AHMEDABAD, India – In early September, the Indian Supreme Court is expected to rule on a gas-agreement dispute brought forth by India’s third richest industrialist, Anil Ambani—against India’s richest, Ambani’s own brother, Mukesh. The two businessmen now independently run what was once India’s largest industrial conglomerate, Reliance Industries, divided between the quarreling heirs after the death of the family and company patriarch, Dhirubhai Ambani. In a country ostensibly rooted in deep extended-family relations, the partitioning of Reliance and the Ambani family—the brothers now estranged—raises many questions as to the relevance of India’s cultural emphasis on family in a time of industrialization, when individual greed and ambition seem to increasingly trump former fraternal and filial obligations.

The “joint-family home,” often comprising three generations’ worth of fathers, sons, brothers, male cousins, and respective wives and families, is now a fading heirloom of India, as speculative real estate investments and construction booms have led more and more families to forgo this ages-old tradition of living together, called “saath-saath” in Hindi. Likewise, the family business is no longer the only source of livelihood for sons, since alternative opportunities abound. But some attribute even this modern move away from the “family as necessitated for economic stability” mantra to the timeless strain in extended family relations as a whole. The Ambani’s are perhaps not unique in their recent disputes, but only in their press coverage.

In a country with almost a dozen Hindi words for “aunt” or “uncle,” depending on the exact relation, such a modern progression toward family breakdown and divide seems incongruous. But then again, partition in Indian history is a recurrent theme, referenced even in the Sanskrit epic “The Mahabharata,” where dividing the kingdom of Hastinapura among cousin, princely heirs is proposed as an alternative to war (although war inevitably ensues). In 1947, geographic partitioning of the subcontinent, intended to veil cultural-turned-political differences, later became the subtext for South Asia’s modern political narrative.

While these examples serve as “lessons to be learned from” antitheses to the idealized Indian family, they are not just mere aberrations. Bollywood and elders now romanticize a time of close-knit familial relations that seems impossibly forced, even for the olden times. The realities of family rifts are often rewritten in golden age retellings of the joint-family collective memory, or dismissed as the result of wayward relatives and brash younger generations. Surely Dhirubhai Ambani may be rolling over in his grave, but today’s evidence for familial breakdown is rooted in themes of family disputes that are as timeless as “The Mahabharata.” Quarrelling families are not a modern phenomenon in India, but the recent move away from the joint-family arrangement is arguably facilitated by more modern trends—India’s continuing growth and a booming real estate market. These factors are nonetheless coupled with desires for separation that have long existed in many joint families.

However, the cultural entrenching of familial respect does live on in its own modern formulation. Each year, countless Indian-Americans voyage back to the motherland in hopes of preserving the unity of families now separated by oceans. The state of “family” and its importance in India is thus seen in a new and modern light. For immigrants in general, relatives function as a symbol of stability in a foreign land. And undoubtedly, one maintains greater respect for those back home when seeing them requires 10,000 miles of travel. However, emigration, too, is a form of pre-emptive family partitioning, fought out in visas and green cards. And so it seems that—in a country with four times the population of the U.S. in one-third the area—all anyone really wants is space.


Ashin D. Shah ’12, a Crimson photographer, is an applied mathematics and economics concentrator in Pforzheimer House.