Family

The chapter opens with Tiruvalluvar: 'Love and dharma are the flower and fruit of family life.'

Almost all of us live in a family. The family is the most basic and the oldest unit of any society.

In India today there are several kinds of family:

• A joint family has several generations living together: grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, brothers, sisters and cousins.
• A nuclear family is just a couple and their children, and sometimes one parent and children.

When a member of a joint family moves to another city for a job or studies, taking their wife or husband and children along, a new nuclear family begins.

Here is something you notice only if you know two languages. English has few words for family relationships, but Indian languages have many more. Hindi, for example, has bua, tau, tai, chacha, mausi, nana, nani and more. English says 'uncle' for four quite different people; Hindi does not: a tau is your father's elder brother, a chacha his younger brother. Some languages, such as Tamil, also have different words for elder and younger brother or sister.

But what is the word for 'cousin' in an Indian language? In most Indian languages there is no such word! That is because cousins are simply 'brothers' and 'sisters'. Nobody introduces their chacha's son as 'my uncle's son'; they say 'my elder brother'. This shows the deep bonds among all the children in a family. A missing word tells you as much as a word that exists.

Notice how often one word in your mother tongue needs several words in English to say it exactly. चाचा (chacha) takes five: father's younger brother (uncle).