Changing Family Patterns

The Indian family has always been a subject of great fascination for sociologists and social anthropologists. This fascina­tion owes itself to the emphasis placed in the Indian tradition upon joint family living and the central place accorded to the domestic unit in ritual and religious activities. This book, the second of the three-volume survey of main currents in Indian sociology, brings together contri­butions by Indian and foreign social scie­ntists on the Indian family in the con text of contemporary social changes. The ten papers comprising the book have been arranged in logical order by the editor, but they also fall into a some­what different set of categories according to their contents. Four contributions deal with village life and emphasize the structural interactions within families resident in the villages studied by the authors.