Class 6 Social Science Chapter 9: Family and Community

The oldest unit there is

Nearly everybody belongs to one, which is exactly why it is easy to overlook. But consider what the chapter claims for it. The family is the fundamental unit of any society, and it is also the most ancient unit any society has. Older than villages, older than cities, older than any government: this arrangement came first.

Several types at once

Indian society today does not have one kind of family. It has several, running from joint families at one end to nuclear families at the other. Both are common, and the difference between them is worth getting exactly right, because it is not about how many people live in the house.

The joint family

A joint family is one in which several generations live together. Set out in full, that can mean grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, and brothers, sisters and cousins, all under a single roof. The word joint points at what is joined: not just people, but generations, sharing one household.

The nuclear family

A nuclear family is limited to a couple together with their children. Sometimes it is smaller than that. One parent living with the children counts as nuclear too. So the test is not the number of people. A large family of one couple with six children is still nuclear.

A question of words

Now to something unexpected. English does not have many terms for describing family relationships. Grandparent, parent, uncle, aunt, brother, sister, cousin: that list is close to complete, and each of those words covers a great deal of ground.

Indian languages have many more

Indian languages are far richer here. Hindi alone offers bua, tau, tai, chacha, mausi, nana and nani, and that is nowhere near the end of the list. Each of those words picks out one relationship precisely, where English would need a phrase to do the same job.

Elder and younger, kept apart

Some languages divide even further. Tamil, among others, has different terms for an elder brother and a younger brother, and the same distinction for sisters. English does not mark this at all. A speaker of English must add a word to say which is meant; a speaker of Tamil cannot avoid saying it.

The word that is missing

Here is the sharpest example, and it runs the other way. Try to name a cousin in an Indian language. Hunt as you like: in most of them, no such word exists. The word simply is not there.

Why it is missing

That absence is not a gap in the vocabulary. It follows from how the relationship is understood. In those languages, cousins are only brothers and sisters. There is nothing else to call them, because they are not thought of as a separate category of relative in the first place.

What the missing word tells us

So a language with fewer words can be saying more. The absence of a word for cousin says how closely every child of a family is tied to the others. Everyone of that generation is a brother or a sister, and the language will not let you say otherwise.

One word, several

The same point shows up when you try to translate. Quite often, one word in a mother tongue can take a whole phrase of English before it is pinned down exactly. Chacha does not mean uncle; it means a father's younger brother, which English can only reach by spelling it out.

Try it on your own family

This is easy to test. Make a list of the members of your family, including a few distant relatives. Write down the term you use in your mother tongue, and then try to find the English equivalent. You will find some terms take one word on one side of the page and five on the other.

What the comparison shows

None of this makes one language better than another. What it shows is that a language keeps careful words for the things its speakers think about carefully. Where Indian languages divide relationships finely, they are marking distinctions that matter. Where they refuse to divide, as with cousins, that refusal matters too.

Scenario:

A class is asked to draw its families and label the type. Most write joint or nuclear quickly. Then three children cannot choose. One lives with a parent and a grandparent but not with uncles. Another's cousins stay for half the year. Their teacher asks whether the two words are enough. The class decides they are a starting point rather than a complete set, because a family is a living arrangement that changes as people move, marry and grow older. Nita writes the conclusion. The labels describe common shapes, and a family that fits neither label is not unusual, only less common.

Analysis:

Two labels and three families that will not sit in either. The words describe frequent shapes, not every shape a household can take.

Activity:

Draw your household and label who lives there. Write one sentence on which type it is closest to and why it is not exact.

Title:

Two columns for your own family

What You Notice:

The underlined rows are usually the majority, and the cousin count is the surprise. Most people find they have no single word for those relatives at all, because they call every one of them a brother or a sister. The last step catches people out too: many decide by counting heads before remembering that the test is generations.

Most Indian languages have no word at all for cousin. The gap is not an accident; it says something about how the family is understood.

Tamil, among other languages, keeps separate words for an elder brother and a younger brother, and the same for sisters.

A single word in a regional language often needs several English words to pin down. Chacha is a father's younger brother, not simply an uncle.

Joint or nuclear — Count the generations, not the people — A joint family holds several generations together. A nuclear one holds a couple together with their children, or one parent with them. Size alone will not tell you which is which.

Why the word is missing — No cousins, only brothers and sisters — Most Indian languages have no word for cousin because the relationship is not marked off. Every child of that generation is a brother or a sister.

What relationships rest on

Start with what holds a family together. The chapter names four things: love, care, cooperation and interdependence. The first two are expected. The second two are worth pausing over, because they are doing more work than they look as though they are.

Cooperation

Cooperation is a long word for a short idea. It means working together, and nothing more complicated. In a household that covers everything from cooking a meal to clearing up after it. Notice that it is not a feeling, as love and care are. It is something people do.

Interdependence

The fourth word is the strongest. Interdependence means that members of a family rely on one another, and that the reliance goes both ways. Nobody in a household is only a giver, and nobody is only a receiver. Everybody is some of each, which is why families hold together at all.

Roles and responsibilities

From those four things follows a claim about every member. Everyone in the family has a part to play, and owes something to the rest. That is not restricted to the adults. The word each is doing the work in that sentence, and it covers the youngest person in the house.

What parents are responsible for

Take parents first, since their part is clearest. They are responsible for raising their children. The goal has two halves, and both are named: to become happy individuals, and to become responsible members of society. A child brought up well is expected to be both.

And then it changes

But responsibility does not stay where it starts. As a child grows older, more of the household work comes their way, and so help the rest of the family. That may be a parent, or a sister, or a brother. The direction of help, which began flowing one way, gradually starts flowing back.

Learning by doing

How does a child learn all this? Not by being told. Through daily practice, children come to take part in the life of the household. Practice here means the ordinary repeated business of living together, and it teaches by repetition rather than by instruction.

Traditions passed along

Something else travels the same way. In many homes, children also learn traditions and practices the family has kept up across generations. Nobody sits down to teach these either. They are absorbed from watching them done, year after year, by the people around.

Dharma, as duty

Behind all of this sits a principle. Following our dharma, which means doing our duty, has long counted as a central principle in Indian culture for a very long time. In a household it takes a plain form: each member acting on what they owe the others, without waiting to be asked.

The family as a school

The chapter then makes a striking comparison. The family, it says, is also a school. That is not a figure of speech about homework. It is a claim about where children first learn important values, and it names four of them in particular.

Ahimsa and dāna

The first is ahimsa, which you met in an earlier chapter as non-hurting. A household is usually where a person first learns it, in the small form of not hurting a brother or a sister. The second is dāna, which means giving. Both are learned by being practised, not by being defined.

Sevā and tyāga

The third is sevā, meaning service, which is work done for others rather than for oneself. The fourth is tyāga, meaning sacrifice, and it is the hardest of the four. Tyāga means giving up something you wanted, because somebody else needs it more.

Giving up, in practice

The chapter puts tyāga in ordinary terms. Individuals in a family often set aside their own needs so that the family's needs are met. Said like that it sounds heavy. In practice it usually looks small: one person going without something, so that another person does not have to.

Why this matters for the next topic

These ideas can stay abstract, which is why the chapter does not leave them abstract. It follows them with two stories of real families, one in Kerala and one in Meghalaya. Read those with this topic's four values in mind, and you will find each of them somewhere in the story.

Scenario:

A class lists the jobs done in their homes in one week and who does each. The list runs long, and a pattern appears: a few people do most of the items. Rohit says the work looks unfair. Their teacher asks the class to add a second column for how long each job takes. Cooking and cleaning turn out to take hours and the visible jobs minutes. The class sees that counting tasks hid the imbalance rather than showing it. Sana writes what cooperation would actually mean here. Not everybody doing one job each, but the hours being shared as well as the items.

Analysis:

Counting tasks made the load look nearly even. Adding time is what made the imbalance visible, because an item and an hour are not the same unit.

Activity:

List a week of jobs in your home with who does each and how long it takes. Total the hours per person.

Title:

Who does what in your home

What You Notice:

The I column is nearly always longer than the C column, which is the point about interdependence: most of what holds a household together is not people working side by side, but people relying on work somebody else did earlier. The last step usually turns up a small piece of tyāga that nobody in the house has thought worth mentioning.

The chapter calls the family a school. Nothing is taught in lessons there; values are picked up through daily practice.

Responsibility in a family runs in both directions. Parents raise children, and as children grow they take on more of the household's work.

In many homes children also learn traditions and practices the family has kept up across generations.

What holds a family together — Love, care, cooperation, interdependence — Four words, and the last two are the ones people forget. Cooperation is working together; interdependence means each member relies on the others.

The four values — Ahimsa, dāna, sevā, tyāga — Do not hurt; give; serve; give up. Each has an English gloss worth learning beside it, because questions may use either the Sanskrit term or the English one.

Two households, on purpose

The chapter now stops explaining and starts describing. It gives two families, one in Kerala and one in Meghalaya, and lets them make their point by example. Read them beside the values from the last topic and you will see those values in ordinary clothes.

Who lives in Shalini's house

Shalini's household has seven people in it. Her father, who runs a small business, and her mother, who teaches at a school nearby. Her younger brother. And three more: her grandmother, her father's younger brother, and his wife. Their daughter makes seven.

The names she uses

Shalini calls her grandmother Acchamma. Her uncle is Chittappa, and his wife is Chitti. Their daughter Chinni is Shalini's cousin. Notice that Malayalam, like Hindi and Tamil, has its own precise words for each of these relationships.

Something is wrong

Her uncle lost his job only recently, and her aunt keeps the home, so no money is coming in from that side of the house. The family does not announce this. Acchamma tells Shalini's father quietly that his brother is having financial difficulties.

Onam was coming, and preparations were under way. New clothes for the festival are part of it, and Shalini had a particular dress in mind, a silk one. Because of the difficulty, her uncle's family had not been able to buy new clothes at all.

The shopping trip

Then Shalini's parents took the two children out shopping. They bought clothes, but not only for themselves. They bought clothes for Chittappa, for Chitti and for Chinni too, out of the same money they had set aside.

What that meant for Shalini

The money did not stretch as far as it would have done. The silk dress Shalini had counted on did not arrive. She settled for a simple cotton one instead, and the chapter is careful to record what she felt about it.

She did not mind

Acchamma explained to her that this is how families stand by one another and share whatever they have. And Shalini did not mind. She was happy that everybody in the house could have new clothes for the festival, not only some.

Look at what happened there

That is tyāga, without the word being used. Shalini gave up something she wanted because somebody else needed something more. It is also dāna, giving. And the whole decision rests on interdependence: one part of the house struggling is the whole house's business.

Now Meghalaya

Tenzing lives in Meghalaya and loves the mountains around him, though life there is sometimes hard. His father runs a small grocery store. His mother has recently become busy with something new.

The cooperative

She joined a local handicraft cooperative, where she makes traditional fabrics, wood carvings and other items. These are sold to tourists. It is real work, and it takes up time she used to spend at home.

Who picks up the rest

Here is the interesting part. His father joined in the housework. He cleans the house, takes care of the small vegetable garden and does other chores. He often helps Tenzing's grandmother prepare the food as well.

Why that detail matters

Nothing forced this. The work had to be done, circumstances changed, and the work moved. Roles inside a family are not fixed labels attached to particular people. They are arrangements, and arrangements can be redrawn when they need to be.

The grandparents at home

Tenzing's grandmother has interesting stories, told with humour and wisdom. The chapter adds that she understands people. That is not a small thing to have in a house, and it is the kind of contribution nobody puts on a list.

His grandfather helps him with his homework and takes him to the school bus stop. Both are daily, unglamorous and dependable. This is what interdependence looks like on an ordinary morning.

The grandfather outside

He takes a real part in social work around the colony, and is always ready to help. If the power fails he goes and lodges a complaint at the office nearby. When a neighbour's house was damaged in a storm, he collected money from the whole neighbourhood for the repairs.

Money, handled together

Tenzing's parents take care of basic necessities such as food and clothing. For special expenses they do something worth noticing: they discuss them together. And his mother has a rule, which is to always keep some money saved for unexpected needs in the future.

The bridge to what comes next

Notice where the grandfather's story has taken us. Collecting money from the whole neighbourhood is no longer about one family. It reaches past the front door, which is exactly where the chapter goes next.

Scenario:

Meera's household in Nagpur has six people. There are her parents, her grandfather, her father's sister, her small brother and herself. Her father's sister has been ill for two months. She cannot go to her job at a tailoring unit. Diwali is three weeks away. The family had been saving for a scooter that Meera's father needs for his work. At a Sunday meal her grandfather says the medicines must come first. He then asks the others what they think. Meera's mother suggests a smaller list of festival purchases. Meera had been promised a bicycle. She says nothing for a while. Then she says the scooter matters more, because her father earns with it. By the end of the meal the family has agreed. Medicines first, the scooter next, a shorter festival list, and the bicycle next year.

Analysis:

Three things from this chapter show at once. Interdependence, because one member's illness has reshaped what everybody else can spend. Tyaga, because Meera sets aside something she was promised. The need she gives way to is larger than her own. And the practice from Tenzing's family of discussing special expenses together. One person does not decide alone, which is how the shorter festival list was agreed.

Activity:

Draw a chart of Meera's six members. Beside each write what they gave up or took on. Then write one sentence saying which contribution would be easiest to overlook, and why.

Acchamma is the Malayalam word Shalini uses for her father's mother. Chittappa is her father's younger brother and Chitti is his wife.

Tenzing's mother makes traditional fabrics and wood carvings at the cooperative, and these are sold to tourists visiting Meghalaya.

When a storm damaged a neighbour's house, Tenzing's grandfather collected money from the whole neighbourhood for the repairs.

Shalini's household — Seven under one roof — Shalini, her parents, her younger brother, Acchamma, Chittappa, Chitti and Chinni. Count them and you have a joint family in one line.

Two families, two lessons — Kerala shares; Meghalaya reshuffles — Shalini's story is about sharing what the family has. Tenzing's is about work moving from one member to another when circumstances change.

Out through the front door

The last topic ended with a grandfather collecting money from a whole neighbourhood. That act belongs to nobody's family in particular. Families, the chapter now says, are connected not only within themselves but with other families and with the people around them.

A name for that group

Such a set of connected people is what we may call a community. Hold on to the word may, because the chapter is honest about it. The term has other meanings too, depending on the context, and the last topic in this chapter comes back to that.

Why people come together

Start with the pleasant reasons. Members of a community come together for celebrations. They celebrate festivals, and they organise feasts, weddings and other events. None of these could be done by one household alone, which is part of the point.

And for work

In some villages the coming together is about work. People support each other with agricultural practices: preparing the land, sowing, and then harvesting. These are jobs with a deadline attached, and many hands finish them inside the season.

Something older and larger

But the chapter has a deeper point to make. Over time, communities settled on agreed ways of using the natural wealth they held in common. The examples given are water, grazing lands and forest produce. All three are things nobody made and everybody needs.

Not written down

We may call these practices rules, though the chapter is careful here. They are rarely written down. There is no register, no signature and no office. The community keeps them because the community keeps them.

What the practices give

Such practices have given communities secure access to their resources. That word secure is doing real work. It means a family can count on the water and the grazing land being there for them next season, and the season after that.

And what they demand

Here is the other half, and it is the half people forget. It also lays a particular duty on every family and every person in the community. Without them, a community does not run smoothly. Access on one side, duty on the other.

The point about duties

This mirrors the family exactly. Each member of a household has a role and a responsibility, and now each family in a community has the same. The scale has changed; the structure has not. And the previous topic's dharma applies here too.

Jhabua, and no water

Now an example from Madhya Pradesh. The area around Jhabua faced an acute water crisis, year after year. It was not one bad season. It was a repeated failure, which is a harder kind of problem to solve.

Halma

The Bhil community there has a tradition called halma. Under it, people gather to stand by any individual or family in a time of crisis. It is not a new scheme. It is an inherited practice, and they applied it to the water.

What they did

The Bhil community planted thousands of trees across hundreds of villages. They cut trench after trench to hold the rainwater, and built other structures to harvest it. Read those numbers again. Thousands of trees, hundreds of villages.

Nobody was paid

This is the detail that matters most. They were not paid for any of it. They did it as a duty towards their community and towards the environment. In halma, the chapter says, the objective is to serve Mother Earth.

Recognition

The work has been noticed. The Padma Shri went in 2019 to Shri Mahesh Sharma, of the Shivganga movement, for work that transformed life among the Bhil communities. The award marks a movement rather than a single act.

Chennai, 2015

The second example is a city in a sudden crisis. In 2015 Chennai flooded. Roads turned into rivers and people could not move about at all. Almost all the shops closed, and services were interrupted.

Who fed the city

Many private groups stepped in, especially spiritual and religious bodies. They cooked food in large quantities and distributed it to those who needed it. Nobody was obliged to do this, and there are many more examples of people coming together for a community's benefit without expecting anything in return.

Scenario:

A class is asked where its community ends. Some say the street, some the colony, some the town. Their teacher asks each child to name one thing their community does together. The answers differ by scale: a shared water tap serves a few houses, a festival fills a colony, and a hospital serves a whole town. The class sees that there is no single boundary. A community is a set of connected people, and the size depends on what is being shared. Imran writes it down. He belongs to several communities at once, each drawn by a different thing people do together.

Analysis:

The disagreement about boundaries dissolves once the question changes. A community is defined by what is shared, so one person belongs to several at once.

Activity:

Name three communities you belong to. For each, write what is shared and roughly how many people it covers.

Title:

Find the unwritten rules

What You Notice:

Almost everything on the list turns out to be unwritten, and yet people follow it closely, which is exactly the chapter's point about practices that are rarely recorded. The last step is the sharpest: as soon as you describe what would go wrong, the duty half of the arrangement becomes visible, and so does why the community needs it kept.

Safety:

Ask an adult before speaking to neighbours, and do not enter any shared space you would not normally use.

The rules for shared resources are rarely written down anywhere. They work because the community keeps them, not because a document records them.

The Padma Shri came in 2019 to Shri Mahesh Sharma of the Shivganga movement, for work that transformed life among the Bhil communities.

During the Chennai floods of 2015 many private groups, especially spiritual and religious bodies, cooked and distributed food at large scale.

Two halves of a shared resource — Access, and duty — Agreed practices give families secure access to water, grazing land and forest produce. The same practices give each of them specific duties. You never get one half without the other.

Halma — Nobody was paid — The Bhil volunteers planted trees and dug trenches as a duty towards the community and the environment, not for wages. That is the detail to keep.

Community in a city

Everything in the last topic came from villages and tribal areas. But community is present in an urban context too, the chapter says, though it may function a little differently there. The example it gives is one man in Ahmedabad.

Kamal Parmar

He is the owner of a small auto-fabrication workshop in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat. More than twenty years ago he noticed underprivileged children on the street near him. A few had dropped out of school. Others had never been to one at all.

What he started

He began giving them tuition. Not in place of his own work, but after it: from half past five in the evening until half past nine, every day, once his regular working hours were done. He also provided them with a free dinner.

How it grew

Soon 150 children were attending regularly, and they were deeply interested in the classes. Think about what that number means for one workshop owner with no training as a teacher and no building to teach in.

A teacher's reaction

Teachers from a school nearby noticed, and took a turn at the teaching for a time. One of them made an observation worth keeping. There are no proper benches. There is no quiet classroom. Vehicles pass and make noise, and yet the children pay full attention.

What that teacher said

The words she used were plain. It touched her heart, she said, and the love and affection there were unbelievable. A trained teacher, in other words, found something in that street class that a school building does not supply.

And the older students

Then some older children who attend regular schools joined as volunteers. One of them remarked that they had gone there to teach and instead learnt a great deal from the children. That sentence is the whole point of volunteering in four words.

A newer kind of community

The chapter now turns to something quite different. New types of community have appeared in the last thirty or forty years. In urban areas the clearest example is the Residents' Welfare Association.

What they do

Such an association makes its own rules and regulations. The chapter names three subjects: waste management, the cleanliness of common areas, and taking care of pets. All three concern spaces and matters that nobody owns alone.

Who makes the rules

And here is the detail to hold. Those who live in the community help make them. These are not rules handed down from outside. They come from the residents themselves, which is what makes the association a community and not merely an office.

Nobody stands alone

Then the chapter makes a larger point. Communities are ultimately interdependent. The very same residents' associations depend on the trading community for their supplies. They also depend on municipal workers to handle their waste.

In complex societies

Stated generally: in a complex society each of us depends on many other people, and on many other communities. That is the same word you met in the first topic about families, now applied at a much larger scale. Interdependence runs all the way up.

The word stretches

The chapter closes by admitting something. Community is a flexible concept. It has been used in one sense so far, but the word does a good deal of other work in everyday Indian English, and it is worth knowing where.

Jāti

First, a jāti, or a subdivision of a jāti, is also often called a community. You will hear the word used in exactly this sense, and it is a different sense from the neighbourhood one this chapter began with.

Religion, region, work, interest

Second, the word covers any set of people sharing a religion, a region, a trade or an interest, especially a smaller group. The examples given are Kerala's scientific community and America's Indian community. Also Chennai's Sikh community, Mumbai's Parsi community, a school's art community and a village's farming community.

The list is endless

The chapter says as much: the list is endless. That is not vagueness but a real feature of the word. What the uses share is a set of people connected by something, which takes you straight back to the definition in the last topic.

And it reaches you. At school you can belong to several communities at once. There is your class, and the sports community. There is the National Cadet Corps, and the National Service Scheme. There may be a science or a drama club. Count how many you belong to.

Scenario:

A colony in Bhopal has 90 households and an association everybody calls the samiti. Its rules are short. Waste goes out before eight, the shared park is swept by four households in turn each week, and dogs are walked on a lead. The residents wrote the rules themselves at a meeting two winters ago. In June the municipal waste van stops coming for nine days because of a strike. Bags pile up. Two households begin burning theirs. At the next meeting a retired teacher points out that the samiti has no power over the van at all. A shopkeeper who supplies the colony offers his handcart for the nine days, and eight volunteers take the waste to the main collection point. The samiti also agrees a new line for its rules: nobody burns waste, whatever happens to the van.

Analysis:

Both halves of this chapter's urban argument are visible. The samiti is a community because its residents make their own rules on exactly the subjects the chapter names: waste, the cleanliness of common areas, and pets. But it is also interdependent, and the strike proves it. The association cannot handle its own waste, because municipal workers do that, and the solution came from the trading community in the form of a shopkeeper's handcart. Nobody was paid, which is the same point the Jhabua and Chennai examples made in the previous topic.

Activity:

List every community your own home depends on in a single week. Beside each, write what would stop if that community did not do its work. Then mark the one you had never thought about before.

Kamal Parmar owns a small auto-fabrication workshop. The teaching began more than twenty years ago, after he noticed underprivileged children on the street.

One older student who volunteered said they had gone there to teach and instead learnt a great deal from the children.

A residents' association depends on the trading community for supplies and on municipal workers to take away its waste.

Kamal Parmar's evening — After work, then dinner — He taught after his own working hours were over, from half past five to half past nine, and gave the children a free dinner as well. Both halves are part of the story.

How wide the word stretches — Religion, region, work, interest — Four ways a community can be formed, on top of a jāti. Parsi or Sikh by religion, an Indian community abroad by region, a scientific community by work, an art community by interest.