The Book

• This volume brings together the seminal contributions of the sociologist Professor A. M. Shah to the study of the household and family in India.
• The Household Dimension of the Family in India (Book One) was widely regarded as a landmark study when it first appeared in 1973.
• It combines micro and macro perspectives, and offers a rigorous critique of the stereotype of the ‘decline’ of the joint family under conditions of industrial modernisation. This book continues to be used as a principal text in many family and kinship courses in sociology departments across the country.
• It is reproduced here with the original foreword by M. N. Srinivas and the original Annotated Bibliography.
• The Family in India: Critical Essays (Book Two), first published in 1998, covers a wide range of theoretical, methodological, substantive and policy issues relating to the family.
• Book Three, titled Essays on the Family and the Elderly, contains three more recent essays, which explore the effects of changes in the family on the elderly; explain the relevance of census data for studies of the household; and comment on the current state of family studies in India from the perspective of the author’s many decades of engagement with the field.
• The Writings of A. M. Shah has a foreword by Professor Patricia Uberoi.