The joint family was one of the better constituents and binding blocks of Indian society for centuries. Consisting of three or four generations living under one roof, it bonded its constituent families into one larger whole, sustained positive relationships, pooled individual resources into one economic whole.

Socially speaking, perhaps its best characteristic was that it took care of the weaker members of the larger family — the infants, the old, the sick or otherwise disabled, the unemployed, the indigent — and ensured that they too were cared for and lived a dignified life. The importance of this last aspect cannot be overstated, for then there were no government welfare schemes, pensions, hospices or Ayushman Bharat-type protective umbrellas.

Looking back, I feel that my father's generation was perhaps the last joint family generation (he passed on in 2017 at the age of 93). He himself grew up in a sprawling family consisting of his parents, four siblings, innumerable uncles, aunts and their families, and a couple of near-invisible widows. They all lived together in happy chaos in a huge haveli my grandfather had built in his village in Fatehpur district of UP.

God only knows how the family's finances were managed: even a firm of chartered accountants would find it difficult to untangle the various contributions to the family kitty! One word of caution, however: don't for a moment think that it was run on democratic lines — no, sir, it was a patriarchal autocracy, my grandfather's word was law and everyone accepted it because it was a mutually beneficial autocracy. No other system would have worked half as well!

The Indian joint family started fraying, I suspect, in the 1960s and '70s, and it was more or less dead by the late 1990s and early 2000s. I'm sure sociologists have identified the reasons for its gradual demise, but it........

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