March 22, 1999

It's choice not genes that makes the New Indian Family. Friends now do what family did once: they cook together and even buy property together. In tragedy or in celebration they become an inevitable social support system. Like a traditional family, the peer group here plays career counsellor. It's even spawning its own customs, rituals and value system.

By Madhu Jain

Harish Kumar and Jeanine live in Dubai and have been seeing each other for some time. When things got serious between them this winter, Kumar, 31, a nightclub manager, e-mailed his gang of friends scattered over four continents, telling them about it. "Welcome to the Byaand," most replied: it was a word coined when the core group was in college in Bangalore during the mid-'80s. Jeanine will, with a little trepidation, meet the clan in December when all of them assemble in Goa to usher in the new millennium. Please note, there won't be any blood relatives present for this momentous event.

A smaller group of five members -- comprising two couples and a bachelor -- of this larger family of 17 lives in Delhi. Says Salil Kumar, 31, a chartered accountant and group member: "We look at each other as a support group." Salil has almost a hundred second cousins in the city but he doesn't meet them. "I would rather spend my time with these friends who are my family. Our silences are comfortable, the bonds are tested and we know each other's habits. This is the comfort zone. If you want to be left alone, you are."

Welcome to the New Indian Family. It's family by choice. Not genes. The friends-as-family seems to be replacing the traditional family. Siblings are becoming like cousins. Cousins like strangers. And strangers like family. Blood is no longer always thicker than water.

Take the Aligan family, as this group of eight families call themselves. They live in a building called Aligan in Calcutta's Salt Lake. They had pooled in for the land and constructed the building together in 1985. It all started with a group of four college mates. They began their careers, got married and then enlarged their core group with four couples drawn from acquaintances and business partners at the workplace.

The Aligan family functions as a joint family: all the rites of passage from birth and marriage to death are a New Family affair. As are the rituals. They celebrate festivals as a joint family would: there's a traditional division of labour. And when somebody dies, the rest rush in to fill the vacuum. As happened a month ago when Babli Pal, who had a kidney ailment, died. Piku, her 10-year-old son, is now being brought up by all the families in the entire building. While Gopa Misra and Kum Kum Roy get him ready for school, young Roshni Misra or Tubli Roy make sure he returns home in time from school and play. They sit with him each evening while he studies.

It was all so natural: "The families spontaneously came forward to help out and the building fell into a pattern around Piku's activities," says Sisir Misra, an Aligan family-member. In fact, when Babli's sister could not go to Vellore last month where Babli was being treated, Gopa stepped in: she was by her side until she died. The sister couldn't make it.

The bonds of friendship can at times also be stronger than family ties. As happened when Rajan Chopra's father died. Four of his friends from his days in the School of Architecture, Ahmedabad, camped in Delhi for a month. They took charge of the final rites and helped their friend cope with the tragedy. And in offices down and across the country colleagues are increasingly stepping in during moments of crisis: donating or arranging blood and helping out with the Kafkaesque dealings with hospital authorities. Just as the family would have once done. But today: cousins go missing. Siblings are elsewhere or have unobliging spouses. Time, increasingly, is money for the blood family.

The New Family is the latest stage in the mutating process of kinship. The tribe or clan was the original family which evolved (devolved may be a better word) into the sub-group of the joint family, explains Mumbai-based psychoanalyst Udayan Patel who recently worked on group behaviour. The identity of the joint family was fiercely protected, just as that of the tribe was earlier. A major badge of identity was the food: you ate what the larger clan did, taking along the gastronomical habits wherever you went. Individuals who moved away also carried with them the baggage of the rituals and customs of the larger family.

Family was a need. It was a kind of cordon sanitaire: this side of the hearth was safe as you huddled together against any of the threatening elements outside. The joint family took in the weak and the strong, single women and single men, the needy and the marginal -- like a good nanny welfare state.

The traditional, rooted family hasn't disappeared from small-town India and persists in pockets of urban India. But the mobile, global family has grown in numbers and created a need for the New Family. The joint family fragmented into the extended and nuclear family, which in turn, has become more amorphous as people move to bigger cities or overseas in search of a better life. Unmoored, they now look for new moorings and new families. Ironically, the looser nuclear family is not family enough for many. Couples and even small nuclear families need to bond elsewhere. There is a basic need for "unequal exchanges" in relationships and marriages, which, as social anthropologist Dipankar Gupta of Delhi's Jawaharal Nehru University explains, modern marriages no longer provide. Couples today have more equal relationships and not what anthropologists label as "generalised equation" (GE) where one person is expected to do more than the other. Earlier, they were unequal. Today's scenario as Gupta puts it is: "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday I cook. Thursday, Friday, Saturday you cook and Sundays we go out for pizza. Or I cook, you clean up." Like a barter. It tends to be increasingly a relationship or marriage built on equality and respect, with no "balance left over". So now you work for this GE outside. You can't always live on the edge, you need psychological support. There's tension in equality.

So, couples need couples.

They distance themselves from their biological families but end up forming new ones: the family instinct is still strong in India unlike western societies. "Assimilating family to friends and friends to family is a very Indian habit," explains sociologist Patricia Uberoi of the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, adding "Friendship has to have a kinship idiom." Vasantha Patri, head of the department of psychology at Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi and a practising therapist, says that there is a big need for belonging and sharing in Asian society. "People don't want to be individuals even when they are. When on holidays, they want to go to somebody's house and just hang about or watch TV," adds Patri. So they substitute family for, well, family. "It's home," says Amita Goel, who works in a publishing house, about the residence of her colleague, Sunanda Ghosh, in Delhi's Hauz Khas locality. "You can drop in anytime and just be."

Friends-as-family is a city thing. The new family cannot survive in small-town India because the family influence is all pervasive. "There is freedom in friendship and friendship itself has become so intimate that the boundaries between friends and family have disappeared," explains Patel. Today's premium on individuality loosens familial bonds while firming those between people with similar tastes and personalities. Individual preferences and desires have normally been suppressed within the extended family. Nandini Sachdeva, 45, a social activist, says that she has really existed on her family of friends."In my own family I could not be me. With friends I can. My inner self is being nurtured."

Family has become a bad word in the lexicon of many. "Expectations from and rivalry among family members is responsible for people moving away from the family," says Patri. In joint families they had to swallow their differences and live together. But equations are easier in this family: siblings don't carry the extra baggage of filial relations. Also, differences over family business or property can transform siblings or even parents and children into enemies. "Sharing is not conducive for friendship, nor is competition," Patri adds. Property disputes are largely responsible for the unmaking of a blood family. But in the new family, there is nothing concrete to fight over: "We are the property," says Rahul Verma, 42, a trade-unionist and feature-writer.

On the other hand, the new family has begun to buy property together. The Aligan building family may be somewhat exceptional. But there are many groups of friends who have built second homes or bought land together. A group of five couples -- including novelist Arundhati Roy and her husband Pradeep Krishen -- have built houses next to each other in Pachmarhi, Madhya Pradesh.

Says Dr Rajesh Parikh, a neuro-psychiatrist: "There is an urban need to manufacture extended families." When he and his wife Phiruza -- both work at Mumbai's Jaslok Hospital -- are away on work, a number of friends take turns to move into their apartment and look after their three children. Their home is a welcoming nest for many unmarried girls and boys in the city.

"You need the support systems that friends provide because we don't have creches or old homes," says Amrit Srinivasan, a Delhi-based sociologist. Indians have to create their own social security net when the real family is no longer able to do so. "You need the structure of protection and confidence building," Srinivasan adds, explaining that women in some feminist groups even tie rakhis on each other.

Also, with incidents of divorce increasing exponentially, there is far more single parenting. For Rajni Gandhi, 37, who works in advertising, her friends are her safety net, her saviours. "They pick up the pieces which a family can't do. My family can only pick up the physical pieces, not the emotional ones." The real family also tends to be judgemental and apportions blame. Friends, on the other hand, are less likely to say: "I told you so." Family would. Family would also tend to discriminate against the girl child and women. Education and the work experience of professional women can alter personalities, making it impossible for them to fit into the stereotypical roles of the traditional family in which "brother" always knows best.

The notion of friendship is translating into family in different age groups. The post-Independence Indian is now making his new family through work, friendship and common hobbies. More disposable incomes are the glue for the new pre-middle-aged and middle-aged family. Groups of families can now afford to go out together: for meals, movies or picnics, even on pilgrimages, like the Aligan clan which has gone to Amarnath and Badrinath together. Some women even plan their babies together so that they can continue to go together on their holidays. Take this group of 30-somethings who are determinedly moving up career ladders. Two of the women will have their babies at roughly the same time later this year. The family members also track each other's careers and help devise future moves on the chessboard of their professional lives. Just as a patriarch would do in a joint family.

It's not only the young who need to form new families. The emergence of the empty nest has fostered the need for the middle-aged and the elderly to seek new groupings. When K. Narayan retired as director of the Kaiga Nuclear Power Project in the north Karnataka town of Kaiga, three years ago he found Bangalore was no longer a pensioner's paradise. People were busy. Relatives were hard to find. His children were in the US and couples like the Narayans had to make do with watching videos of their children in New Jersey or Rotterdam or London. And that's how India's first Non-Resident Indian Parents Association (NRIPA) came into being in Bangalore last year. It now has 180 members: average age, 65 plus. They meet every month in one another's homes and provide each other with emotional and practical support. Andal Ram, 61, NRIPA member, feels her life has changed after the association was formed. "Now I know that there are so many parents like me who don't have to live with an empty nest syndrome anymore. We have so much to do and feel we are younger by the day," she says.

Members of the New Indian Family still want the rituals of the family and seek it in friendship. Ironically, in rituals which bind. The informal becomes formal. Verma had casually started throwing a large new year's party: for the last ten years members of the core family and the larger family have flocked here. There's no question of going anywhere else. Similarly, Raj Chohan, a Customs clearing agent and a member of the Verma "family" has an annual sarson ka saag dinner. So and so's birthday is celebrated in so and so's house without fail. And the Verma wedding anniversary has become another annual event.

But there is a flipside to the New Indian Family of friends. Often, they merely exchange one umbilical cord for another. And as happens with traditional families, this one too can get claustrophobic. A patriarch or matriarch inevitably emerges. And when one of the clan falls in love, the others tend to get possessive, reacting much the same way a joint family would, to a new daughter-in-law. They close ranks. And again, like a traditional family, each new entrant has a settling-in period. Gradually, even this family begins to have its secrets which they keep from each other.

Or in other words, the family is dead, long live the family.

-with Labonita Ghosh and Stephen David

© Living Media India Ltd