in the family courts of Kerala. In 2015 it increased to 44000!

Across the country, 13 out of 1000 marriages end in divorce within ten years. The rates are higher in love marriages, in urban areas and southern states. Maharashtra with an 18 percent divorce rate has the highest incidence while Kerala with 6 percent is a safer haven for the institution of marriage than many other states as per these numbers. But India's divorce rate is one percent. (The one percent looks less but given the Indian demography it is huge enough to make Marriage jittery.)

Divorces were looked down upon in the 80s. Second marriages especially if it is a love marriage carry a stigma.

I recall sessions with a psychiatrist after I decided to seek a divorce a few years after my marriage. Every kind of pressure was placed on me to retract my decision.

Courtship, dating: No one dated a few decades ago unless they were absolutely without "family values or “morals” in those days.  When people fell in love, they rarely expressed their feelings. And if they happened to express themselves, meeting each other was looked down upon…It had to be conducted in utmost secrecy.

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If someone had a love marriage, it was not seen as a respectful thing. If there was an inter-caste or inter-religious wedding, then the couple faced rejection and disapproval from their families faced social disapproval even in the 70s and early 80s. (To be continued: Part 2: Modern Marriages)