Filial Support Norms Challenged in South India

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"They don’t need it, and I can’t give it": ﬁlial support in South India
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CHAPTER 3
THEY DON’T NEED IT, AND I CAN’T GIVE

IT: FILIAL SUPPORT IN SOUTH INDIA
Penny Vera-Sanso
C entral to the Indian system of old-age support is the norm

that sons support their parents; that is, they provide financial
and practical support for their elderly parents. This norm is undis-
puted in popular discourse, is enshrined in legislation and gives
rise to a welfare system that only provides non-contributory old-
age pensions to destitute people without surviving adult sons. In
practice, however, there is considerable variation in the extent of
economic and practical support that parents receive from sons.
Indeed, it is not uncommon for sons to ask their elderly parents
for periodic financial help. In terms of the norm of old-age sup-
port, many parents are effectively childless: they receive negligi-
ble or no financial and practical support from sons or daughters.
For others, practical and economic support is at best intermittent.
My objective is to explain why this lack of congruence between
norm and practice has not unseated the norm’s persistence. I shall
argue that the reason why it has not done so can be explained,
first, by the norm’s underlying assumptions that elderly people
need support and sons are able to provide it and, secondly, by
ambiguities about what constitutes elderly, need, support and
ability to provide. The extent to which elderly people need sup-
port and sons are able to provide it varies not only by class or
caste but also by economic location, that is, by the way people of
78 Penny Vera-Sanso
different ages, genders and abilities are included (or excluded)

from the specificities of their local economies.1 Drawing on
anthropological field research undertaken in the South Indian
state of Tamil Nadu, I argue that it is divergent concepts of persons
and their needs, rights and obligations as mediated by economic
location which largely determine whether and to what degree
elderly parents receive economic support from their sons.
This chapter is divided into three main sections. The first looks
at the provision of old-age support in South Asia. It begins with
an acknowledgement that there are few alternatives to filial sup-
port. The main focus is on accounts claiming that parents receive
support from sons in old age. These are scrutinised for assump-
tions regarding the kinds of relations that occur within house-
holds and between elderly parents and adult sons. Evidence from
studies of nutritional status and mortality rates supports the con-
tention that there is no easy association between having sons, fil-
ial support and older people’s welfare and survival. Taken
together, sections two and three lay out the grounds for the claim
that sons commonly make in relation to their parents’ need for
support, that is, ‘They don’t need it, and I can’t give it.’ Section
two focuses on the slippage between the norm of filial support
and the evidence that elderly people may not be receiving the lev-
els of support the norm implies. It examines a number of local
concepts regarding persons and their needs, rights and obliga-
tions, in order to understand how these concepts, as mediated by
economic location, determine whether and to what degree
elderly people receive economic and practical support from their
sons. Specifically, this section looks at concepts of masculinity,
independent households, parental need and the need for privacy
before contesting oversimplified assertions regarding the relation-
ship of economic status and filial support. It argues that many
parents receive no or intermittent support from their sons and
that in relation to the norm of filial support these parents could be
described as ‘effectively childless’ or ‘intermittently childless’,
respectively. Section three, entitled ‘We Look After Our Families’,
argues that a man’s first responsibility is to his conjugal family. His
duties to his parents are only secondary. Rising longevity and
post-independence economic and social policy have greatly
expanded demands on household resources. This increases the
likelihood that filial support for elderly parents will be less read-
ily forthcoming, more intermittent or even negligible. The chap-
ter’s conclusion argues that from a theoretical perspective, in
relation to filial support in old age, there is no easy distinction
between people who have sons and people who do not.
Filial Support in South India 79
Old-Age support in South Asia
Old-age support in South Asia is, and always has been, predomi-
nantly the responsibility of sons. Although all children are con-
sidered indebted to their parents for giving them life and bringing
them up, it is only sons who are expected to repay that debt. A
daughter’s debt is discharged on her wedding day, because, once
a woman marries, her labour and hence her income belong not to
herself but to her husband. Consequently couples without sons
may try to adopt one, usually a relative or a daughter’s prospec-
tive husband. This strategy to secure economic or practical sup-
port in old age is only viable where there is something, usually
property, to inherit and where there are several potential heirs.2
Other than this, support is extremely limited both for elderly peo-
ple without sons and for those whose sons are unwilling or
unable to provide for them.
The alternatives to filial support are regionally specific, are dif-
ficult to secure and may not meet basic medical and nutritional
needs. Support from relatives other than sons is generally very
rare throughout South Asia, although it may be slightly more
forthcoming in India compared with Bangladesh, and in south
India compared with north India (Cain 1988; Dreze 1990; Dhar-
malingam 1994; Panda 1998). Nor is its impact on welfare in old
age significant (Caldwell et al. 1988; Rahman 1999). Old-age
homes are rare and fall mainly into two categories: first, charita-
ble institutions, the majority of which are located in south India
and cater for the Christian minority (James 1994); secondly, pri-
vate homes where emigrant professionals can send their parents.
State provision does not provide a realistic alternative to support
from sons. State non-contributory pensions for the elderly are
only made available to impoverished people over sixty years old
without a surviving adult son. Not only are these pensions noto-
riously difficult to secure, even when individuals meet the state’s
criteria for entitlement (Prasad 1995), but government officials
readily acknowledge that it is not possible to survive on the pen-
sion alone. In summary, for the vast majority of people who are
unable to work or fund themselves in old age, viable alternatives
to a son’s support do not exist.
The lack of alternatives to filial support, combined with con-
cerns about the impact of post-colonial economic and social
changes, has stimulated a number of surveys of older people’s
residential patterns in an attempt to chart the persistence of the
‘traditional’ system of old-age support. The surveys seem to sug-
gest that in relative – rather than absolute – terms few elderly
80 Penny Vera-Sanso
people live alone, with the percentages found to be varying

between zero and 35 per cent (Vatuk 1982a; Dreze 1990). It has
been suggested that this wide variation could reflect a regional
difference between north and south India (Vatuk 1982a). It is
more likely that inconsistencies regarding definitions of ‘old’ and
of household boundaries make residential surveys incomparable.
More problematic still are assumptions regarding older people’s
access to household and family resources.
The first difficulty faced by people researching ageing and old-
age support is determining who to research, that is, who to class
as ‘elderly’. In the case of the residential surveys cited above, the
lower age limit for the category of ‘elderly’ varied considerably,
ranging between age forty-five and over sixty. To some extent
this wide range reflects the uncertainties of gathering data from
people who, while not knowing their exact year of birth, inten-
tionally underestimate their age. This tendency is particularly
prevalent among manual labourers wishing to present themselves
as more youthful and hard-working than their real age might
imply. More significant than uncertainties regarding chronologi-
cal age is the fact that ageing is an uneven process. In objective
terms the speed and impact of the ageing process on an individ-
ual’s physical capacities will vary according to their life history,
social status and access to material resources. Thus, for example,
the ageing process is much faster and more debilitating for land-
less labourers forced to endure arduous working conditions, peri-
odic undernutrition, chronic malnutrition and inadequate levels
of medical care than it is for big landowners. The latter are gener-
ally healthier and better able to afford medication and medical
equipment as well as labour and labour-saving devices to sustain
their capacities in later life. Consequently, surveys taking age
forty-five as the starting-point for investigating old-age support
are less likely to miss the objective level of need of particularly
poor sections of the population than are ones beginning at age
over sixty. At the other extreme, surveys which identify the
‘elderly’ as those aged over sixty are assuming that which should
be investigated, namely, older people’s capacities and need for
support. This is the crux of the problem in any investigation of old
age. The issue is not just one of deciding who should be cate-
gorised as ‘elderly’, but of identifying who is and who is not cate-
gorised as such, and in what contexts. It is in relation to old-age
support that the category of ‘elderly’ is most contested within
families and, as will be argued below, this contestation varies by
gender and economic location. In regard to this chapter, the term
‘elderly’ is used not just to signify the outcome of the ageing
process, a final stage of frailty, disability or dependence. Rather, it

is shorthand for the phrase ‘ageing and elderly people’, that is,
people who are in some way or in some contexts affected by the
ageing process. It refers to people, irrespective of chronological
age, who are – or who are considered by themselves or by others
to be – ageing or aged.
The remaining methodological problems identified above, that
is defining household boundaries, assessing access to household
resources and identifying inter-household resource flows, means
that there can be no easy correlation between residential patterns
and old-age support. The view that there might be is based on a
number of assumptions regarding intergenerational and house-
hold relations: first, that elderly people need support; secondly,
that it is younger adults who are doing the supporting; thirdly,
that filially related families residing on the same piece of property
or sharing one dwelling ‘live together’; and, fourthly, that it is
parents who ‘live with’ sons rather than the reverse. The phrasing
that residential surveys employ, that elderly people ‘live with’
their married sons, is both inaccurate and misleading. It disre-
gards the fact that South Asians differentiate between house-
holds, which comprise those who eat together, and families,
which include people who may or may not reside on the same
property. Tamils, for instance, distinguish between those who are
vittle, literally ‘in the house’, and those who are sondakarangal,
that is, ‘our people’. The former refers specifically to those who
eat together. The reference group for sondakarangal can vary con-
siderably in size depending on the subject under discussion: it can
range from family members who live on the same premises but
eat separately right through to people from the same caste, many
of whom will not be genealogically related. Surveys failing to dis-
tinguish between households and families give the misleading
impression that filial support for the elderly is more widespread
than it is.3
The phrasing that elderly people ‘live with’ married sons is
inaccurate and misleading on a further count. In most South
Asian families, it is not parents who live with married sons but
married sons who live with their parents, either in their parents’
household or as separate households in adjacent rooms or
dwellings located on their parents’ property. In many instances,
people aged over sixty who have married sons living with them
will be supporting unmarried sons and daughters, as well as pro-
viding practical and financial assistance for relatively recently
married sons and their families (Caldwell et al. 1988; Vatuk 1990;
Vera-Sanso 1999). Nor is there any guarantee that married sons
82 Penny Vera-Sanso
will remain with their parents into what is known in gerontolog-

ical literature as ‘old-old’ age or after the various forms of assis-
tance can no longer be provided by parents. Indeed, there is some
evidence that the likelihood of a man or woman ‘living with’ a
married son declines after the age of seventy and with the loss of
a spouse (Panda 1998). The assumptions of old-age dependency
and filial support do not reflect the extent to which married sons
are reliant on the downward resource flows from ageing parents
that occur in practice.
Rather than investigating the actual extent of old-age support,
surveys of residential patterns rely on the assumption that if a
family ‘lives together’ all members are equally provided for. Yet
we know from research on gender and household relations that
the consumption of household resources can be highly unequal
(Papanek 1990). We also know that, despite local definitions of
what constitutes a household, in practice a household’s bound-
aries can be context-dependent and highly contested (Vatuk
1989; Vera-Sanso 1997). For example, in urban and rural Tamil
Nadu, not all people who eat together have equal rights to all
household resources, and the head of household and his wife
may not agree that all the people who actually eat in their house-
hold have the right to do so without making a visible financial or
practical contribution to the household (Vera-Sanso 1997). Some
household members may be classed as guests with the more ten-
uous right of hospitality. This means that, in order to grasp the
degree of security which old-age support provides for older peo-
ple, we need to investigate not only the extent of support elderly
people receive within households but also the terms under which
it is given. The failure to investigate the issue of resource flows
means that, even when residential surveys make the distinction
between households and families, that is, between consumption
units and co-resident units, respectively, they still have difficulty
capturing the full extent of old-age support and the security it
provides. This is because they cannot differentiate between
elderly people who live next door to their sons and receive ade-
quate support, inadequate but systematic support, conditional
support or no support whatsoever (see also Vatuk 1982b; Dreze
1990).
Gathering accurate data on intra-household and inter-house-
hold resource flows is notoriously difficult, irrespective of
research methodologies. A potential alternative is provided by the
study of nutritional status and mortality rates. However, studies of
correlations of mortality, fertility and residential patterns which
begin with the assumption that elderly parents receive adequate
access to household resources also tend to assume that it is largely

only those people who do not have surviving adult sons who risk
destitution and increased mortality. Rather than examining the
significance of filial support for older people’s welfare and sur-
vival, this approach focuses on the mortality rates and class
mobility of people without surviving adult sons (see, for example,
Cain 1988). More recent studies, which do not assume a positive
relationship between old-age support and parental welfare and
survival, provide a more nuanced picture of filial support. For
instance, Rahman’s (1999) longitudinal study in Bangladesh finds
that having one son does not significantly improve parental sur-
vival but having two does. This is because two sons ‘increase the
options for the elderly’ by providing a margin for manoeuvre
where one son is unreliable or has a low income (Rahman 1999:
232). Gillespie and McNeill’s seminal village-based study in Tamil
Nadu contrasts the anthropometric measures of men and women
aged between twenty and forty-nine with those aged over sixty.
They found that the latter’s ‘nutritional status is considerably
worse than that of younger adults’ (Gillespie and McNeill 1992:
98). The authors attribute this to older people’s much lower
energy intake, which could in turn be due to ‘the very common
physical handicaps and/or to a low priority of this age group for
the household food resources’ (1992: 99). This study found that
in the over-sixty age group men and women from wealthier
households were disproportionately represented compared with
other socio-economic groups and that a higher proportion of men
than women survive beyond their sixtieth birthday.4 Differential
survival rates between men and women, which vary across the
subcontinent and between classes, undermine arguments for the
importance of filial support for parental survival. Cain (1988: 29),
for example, presents male to female ratios that suggest that turn-
ing age sixty significantly lowers women’s chances of survival but
not men’s. In a context where men marry women several years
younger than themselves this declining ratio of women to men
after the age of sixty supports the view that a spouse may be more
significant for older people’s survival – irrespective of gender –
than filial support (Panda 1998; Rahman 1999). This work on
mortality highlights a fundamental problem with surveys of
parental residence: they cannot reveal how many parents have
not survived and how much excess mortality is attributable to fil-
ial neglect – a neglect which may equally occur in contexts where
parents live with, adjacent to or at a distance from their sons.
The mismatch between the evidence regarding older people’s
welfare and survival and the norm that sons provide economic
84 Penny Vera-Sanso
and practical support for their elderly parents suggests that filial
relations are much more complex and contingent than is gener-
ally acknowledged. Co-residence with a married son, whether
within the same household or living adjacently, provides no cer-
tainty that parents will receive the level of support that the norm
of filial support would imply. Part of the difficulty in understand-
ing the complexity and contingency of filial relations lies in com-
mon assumptions regarding ageing and dependency and
regarding intergenerational and household relations. This section
has tried to expose a number of assumptions embedded in
research which finds the traditional system of filial support
unproblematic and persistent. I have argued that we cannot
assume that the category of ‘elderly’ is fixed; it is more likely to be
contextually variable and contested. Nor can we assume that
rights to household and family resources are equal, uncondi-
tional, or uncontested, or that resource flows from ageing and
elderly people to married sons are not more significant than
upward transfers.
The Slippage Between Norm and Practice
In order to explain the apparent slippage between the norm of fil-

ial support and evidence that elderly people may not be receiving
the levels of support the norm implies, I examine concepts of per-
sons and their needs, rights and obligations that shape filial rela-
tions. This discussion draws on two extended periods of
residential fieldwork I undertook in urban and rural Tamil Nadu.
The first period of sixteen months was undertaken between 1990
and 1992 and involved the investigation of 120 households living
in squatter settlements, municipal tenements and government-
allotted plots in Chennai, formerly Madras. These informants
were either low-caste or scheduled caste, and the latter, formerly
known as ‘untouchables’, comprised 17 per cent of the sample.
The overwhelming majority of informants worked in the informal
sector. The second period of research was undertaken in the
twelve months between 1999 and 2000 and examined intergen-
erational relations in a wide range of classes and castes in Chen-
nai and urban and rural western Tamil Nadu. The main focus in
the rural setting was intergenerational relations within two
Chakkliyar castes resident in two villages. These castes, the
Arundhadhyar and the Mathari – traditionally drummers and
night-soil sweepers – occupy the lowest rung of the scheduled-
caste ladder. Now they are overwhelmingly landless labourers,
several of whom are or were bonded. A few are sweepers. Fol-

lowing residential surveys, research was primarily based on infor-
mal interviews and conversation as well as casual observation of
interaction between generations. In both periods of research,
informants included not only elderly people but also their fami-
lies, relatives and neighbours. Most informants were visited on a
number of occasions. On the basis of this research it is clear that,
while old-age support is strongly conditioned by economic fac-
tors, they do not by themselves determine the nature, extent and
timing of support. Rather, it is conceptual frameworks regarding
family boundaries and the relative needs of specific identities that
determine the impact of economic factors on old-age support.
The South Asian domestic cycle is critical to the system of fil-
ial support, but rather than ensuring economic and practical
support for older parents – as is generally assumed – the domes-
tic cycle facilitates the slippage between the norm of filial sup-
port and the support, or lack of support, that occurs in practice.
Central to understanding the cycle’s significance for old-age sup-
port and household formation is the recognition that family
members do not necessarily see the ‘normal’ family trajectory
from the same perspective. They do not do so because there are
three co-existent trajectories, all of which are equally ‘tradi-
tional’: the nuclear–joint trajectory, the nuclear–joint–nuclear tra-
jectory (see also Caldwell et al. 1988) and the nuclear–joint-
nuclear–joint trajectory.5 The latter occurs where a son moves out
of his natal family some time after marriage, and after a period as
the head of a nuclear household, either returns with his marital
family to his parents’ household or has them join him. Three con-
cepts of need determine which trajectory each son will follow
after marriage: first, that men need to be financially independent;
secondly, that sons are obliged to support their parents but only
when the parents need it; and, thirdly, that young couples need
privacy. These needs are open to interpretation and contestation.
When is a man financially independent? How much support do
parents need at any particular time? Is there enough room for pri-
vacy? It is this indeterminacy that underlies the slippage between
the norm of filial support and what happens in practice. The fol-
lowing sections discuss these concepts in turn.
Masculinity and independent households

The first need arises out of the view that people are accountable
to and must comply with the wishes of those on whom they are
dependent. Hence adult masculinity is predicated on being the
head of a financially independent household. In the Tamil idiom,
86 Penny Vera-Sanso
in order to have a life (varkkai) a man must stand on his own feet;
that is, he must be financially independent in order to be self-
determining (Vera-Sanso 2000). This is the pressure which pro-
motes the move from joint household to nuclear household, from
joint budgeting and consumption to separate budgeting and con-
sumption. The split can be initiated by either a married son or his
parents. As most sons marry when their parents are still self-sup-
porting, it is the son’s wish for self-determination which lies at the
heart of separate budgeting in the vast majority of families. The
timing of son-initiated splits varies from family to family. The
availability of separate and affordable premises, the need for
parental help during the early part of a marriage, especially in
relation to the protection and semi-seclusion of young wives, and
the need to establish livelihoods are the main factors determining
when sons will initiate a separation.6
There is little that parents can do to prevent sons setting up
independent households. Recognising the need to maintain good
relations with sons and their families in order to safeguard the
possibility of filial support in the future, self-supporting parents
usually consent when a son seeks permission to form a nuclear
household. The difficulty lies with disabled parents who are not
entirely self-supporting. These parents feel forced to refuse their
son’s request for separation, despite knowing that it is only a mat-
ter of time before the son or his wife provoke a complete break-
down in filial relations. Unless these parents have other sons who
come forward to support them, they will be effectively childless in
terms of the norm of filial support: that is, they will receive no
practical or financial help in old age. In a minority of families, par-
ents initiate the split but only do so when they consider a son
slow to take on the financial responsibilities of married life. It is
common practice for parents to continue paying for basic house-
hold expenses even after a son’s marriage and for the latter to
keep a significant portion of his income for his own and his con-
jugal family’s use (see also Vatuk 1990 on north India). Unable to
force sons to work or hand over their earnings to contribute to
household expenses – a demand which would demean a father –
parents’ only leverage is to initiate separate budgeting. As it is
common for each married son to remain in his parents’ house-
hold for a period of time, parent-initiated splits risk the possibility
that sons will refuse filial support in old age if they feel prema-
turely or unjustifiably forced out of the natal household. Thus,
unless parents are entirely dependent at or soon after a son’s mar-
riage, most sons will want to set up independent homes. For par-
ents, all separations carry the risk that sons will not support them
in old age, but these risks are significantly heightened where par-
ents attempt to prevent separations or initiate the split them-
selves.
The discourse predicating masculinity on financial indepen-
dence not only propels young married men out of the joint fam-
ily but makes elderly men and their wives ambivalent about being
incorporated into their sons’ households. The romantic ideal of
the joint household is one where the elderly are surrounded by
the love and respect of married sons, daughters-in-law and
grandchildren, all of whom are engaged in compensating for the
suffering that parents, parents-in-law and grandparents endured
in giving life to and bringing up successive generations (see also
Vatuk 1990; Lamb 2000). The primary expression of a son’s (and
daughter-in-law’s) affection and willingness to care for ageing
parents is the prompt and solicitous service of food. It is through
the service of food that elderly parents are made to feel welcome
or unwelcome in their children’s homes. Yet being financially
dependent on another person, expressed in terms of ‘who is feed-
ing whom’, is a vulnerable position. It necessitates a degree of
subservience and acquiescence, an avoidance of conflict for fear
of damaging or even breaking the relationship. Given the highly
personalised nature of most economic exchanges, it is in the giv-
ing and receiving of financial support, whether it be food, loans or
wages, that people experience gender, age, caste and class hierar-
chies on a daily basis (Marriott 1976; Vera-Sanso 1994). In this
way, it is not only that age hierarchies become inverted for the
dependent old, although in theory they should not, but also that
men experience a significant loss of masculine status. In better-off
joint households, where informants tend to be more guarded
about family reputation, old men admit with a wry smile that
‘when you stop earning nobody listens to you’ (see also Caldwell
et al. 1988). Several studies have shown that with this inversion
of domestic hierarchy can come not only a greater degree of
humiliation but also of maltreatment (Mahajan 1992; Dharma-
lingam 1994; Vera-Sanso 1999).
A corollary of the association between manhood and financial
independence is that households are expected to be financially
independent. While few households in South Asia do not rely on
a network of support – which belies the claim to independence –
the household’s status and that of its head are dependent on
appearing economically autonomous. In these circumstances all
economic transfers, from whatever source, which fall outside
what is demanded at ritual and life-cycle events (such as mar-
riage, female maturation, retirement) are not seen as constituting
88 Penny Vera-Sanso
economic support but are construed as loans, gifts or earnings.7 It

is not just in the interest of the recipient person and household
that economic transfers are not defined as support. For the donors
such a definition would expose them to expectations of further
transfers. In the squatter settlements and municipal tenements of
Chennai, for instance, an older person in need of some financial
help is more likely to be lent a piece of jewellery or some other
household item to pawn than to be given food or money. These
‘independent’ households maintain a strict balance of reciprocal
relations, even where households are filially linked. In north
India, for example, ‘if a married son and his father live separately
(nyare), they will rarely help each other to cultivate, though one
may be found to lease in the other’s land on “standard” contrac-
tual terms, or even to hire his labour at the “going wage”’ (Dreze
1990: 97; see also Caldwell et al. 1988 on south India). Similarly,
where a son who does not live in the same household cultivates
land for his mother’s support, the produce she receives is equal to
what a landowner would receive from a sharecropper. It is not
only in the formal arrangements landed families make around
the exchange of land, labour and their products, where either
party can be replaced by someone outside the family, that the
concept of independent households can be seen to operate. It can
also be seen among landless scheduled caste people in rural Tamil
Nadu, who generally own the plots on which their homes are
built, and among people living in Chennai’s squatter settlements
and government-allotted plots. They exchange their obligation of
filial support for the right to inherit; sons discharge their obliga-
tions to support parents by forgoing their share of the parental
home in favour of a brother or sister, or may reject all obligation
to support parents on the grounds that their parents have nothing
they wish to inherit. These intergenerational exchanges not only
underscore the extent to which filially related households are
seen as separate and properly self-provisioning but also reveal
how similar concepts manifest themselves in different classes.
The expectation of financial independence means that parents
are not deemed by sons to require support until they are too sick
or old to support themselves. Where possible, impoverished older
people attempt to reconfigure their work to fit their declining
physical capacities (Dharmalingam 1994; Vera-Sanso 2001).
Urban areas tend to provide greater scope to do so than do rural
areas. People working in the informal service sector, such as
domestic workers, hawkers or snack-makers, can reduce the
hours they work or the distances they travel. Unable to do heavy
manual labour, men can look for work as night-watchmen. This
move to less intensive labour disproportionately reduces incomes.

Hawkers, for example, switch from buying from wholesalers to
buying from retailers and from selling in markets or around mid-
dle-class neighbourhoods to trading in their own, low-income
neighbourhoods (Vera-Sanso 1995). Opportunities in rural areas
tend to be less consistent. In richer villages there may be some
scope for service work (such as cleaning toilets) or begging; in
poorer ones there are no such opportunities (Vera-Sanso 2001).
The majority of ageing landless labourers are forced to continue
taking on casual work in the fields. However, their inability to
work fast or carry heavy loads means they are only offered work
during labour shortages (see also Kapadia 1995). Additionally,
their need to recuperate from a day of work prevents them from
taking full advantage of periods of high labour demand. For the
vast majority of elderly landless labourers work is at best inter-
mittent.
The view that adult masculinity necessitates independence
encourages the move from joint to nuclear households, while
placing barriers to the move from nuclear to joint households.
The corollary, that households should be independent, requires
elderly parents to remain self-supporting for as long as they are
able to do so. In short, expectations of, or perhaps more accu-
rately pressures towards, household independence facilitate the
slippage between the norm of filial support and actual practice by
adding a sub-clause: sons should support parents in old age but
only when parents need support. Because parents have no means
of compelling sons unwilling to support them and because sons
are expected to come forward, unbidden, at the appropriate
moment, parents receive support only when sons deem parents
to be in need of it – not when parents feel it is needed – and only
to the extent that sons deem it necessary (see also Dreze 1990).
Combined with the risks to filial relations that the process of
household separation poses, this forces parents to support them-
selves until much later in life than the norm of filial support
would at first glance seem to require.
Parental need
In India the ageing process is thought to be one of declining sen-
sual appetites (Vatuk 1990). This process, which is linked to
lifestage rather than chronological age, is one of cooling and dry-
ing – a process considered both inherent in the body and requiring
self-discipline (Lamb 2000). In Tamil Nadu, for instance, the
elderly are described as having had their life, vaalkai mudinchi
pochu (literally, ‘life, having finished, has gone’). What is meant by
90 Penny Vera-Sanso
this phrase is that older people have enjoyed the pleasures of life,
pleasures that are considered to be the prerogative of younger peo-
ple, and, that period being over, older people are expected to turn
to a simpler way of life without the luxuries of youth. Starting
from a period shortly after their first son’s marriage or daughter’s
maturation, men and women begin to move away from styles of
dressing which draw attention to the sexed body. Men and women
gradually exchange bright, bold or intricately designed clothing
for more simple styles and neutral colours and shoes and bodily
adornments, such as jewellery and flowers, are discarded or sim-
plified. They are no longer deemed to require privacy, as relations
between husband and wife are expected to simulate those
between brother and sister once their children begin to marry.
Similarly their need for physical comfort and entertainment is also
expected to decline below the needs of younger people.
Exactly what older people forgo depends on social status. In
part this is because what constitutes a young person’s luxury
amongst impoverished classes, such as beds, toothpaste and hair
oil, is considered a basic necessity for others; in part it is because
younger people’s right to experience the pleasures of life requires
that resources are made available for them to do so. Thus, in rural
areas, scheduled caste people consider toothpaste and tooth-
brushes a young person’s luxury which older people will not use
in case their daughters-in-law make disparaging comments about
their use. Except among the wealthy, new saris are the preserve
of younger women, older women wear cast-offs from patrons,
employers, daughters and daughters-in-law or, in the case of the
impoverished scheduled castes, second-hand clothes bought in
the market-place. This class-based and age-based variation in
need also extends to medical treatment. While most families must
‘ration’ medical treatment, it is noticeable that in the poorer sec-
tions of society older people are expected to endure ill-health
with no treatment or less treatment than is expected for younger
people. Similarly, older people are expected to control their
appetite for food, in terms of both quantity and flavour, a practice
which the wealthy also follow. It is this expectation that may
partly explain Gillespie and McNeill’s (1992: 98) finding that even
in better-off households the nutritional status of people aged sixty
and over is ‘considerably worse’ than that of younger people.
Thus, older parents are expected to have few needs, mainly
focused around the need for a small quantity of food per day,
although what counts as a need will vary by class. Consequently,
once parents’ duties to their children are met, that is, after all
their children are settled in marriages and are self-supporting,
parents, no matter what their chronological age, are considered to

have limited financial needs, which in the case of the poor are
considered by sons to be readily met by very small incomes or
pensions.
The fact that parental need relates to lifestage and not chrono-
logical age is significant. A parent whose children are married
may be classed as ‘old’ (vaiyasu in Tamil) in relation to needs
while not being classed as ‘old’ in other contexts. In the context
of need for filial support the issue revolves around parents’ capac-
ity to support themselves. ‘Old’ is seen in relation to an activity:
for example, too old to do housework, too old to undertake or
secure work of an appropriate status. For many government and
organised-sector employees, ‘too old to work’ is deemed to be the
age of official retirement, usually between age fifty-eight and
sixty. For people working in family businesses, the informal sec-
tor or as agricultural labourers, however, there is no equivalent
cut-off at which they can be deemed to be ‘too old to work’. In
practice there is little agreement between parents and sons as to
when the former have reached that stage. Among the landed and
those engaged in family businesses, sons may consider this point
as arriving earlier than do fathers, but among those working in
the informal sector or as agricultural labourers sons may only
regard their parents as ‘too old to work’ when they are consis-
tently refused work during periods of high labour demand. This is
frequently long after parents consider they should no longer be
required to work.8
Thus, whether a parent is deemed by sons to be in need of
financial or practical support rests on concepts of need relating to
age and gender as mediated by economic location. Generally only
two categories are deemed to be unequivocally in need of finan-
cial support. The first consists of those for whom work is not par-
rakkam (literally, ‘habit’), that is, those who are not habituated to
work, such as those women and disabled people who have never
worked. The second comprises people whose sons deem them to
be too old or to have become too disabled to work. Excepted from
these two categories are those who receive a pension or have
other sources of independent income, because their incomes are
generally assumed to meet their reduced needs. In terms of prac-
tical support, men – who are by definition unable to cook or do
their own washing – are more likely to be deemed in need of
practical support than are women (see Vera-Sanso 1994). The lat-
ter are considered able to cook and clean and therefore not in
need of a daughter-in-law’s help unless they are very frail or dis-
abled. However, where practical support is onerous, as in cases of
92 Penny Vera-Sanso
old-age incontinence or stroke-induced paralysis, many parents

fear and experience ill-treatment, neglect and premature death
(see also Vatuk 1990). Consequently, the vast majority of impov-
erished people in urban and rural Tamil Nadu at best only receive
intermittent financial or practical support when work is scarce or
during longer illnesses.
As filial support is predicated on perceived parental need, sons
may take the position that parental income – no matter what its
source or scale – obviates their duty to support their parents. Thus
the sons of elderly landless scheduled caste people, who have the
opportunity to beg from landed high-caste families, consider
themselves no more obligated to support their parents than do the
sons of wealthy people. While wealthy parents may agree with
this view, parents from the scheduled castes will generally express
another view: they consider their sons to be flouting the norm of
filial support. Even those receiving intermittent support from sons
concur with the latter view. Oscillating between periods of self-
support and dependence or circulating between the households of
a number of sons, they claim they are being made to feel like beg-
gars and that this is a tactic used by younger people to encourage
parents to be self-supporting. The most common complaint is that
food is not offered when they are hungry and occasionally it is not
offered at all – they are being forced to ask for food. As food is the
key marker of filial support, this is seen by parents as a rebuttal of
filial obligation. To avoid humiliation, parents turn to other poten-
tial sources of food, for example by visiting another son or daugh-
ter as guests and returning to self-support as soon as work
becomes available. While this humiliation can be meted out to
anyone irrespective of gender or marital status, widows and wid-
owers experience it more frequently than married people and wid-
ows more often than widowers. This is because women are
generally ten to fifteen years younger than their husbands, so cou-
ples are more likely to be self-supporting and wives are more likely
to outlive husbands than the reverse.9 While many parents may
consider their case for support indisputable, it is up to their sons,
not themselves, to determine whether they need support, when
and how much. It is this indeterminacy around parental need and
ability to be self-supporting that allows sons to assert that they
uphold the norm of filial support while not supporting their par-
ents in practice: it allows them to claim ‘they don’t need it’.
The need for privacy

The combination of these concepts regarding men’s need for an
independent household, the needs appropriate to old age and the
contingent nature of filial duty determines whether sons remain

in the joint household or initiate the move to independent
households. However, it is the need for privacy – the requirement
that young couples have a separate space in which to sleep – that
determines how many sons, if any, remain on the same property
as their parents. Initially this space is for sleeping, but, as most
young people pursue the nuclear–joint–nuclear cycle, they must
also be able to set up independent households in the space; that
is, they have to be able to cook separately. The poorer a family the
less likely it is to have the kinds of property that can be subdi-
vided. It is not just the size of a family’s property but its tenure,
that is, whether it is owned, squatted or rented, that determines
whether families can sustain the more inclusive arrangements of
joint or adjacently living households (Vera-Sanso 1997). Thus in
Chennai people living on low incomes in rented accommodation
are generally in small properties or properties which do not lend
themselves to subdivision. Their sons move away within months
of marriage. In terms of the norm of filial support, elderly parents
in these circumstances are effectively childless: they receive no
financial or physical support from their sons. In contrast, people
in Chennai who own small areas of land or occupy squatted land
are usually able to retain one or more sons in a separate room or
dwelling. This is proof that joint or adjacent living is not so much
correlated with wealth but with space. In the future, as land
becomes increasingly subdivided, fewer parents will be able to
provide the space needed to keep their sons close by.
In rural Tamil Nadu housing is similarly subdivided, or elderly
people are forced on to open verandas to sleep (see also Dreze
1990; Lamb 2000). Where sons form nuclear households, parents
have to cook separately. Considered to be in less need of privacy,
protection and comfort than young couples and children, parents
cannot resist this push towards the periphery of the house. In
some instances government housing policies aimed at raising the
living standards of the poorest in rural Tamil Nadu have exacer-
bated the trend towards old-age abandonment by assuming that
married sons need independent homes in order to set up nuclear
households. Their policy of providing house sites and sometimes
houses for married sons living with their parents not only leaves
parents alone in their home but undermines what leverage prop-
erty ownership can offer (see also Caldwell et al. 1988). Located
on the outskirts of villages these new house sites hinder a son’s
ability to keep an eye on the degree to which elderly parents are
able to support themselves. The situation is in stark contrast to
that in which a son’s family lives adjacent to his parents. In these
94 Penny Vera-Sanso
circumstances it is difficult to be unaware of whether a fire has

been lit to boil up some basic food each day. Compared with joint
households, however, adjacent living makes it ‘much easier for
sons to abandon their [parents] when times are hard, and it
would be surprising if they did not do so from time to time wher-
ever the system of adjacent living prevails’ (Dreze 1990: 114).
Thus the view that young people need privacy acts as a further
stimulus to sons leaving the parental household. Whether they
leave the parental property altogether, set up separate households
within or force parents on to the margins of their own home
depends on the size and tenure of the property and its capacity for
subdivision. As it is sons who determine whether their parents
need support, and parents are reluctant to prompt them for fear
of a hostile response, the significance of proximity lies not in
ensuring filial support – which it does not do – but in its direct
impact on a son’s awareness of parental need.
The economics of filial relations

Many studies find a correlation between intergenerational rela-
tions and economic status and give the impression that filial rela-
tions are the outcome of a son’s struggle between economically
motivated self-interest or constraint and filial duty. In relation to
property, families with large property holdings are found to be
more likely to live in families containing three or four generations
(Vatuk 1982b), whilst elderly people without property have a
much higher risk of being ‘deserted’ or left ‘destitute’ by their
children (Caldwell et al. 1988; Panda 1998; Vera-Sanso 1999).
Similarly, in relation to incomes, opportunities for individual
incomes are found to weaken the dependence of young adults on
their parents (Caldwell et al. 1988; Dharmalingam 1994; Vera-
Sanso 1999), whereas independent incomes for older people
encourage married sons to remain with their parents (Caldwell et
al. 1988).10
In order to understand how economic status shapes filial sup-
port these correlations need to be examined within the frame-
work of local concepts of persons and their needs and obligations.
When framed through concepts regarding a young family’s need
for privacy and a son’s need to establish an independent house-
hold, we can see why large property holdings are more likely to
give rise to joint households containing three or four generations,
which in turn give way to families of three or four generations liv-
ing in filially linked, adjacent households. On the same basis, we
can see that the common correlation that parents without prop-
erty have an increased risk of being ‘deserted’ by their children
should really be interpreted as indicating that ‘parents without

sufficient property to provide privacy for their married sons have
a higher risk of sons moving to other premises’. This risk is much
greater where elderly parents, whose needs are deemed to be
small, are in receipt of a pension or are thought to be capable of
earning a small income. It must be remembered, however, that
the issue is size of property rather than wealth per se. In Chennai,
for example, many families have divided squatted land, to which
they do not have legal title, into several small rooms, each of
which houses a separate household based around a married son
(Vera-Sanso 1997).
Equally we can see that the combination of local concepts and
differential opportunities for independent incomes shapes inter-
generational relations with diverse outcomes. The combination of
early marriages and the practice that married sons share premises
with their parents for a few years while their wives and children
are young means that, in virtually all families that have several
sons, independent parental income coincides with long periods
where one son after another marries and lives on the same
premises as his parents. This co-residence does not necessarily
imply joint living, nor does it indicate filial support. Rather par-
ents generally subsidise their son’s conjugal family. The wide-
spread nature of this process makes the assertion that a parent’s
independent income encourages married sons to remain in the
parental home misrepresentative of filial relations and sons’ moti-
vations: usually a parent’s independent income either encourages
parents to initiate separate living or justifies a lack of filial sup-
port. It is only where sons are heavily dependent on their parents’
income for their day-to-day expenses that sons will attempt to
remain with their parents longer than is usual. Similarly, oppor-
tunities for young people to earn individual incomes merely has-
ten the move to separate living required by the association of
adult masculinity with independent households by weakening a
son’s dependence on his parents. They do not determine whether
sons support parents.
Caldwell et al. (1988) also report that many fathers keep a
share of their property at partition, which is then often worked
by day labourers, explicitly in order to guarantee the quality of
filial support.11 This is a misreading. Two principles operate here:
first, men are expected to be self-supporting and, secondly, each
man has a right to a share of his family’s patrimony to support
his household. As a man’s need for income declines, both with
age and with the marriage of his children, he is expected to
divide the property between himself and his sons. Where the real
96 Penny Vera-Sanso
significance of an independent income lies is in the respect and

quality of care physically dependent parents can expect if they are
acknowledged as ‘feeding themselves’. The question is not just
one of having an independent income but of matching income to
need. If elderly parents are deemed by sons to be keeping large
family resources or independent incomes for their own use
despite their supposedly minimal needs, or failing to partition
property to allow sons to become the heads of independent
households, good relations can seriously founder. In Chennai’s
squatter settlements elderly women earning minimal incomes in
the informal sector may suffer physical and verbal abuse from
sons living in adjacent households if they refuse to turn over what
sons assume to be earnings in excess of their mother’s perceived
needs (Vera-Sanso 1994). Consequently humiliation and mal-
treatment of the old can occur irrespectively of wealth, household
form and residential proximity, and occur both where older gen-
erations are financially dependent on the young and where the
young are financially dependent on the old (see also Mahajan
1992).
‘We Look After Our Families’
The slippage between the norm of old-age support and practice

cannot be fully explained as long as the focus is limited to rela-
tions between the elderly parents and their sons. Instead the per-
spective must be multigenerational for two reasons. First, support
of elderly parents should be seen within the context of a family’s
need to support the young (Collard 2000; Kabeer 2000). Sec-
ondly, changing demographic patterns are creating new burdens
on families. The current life expectancy at birth in India is sixty-
one years (WHO 2003), and by 2025 the World Health Organisa-
tion predicts it will have reached seventy years (WHO 1998). Not
only does this represent a rapid rise but to achieve this figure
many people are now living well beyond age sixty-four. In India,
where age at marriage is frequently below twenty and people
expect to have children within two years of marriage, the usual
three-generation model of intergenerational relations (parents,
adult children and grandchildren) is no longer applicable. Instead
of three generations, it is becoming increasingly common
amongst all communities, irrespective of their wealth, to find
families of four generations, two or three of which may be in
need of some level of support. Taking a multigenerational per-
spective not only raises questions about the ability of the system
of filial support to cater for the needs of two dependent ageing

generations but also sidesteps debates over whether contempo-
rary sons are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, in favour of unravelling the complex
nature of multigenerational relations and the challenges that a
rapidly rising life expectancy poses for the current system of old-
age support.
Indians have long prided themselves on the primacy they place
on their family’s welfare over their personal desires. Individual
identities and family reputations are closely bound to the appear-
ance of good family relations, rising family status, hard work and
the sublimation of individual desires. What exactly these entail
varies, but the objective is to meet the standards considered
appropriate to a family’s economic location. A man’s first respon-
sibility is to meet the needs of his wife and children, a responsi-
bility he formally shares with no one, although in practice
women are often significant family providers. Additionally men
are expected to work for the benefit of future generations. The
generality of this expectation is found in an inheritance system in
which men do not inherit land from their fathers in their own
right but as stewards for their sons. Concomitant with this orien-
tation down the family tree is the view that a man’s responsibil-
ity for his elderly parents is both secondary and shared with all his
brothers. As a man’s primary responsibility is towards his conju-
gal family, his obligations towards elderly parents are based on his
assessments both of their needs and access to other sources of
support and of his ability to support his parents while meeting his
conjugal family’s needs. As discussed earlier, sons only consider
themselves obliged to help their parents when all other means of
support are exhausted. It is this balancing of need that explains
why sons appear complacent in the presence of their parents’
hardship (for example, see Dreze 1990). It also provides the key
to understanding why parents consider themselves effectively
childless while their sons assert that ‘in India we look after our
parents’.
It would be wrong to write sons off as callous. Discourses gen-
erated in the political and economic arena have raised expecta-
tions of children’s rights and scheduled-caste rights, as well as
increasing and generalising the expectation that everyone can
have access to material markers of status. Social and economic
policy generated at national and state levels in relation to educa-
tion, globalisation, untouchability and infrastructural develop-
ments has significantly increased the costs sons face in providing
for their conjugal families. These increased costs, in combination
with rising longevity, are jeopardising men’s ability to support
98 Penny Vera-Sanso
their elderly relatives. In the following pages each of these factors

will be discussed in turn.
Research undertaken by Caldwell and his colleagues (1988) in
large and small villages of the south Indian state of Karnataka
found that many of the politically generated changes since inde-
pendence have had an impact on intergenerational relations.
Alongside the widespread penetration of concepts of childhood,
dependency and immaturity have come the right of children to
education, a decline in the amount of work required of them and
their greater access to modern medical facilities and goods pur-
chased in the monetarised economy. In rural Tamil Nadu, for
example, several of my scheduled-caste informants were bonded
as agricultural labourers when they were children. In 2000 the
situation was very different. Although there were still a few
bonded children, no families had used their children to set up
new relationships of bondage. Additionally, if unmarried, non-
bonded sons worked, they kept their earnings for their sole use.
(Unmarried daughters, in contrast, gave all their money to their
mothers and in doing so released married sons of their duty of fil-
ial support.) Children are now more ‘expensive’ not only because
of the loss of income but also because educational costs are com-
paratively high and escalating. Despite these costs, education is
widely recognised as vital for success in life. Although schooling is
ostensibly free, the costs of uniforms, books, etc. have to be met
by parents. Subsidies for scheduled-caste families do not meet all
costs and are based on a system of reimbursements. As basic
teaching qualifications in government schools require only eight
years of education – typically reached by a thirteen-year-old –
many parents, even among the poor, are buying tuition or send-
ing boys and girls to private schools in an attempt to improve
their children’s education. In a context where expectations
regarding the rights of children have not been matched by sup-
port for the rights of older people, sons feel increasingly pres-
surised to overlook their parent’s need for support.
Since the research by Caldwell and colleagues, India has been
opened up by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank,
and this has extended the demands conjugal families are placing
on household resources. Globalisation has created new economic
opportunities for young people. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the
children of mill-hands now expect their parents to put them
through degrees in business studies and information technology.
While these children are attempting to move into the global mar-
ket-place, their parents are confronted not only by rising educa-
tional costs but also by pay cuts and job insecurity consequent on
cheap imports since barriers were dropped in the 1990s. A further

effect of globalisation has been the edging of a culture of resource
building for future generations towards one of conspicuous con-
sumption. Traditionally a father’s duty towards his children was
to arrange their marriages, foster his son’s livelihood and meet rit-
ually defined obligations between his family and his children’s
marital families. The expenses this entailed varied according to
region and social status. Unlike in the past, when there was little
socio-economic differentiation within sub-castes, today’s
arranged marriages are predicated on a family’s social and eco-
nomic status (Kapadia 1995). Long-standing transfers of food,
goods and wealth from a parent’s household to an adult child’s
household or in-law’s family occur on the occasion of the son’s or
daughter’s marriage and when grandchildren reach locally signif-
icant developmental stages, such as first birthday, circumcision or
ear piercing. The spread and inflation of dowry payments are well
known (Sax 1991; Kapadia 1995). Less well known, perhaps, is
the extent to which families across all classes and castes – includ-
ing the poorest – are increasingly under pressure to spend money
on markers of social status (for example, modernised housing,
consumer goods or livestock) in order to attract husbands and
wives for their children and to prevent the whole family, but
especially adult children, from losing face in relation to in-laws.
Failure to meet standards of provision for sons and daughters or
to maintain appearances appropriate to a family’s social status
lowers the family’s social standing and can sour relations between
husband and wife as well as between parent and child. This shift
of a culture of resource building for future generations towards
one of conspicuous consumption does not relieve men of the
expectation of building resources for the future generation: it
adds to it. As parental need is secondary to the needs of the con-
jugal family, these heightened demands on a household’s
resources jeopardise elderly people’s access to filial support.
In India people from what were once known as ‘untouchable
castes’ were forced to mark their untouchability not just through
their occupation, specified social relations with higher castes and
exclusion from education but also through their appearance.
They were not allowed to wear upper garments, footwear, clean
clothes or silver and gold jewellery nor were they allowed to put
oil or flowers in their hair. These were status markers reserved for
caste Hindus, as was educating one’s children. Tamil Nadu has a
long political history of opposing what is locally defined as the
Brahminically imposed caste system. The emphasis was on self-
respect, on valuing the non-Brahminical, Dravidian culture and
100 Penny Vera-Sanso
on opposing blatant forms of untouchable discrimination, such as

barring untouchables from temples or insisting on the two-tum-
bler system.12 Initially this movement was urban-based, but in
recent years it has penetrated rural areas to the extent that there
is now no concerted effort to stop children from scheduled castes
attending school or to prevent scheduled-caste people from dress-
ing in a manner similar to caste Hindus. A heightened conscious-
ness of their rights, combined with their increased access both to
state schools and marketed goods, has raised the aspirations of
scheduled-caste people, who now feel a strong need to maintain
the markers of a socially valued identity that other castes take for
granted. Not only are these needs seen as the prerogative of
younger scheduled-caste people, again raising the level of their
needs in relation to those of older people, but they place a signif-
icant burden on households whose incomes are generally the
lowest and most insecure.
Alongside these massively increased needs generated within a
son’s conjugal family, post-independence infrastructural develop-
ments and globalisation have radically restructured labour oppor-
tunities. Taking rural Tamil Nadu as an example, a biannual
irrigation system permits the growth of sugar cane and rice one
year and dry crops the next. While wet crops provide work for
both men and women, growing dry crops is mainly women’s
work. With the spread of electrification to farmland, many farms
growing labour-intensive food crops are now being sold and
turned into coconut and banana plantations reliant on semi-auto-
mated irrigation or into semi-intensive chicken farms, all of
which require minimal labour input. The small number of large
farmers who have gone over to intensive production methods are
importing workers from more impoverished areas of Tamil Nadu.
Consequently, for local people work is becoming increasingly
scarce and is consistently more in the hands of women than men,
although daily wages remain considerably higher for men than
for women. Failing to provide adequately for their conjugal fam-
ilies, men feel they are not able to provide for their parents. In the
words of one scheduled-caste agricultural labourer, ‘Our wives
are feeding us, how can we ask them to feed our parents?’
The final challenge to the system of filial support to be dis-
cussed here is the extension of life expectancy. As mentioned ear-
lier, many people are now living to the point where in theory
they are dependent on sons, who in turn are themselves depen-
dent on their sons. In practice, however, some of these ‘old-old’
people will have outlived sons, and others will have remained in
their independent households while their sons have managed to
retain or re-establish joint households with their own sons. The

widespread view that those unable to meet their obligations have
no right to ask others to do so means that men dependent on
their sons cannot ask them also to take on the responsibility of
elderly grandparents. With no voice in a grandson’s household
pressing for their inclusion, grandparents are dependent on the
willingness of grandsons and their wives to support them. The
high level of care that the very elderly require frequently makes
young families less able or willing to extend support to them. This
is especially true of households reliant on women’s incomes. In
practice, grandparents are more likely to be taken in when their
own elderly children are able to meet their practical needs. Oth-
ers appear to live on the margins of related households, either in
their own homes or in the yard of a relative. These people are
effectively childless, silently waiting for charity, that is, the offer-
ings of food made by nieces, nephews and neighbours on an ad
hoc or temporary basis.
Conclusion
Studies of old-age support in South Asia take the norm that it is a

son’s duty to look after his parents in old age as their starting-
point. Many, although by no means all, assume that elderly peo-
ple are indeed supported by their sons. Yet the Indian system of
old-age support is considerably more complex and contingent
than the norm suggests. A multigenerational perspective on
needs, rights and obligations reveals that Indian families are ori-
ented towards the young and away from the old. A man’s first
responsibility is to meet the needs of his wife and children. His
duty to his parents is secondary and shared with all his brothers.
An ageing father’s duty is to be self-supporting, to minimise his
needs and to transfer resources down the family tree to those
considered more in need of them. Consequently a son’s duty is
merely to contribute to the support of his parents when they need
it, and even then only if – and to the extent that – he is able to do
so. Wealthy parents do not require support; impoverished sons
struggle to provide any. Indeed, the latter may be relying on
transfers from their elderly parents.
The system leaves old people open to a number of vulnerabili-
ties. Parents cannot control what support they receive from their
sons and when they receive it. Instead, it is sons who determine
when parents need support, what their needs are and how much
they are able to provide. The placing of elderly people’s needs
below those of the young, which is done both by families and by

governments intent on raising the nation’s capacities through
education, medical services, infrastructural provision and global-
isation, has not only widened the gap between the needs of the
old and the young but made it more difficult for men both to ful-
fil their responsibilities to their conjugal families and to support
their parents. While it is generally acknowledged that the South
Asian system of old-age support fails those without surviving
sons, the recent rise in life expectancy is exposing another failing.
The system does not cater directly for the needs of old people
who are dependent on sons who are themselves dependent.
From a theoretical perspective, it is clear that systems of old-
age support are based on often opposing concepts of persons and
their needs, rights and obligations and that these concepts shape
the influence that economic factors have on filial support. The
combination of opposing concepts and economic factors generate
diverse patterns of intergenerational relations, ranging from filial
support or neglect to support of sons by elderly parents. It is also
clear that there is no easy distinction between people who have
sons and people who do not. It is not just those without sons who
lack filial support. Many people are effectively childless. It would
be a mistake, however, merely to broaden the category of the
childless to include those whose sons do not support them finan-
cially or physically. Instead, a large proportion of old people oscil-
late between shorter or longer periods of receiving some practical
or financial help and periods of having to be what might
euphemistically be called ‘self reliant’. These people suffer ‘inter-
mittent childlessness’. Until governments accept their role in local
systems of old-age support, first, by putting older people’s needs
on a par with those of younger people and, secondly, by not
assuming filial support is forthcoming, sons will be able to claim
that ‘They don’t need it, and I can’t give it.’
Notes
The author would like to thank Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill, Philip Kreager, Janet
Vera-Sanso and Gordon Talbot for comments on earlier drafts.
1. Elderly people’s access to work can vary significantly depending on their vil-
lages’ economic history and infrastructural provision. Urban areas generally
offer more scope for elderly people to engage in work tailored to their physi-
cal capacities, such as informal-sector trading (Vera-Sanso 1999, 2001).
2. For example, support in old age is more likely to be realised where a person
selects one of several people equally entitled to inherit that person’s property,
say, one of several nephews or sons-in-law. However, where there is only one
obvious heir, for example an only daughter, then adopting the son-in-law
does not increase the likelihood of support in old age (Vera-Sanso 1999).
3. Commenting on residential surveys, Panda (1998) rightly argues that, when
old people living with their spouse, unmarried children or other relatives are
deducted from those not classed as ‘living alone’, the number of people ‘living
with’ married sons falls considerably. He found that in rural Orissa, while 18
per cent of people over age sixty live alone, only 57 per cent ‘live with’ one or
more married sons, either in one large household or in adjacent households.
This leaves unanswered the question of how much, if any, filial support par-
ents living in adjacent households receive from married sons.
4. From the age of seventy onwards women in India have an advantage over
men in terms of life expectancy (Caldwell et al. 1988).
5. ‘Joint’ here refers to two or more families linked by a father–son relationship.
While ‘stem family’ is the more usual anthropological term, the use of ‘joint’
is more common in research on India and reflects the local distinction between
families which are ‘joined’ and ‘separate’.
6. Due to the view, widespread among all castes and classes, that young women
need protection from both predatory men and their own indiscriminative sex-
uality, young couples are keen to have parents at home who can chaperon the
bride in order to protect her as much from malicious gossip as from sexual
harassment (Vera-Sanso 1994).
7. People who have contributed to a provident fund receive a lump sum at retire-
ment. In Tamil Nadu sons and daughters, irrespective of their marital status,
are thought to have a right to a share of the money; a significant proportion is
divided equally between them as a form of pre-mortem inheritance.
8. In the case of villages with a tradition of supporting scheduled-caste beggars,
families may consider ‘too old’ only to have been reached when parents are no
longer able to move around the village begging.
9. Ill-health and old age are justifiable, relatively non-emasculating reasons to be
dependent on one’s wife (Vera-Sanso 2000). It may be reliance upon a wife’s
income and her domestic services that lies behind Rahman’s (1999) finding
that a spouse is more significant for men’s survival than it is for women’s.
10. Several authors claim that the rapid expansion of off-farm and urban employ-
ment has reshaped filial relations by providing independent incomes for the
young (Caldwell et al. 1988; Dharmalingam 1994). However, these opportu-
nities are not available to the vast majority of uneducated, low-caste people.
More significant for the understanding of the relationship between economic
conditions and co-residence is the collapse of the village-based jajmani system
in favour of a monetarised system. Under the jajmani system, workers were
paid in kind, and access to work and services depended on long-standing
relations between families (see also section on patronage in Schröder-Butter-
fill, Chapter 4, this volume). Monetarisation of agricultural labour enhanced
young, including low-caste, people’s access to work, goods and services out-
side their family’s networks, which, in turn, facilitated the move to separate
living.
11. The situation is quite different for Indian women: because they are seen as
properly dependent on fathers, husbands or sons, they rarely inherit property
from any relative (Agarwal 1998). Unlike in other parts of India, women in
West Bengal do inherit a share of their deceased husband’s property. See Dreze
(1990) for the impact inheritance has on a mother’s bargaining power in rela-
tion to her sons.
12. Under the two-tumbler system, which operated largely in tea stalls, one tumbler
would be chained to the side of the stall for the exclusive use of all untouch-
ables, while caste Hindus would be given tea in a separate set of tumblers.
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THEY DON’T NEED IT, AND I CAN’T GIVE

C entral to the Indian system of old-age support is the norm

different ages, genders and abilities are included (or excluded)

Filial Support in South India 79

Old-Age support in South Asia

people live alone, with the percentages found to be varying

Filial Support in South India 81

process, a final stage of frailty, disability or dependence. Rather, it

will remain with their parents into what is known in gerontolog-

Filial Support in South India 83

access to household resources also tend to assume that it is largely

The Slippage Between Norm and Practice

In order to explain the apparent slippage between the norm of fil-

Filial Support in South India 85

several of whom are or were bonded. A few are sweepers. Fol-

Masculinity and independent households

Filial Support in South India 87

economic support but are construed as loans, gifts or earnings.7 It

Filial Support in South India 89

move to less intensive labour disproportionately reduces incomes.

Filial Support in South India 91

parents, no matter what their chronological age, are considered to

old-age incontinence or stroke-induced paralysis, many parents

The need for privacy

Filial Support in South India 93

contingent nature of filial duty determines whether sons remain

circumstances it is difficult to be unaware of whether a fire has

The economics of filial relations

Filial Support in South India 95

should really be interpreted as indicating that ‘parents without

significance of an independent income lies is in the respect and

‘We Look After Our Families’

The slippage between the norm of old-age support and practice

Filial Support in South India 97

of filial support to cater for the needs of two dependent ageing

their elderly relatives. In the following pages each of these factors

Filial Support in South India 99

cheap imports since barriers were dropped in the 1990s. A further

100 Penny Vera-Sanso

on opposing blatant forms of untouchable discrimination, such as

Filial Support in South India 101

retain or re-establish joint households with their own sons. The

Studies of old-age support in South Asia take the norm that it is a

102 Penny Vera-Sanso

below those of the young, which is done both by families and by

Filial Support in South India 103

104 Penny Vera-Sanso

Agarwal, B. 1998. ‘Widows Versus Daughters or Widows and

Filial Support in South India 105

Prasad, K.V.E. 1995. ‘Social Security for Destitute Widows in Tamil

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