The Mother’s Day celebration at her school has Stella worried sick. The little girl has grown up with Papa and Daddy and a whole host of loved ones whom she calls family. But who could she possibly invite for her class celebrations who would fit in as Mummy? Her friends ask her questions as the class works on invites and decorations. Who is it that packs her lunch and reads out stories at bedtime? Who holds her close when she takes a tumble and kisses her hurt away? By the time the day of the event rolls in, Stella knows who to bring to the celebration — her two fathers, of course, but also her Nonna, and her uncle, aunt and cousin, her very own circle of love. And she is not the only one. At the event, there are others with families as atypical as hers. A friend arrives with two mothers, another with a grandmother. Reading Miriam B Schiffer’s Stella Brings the Family (2015), a picture book for four to eight-year-olds, offers a glimpse into the possibilities of a modern family — flexible, diverse — and quite unrecognisable from our community life in India, where the idea of the cisgendered unit of mother, father and their children at the core of a family remains unwavering.
It’s a story that has stayed with me long after my child moved past picture books, and it is this book that comes to mind while reading the Supreme Court’s recent observations on familial relationships that expand on its traditional understanding. In an order granting maternity leave to a central government employee, who had previously availed it for the care of her husband’s children from an earlier marriage, a bench comprising Justices D Y Chandrachud and A S Bopanna observed that “atypical” families — “domestic, unmarried partnerships or queer relationships” — were as deserving of both legal protection and the benefits of social-welfare legislation as traditional families.
The observations open up possibilities of reimagining relatedness, still so tightly bound by heteronormative strictures that anything that falls outside them is wilfully ignored. The Cambridge dictionary explains a family as “a group of people who are related to each other, such as a mother, a father, and their children”. But, in a way, this reflects our own imaginative myopia. Families are anything but typical and extend beyond the biological. They are chaotic, messy, and, depending on our experience, circles of love or oppression, capable of building us up or breaking us down. Their folds have always embraced grandparents and aunts, uncles and cousins, kith and kin, near and far. It takes a village to raise a child, say neighbours who have been involved to a degree in the upbringing of each other’s young, sharing football matches, school drop-offs and admission anxieties; we all have friends who are “like family”, who step in unasked every time there’s a medical emergency or a celebration at home, who we turn to for advice or solace.
Yet, our tendency to shoehorn the many different kinds of families into recognisable versions of the traditional reflects our anxieties about a future that is constantly shifting. The heterosexual family set-up as a bedrock of our society is an anchor that we cling to because that is what we have been taught by patriarchy. What the observations by the Justices nudge us towards is perhaps a recognition that, with the shift of historical contexts that have made relations far too diverse and complex to be hemmed in by binaries, we require redefinitions of old roles. A woman can need maternity leave to look after the children of her husband from a previous marriage and their own; an LGBTQIA+ couple can be an excellent role model in diversity; two unmarried people unwaveringly committed to the child they share. Consider Pune resident Aditya Tiwari, who adopted a child with Down’s Syndrome in 2016 when he was 28, and showed that he could be both “father and mother” to his child.
The changing dynamics of the family at its most basic do find acknowledgement in the NCERT textbook for Standard IV CBSE students. In a chapter called ‘Changing Families’ in Looking Around, the Environmental Studies textbook, three representative families are put forward for children to discuss. Nimmi has had a new sister and her family is expanding. Celebrations are afoot in Nazli’s home too. Her cousin is getting married, bringing a new member into the family. Tsering’s family is sad, though. His father’s promotion mandates a transfer and the family will have to move soon to a new city.
The judicial observations make me imagine a fourth story, far out in the future somewhere, of a young Indian child like Stella, with two mothers or two fathers, or, just one, who will accompany her to a school celebration, head held high, eyes shining with excitement and be drawn into the circle as one of its own.
paromita.chakrabarti@expressindia.com
