Role and status of the grandmothers if the urban youth is developing a preference for late marriages and deferred child-births

Dadis and Nanis: ROLE AND STATUS IN INDIAN FAMILY AND SOCIETY: A SYMPOSIUM PROPOSAL, PUNE, April, 4-6, 2008, From: "Prakash Chand Mathur" pcmathur1940@rediffmail.com Indain Book Chronicle

DNFT_april2008.doc [~33K]

For all us, grandmothers are a fact of life of, but, surprisingly, there appears to be very little appreciations of their role and status in social science literature encompassing such ‘social’ disciplines likes Sociology and Psychology, let alone the more prosaic disciplines, like Political Science, Public Administration, Law and history; even Philosophy, Theology and Religion offer very little portraiture of grandmothers either those belonging to the family of which one is a progeny or the family of which one is enrolled with deliberate and due mate-selection processes.

In other words while we all know that grandmothers are very much a part of most urban and metropolitan households, but the lack of serious analyses of their role and status is certainly too glaring an academic deficit which must be erased as several divergent change-chains are uprooting the cultural traditions of Indian families as, on the one hand, the proportion of 60-plus persons is steadily rising but, on the other, the proportion of 21-minus persons is also growing in the Indian’s demographic profiles multiplying the chances of grandmother-grandchildren cohabitation for much longer periods than was the case in, say, the 18th or 19th centuries giving rise to the possibilities of more families having resident grandmothers and , one may even dare to prognosticate, even great-grandmothers than possibly was the case in pre-British villages, towns and cities of India...

AS a (Academic) sequel and also as a serial celebration of grand-mother-hood, DNFT would like to organize, hopefully every year, a 3-day Symposium, to (socio-culturally0 celebrate and (socio-scientifically) calibrate the lives and life-crises of grandmothers in, to being with, urban and metropolitan locales, encompassing nearly 30% of Indian’s total population paying due attention to Literature, Social Science, Demography and Public Policies

Tentatively, the Symposium is scheduled for April, 2008; preferably at Pune (Maharastra, India).While more details are being worked out this Call for Expression of Interest is being broadcast on the occasion of the release ceremony of DADI - NANI: MEMORIES OF OUR GRANDMOTHERS edited by Subash Mathur and Subodh Mathur and published by Spenta Multi-Media, Mumbai.

P.C.Mathur, Symposium Coordinator, Jaipur, Tel:-94148-52747
Ashok Mathur, MT, DNFT, Pune, Tel: 98231-23050