A Study of Families in Contemporary India

Abstract

In this study, family is a text, where I try to read into the institutionalised threads of power that run through it. Within this social process the generality and particularity of family systems emerge simultaneously. I am studying the contemporary middle-class Indian family, in the temporal period of 1990’s to the 2020’s, through a feminist lens. The families I spoke with live in urban as well as rural spaces. Through multiple conversations, what emerges is the varying experiences of change in the post-liberalisation period. The conversation with the women of these families are both a method and a site of ethnography. I navigate the generational changes in these families through the women I converse with. My understanding is thus a mediated one.