ABSTRACT
To speak of fatherhood in India, as distinct from fatherhood elsewhere, involves the implicit assumption (and admission) that fatherhood can be a cultural construction as much as a biological one. In other words, a man’s fatherhood is not only influenced by his life stage and his uniquely individual life history: It is also shaped by the cultural matrix—family type, cultural norms, values, and ideals of parental behavior—in which fatherhood is embedded. Before I proceed to elaborate on the cultural construction of fatherhood in India and its impact on the developmental fate of sons, let me first note that I am fully aware of the problems in making any generalizations on fatherhood in a society as complex and heterogeneous as India, which has such a welter of distinct regional, linguistic, caste, class, and regional subidentities. Yet there are a number of accounts of childhood in different castes and classes from all over India—anthropological studies of growing up in villages in many parts of the country, sociological studies of childrearing practices in a few towns and cities, clinical case material, regrettably limited to certain classes in the large cities—which lead to the conclusion that certain tentative generalizations on fathers and sons in traditional India, in the sense of describing a dominant mode in a variable range, are indeed possible. Parenthetically, I must also add that in the following observations, “Indian” primarily refers to Hindu India, although, in fact, other religious groups in India have been profoundly influenced by the dominant Hindu culture.
