Family Studies brings together diverse contributions to focus upon issues central to the conceptualization of families and their implications for Indian society.
Within the social, political, and economic contexts existing in modern-day India, family is neither a simple remnant of tradition nor a domain merely representing insulated private lives. Rather, it is implicated in malleable yet overpowering structures, relationships, and practices. If the 'family' is a crucial site of ideological and imaginative investments playing a critical role in reproducing and defining contemporary selves and societies, 'families' are responsive to and constrained by the complex dynamics in which they are enmeshed. Family relationships remain fundamental to survival and security even as policy and legislative imperatives as well as reproductive and communication technologies play a crucial role in reshaping them. Critically interrogating the extant approaches to and concepts within the study of family, Family Studies brings together diverse contributions by scholars from varied backgrounds to focus upon issues central to the conceptualization of family and their implications for Indian society. The chapters in this volume make a strong case for why family as an ideological construct and families as a multitude of lived relationships should continue to be subjects of critical social scientific attention.
Anuja Agrawal: Introduction
Part I: Critical Reorientations
1: Penny Vera-Sanso: Misconceiving the 'Indian Family': The Politics of
Family-Based Discourse
2: Kumkum Sangari: The Insides and Outsides of Families: Social Reproduction
in Neoliberal Times
Part II Beyond the 'Normative' Family
3: Sylvia Vatuk: 'To Restore the Comforts and Bliss of Married Life':
Restitution of Conjugal Rights in Indian Law and Practice
4: Srimati Basu: Making Families without Wives: Kinship in the Men's Rights
Movement
5: Arijeet Ghosh and Diksha Sanyal: Marital Status Discrimination in India:
Prospects and Possibilities
6: Rama Srinivasan: Familial Crisis and Marriage: The 'Navigational Capacity
for Aspiration'
Part III Trust, Betrayal, and Shifting Relations
7: Parul Bhandari: Locating Friendship in Family: A Study of Indian Elites
8: Soibam Haripriya: Spilt Blood: Kinship and Friendship in a Regime of
Violence
9: Supriya Singh: Household Formation of Indian Migrant Parents in Australia
Part IV New Practices: Familial and Methodological
10: Shriram Venkatraman: Digital Mothering in Middle-Class Families
11: Nidhin Donald: Displaying the 'Family' Online: Reflections on Syrian
Christian Visual Life
12: Suryanandini Narain: 'Seeing' Family through Wedding Albums
Anuja Agrawal is Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. She has also taught at the Lady Shri Ram College for Women and was a Commonwealth Scholar in 2000-01. Agrawal has authored the monograph Chaste Wives and Prostitute Sisters: Patriarchy and Prostitution among the Bedias of India (Routledge, 2008) and edited the volume titled Migrant Women and Work (Sage, 2006). Additionally, she has written and published extensively on a wide range of issues in the fields of family, kinship, marriage, and gender studies. Her research interests also include denotified tribe (DNT) communities, sex work, and migration.
