CHAPTER 13
The Householder Tradition in
Hindu Society
T. N. Madan
Defining the Terms
To write about the householder tradition in Hindu society, it seems desirable that
we begin with a brief clarification of the key terms “householder,” “tradition,”
and “Hindu society” as employed in this chapter.
A household is a group of persons who own or “hold” a house: they are the
householders. They may as well be seen as a group that is held together, as it
were, in or by a house. The idea of ownership is mutual and dynamic: it is a
durable relationship made of many strands. A house is of course a building of
some kind intended for human habitation, but in many cultural settings, includ-
ing the Hindu, it is more than that. Besides a material (architectural, allodial)
aspect, it has ritual, symbolic, and emotional significance, establishing richer
bonds between the house and the householders, and among the householders,
than those of mere co-residence in a dwelling.
Co-residence is, however, a crucial aspect of the life of the householders. It
arises from the ties of kinship, which may be biological or fictive but modeled on
the biological, and of marriage. To elaborate, the household comprises at least a
married couple and their naturally born or adoptive children. In preindustrial
societies the household is usually more ramified structurally and may even
include distantly related or unrelated helpers and dependants. In such societies,
the family and the household usually are, unlike in contemporary western
society, differentiated. A family usually comprises many households which live
in separate sections of a house or in separate houses. The houses may be built
around a compound or may be scattered. The failure to recognize the embedded
character of the household within the family has given rise to the somewhat mis-
leading notion of the Hindu “joint” family (Madan 1962). Some perceptive
scholars have rightly observed that from the Hindu perspective the western