Breaking down the question
This is a ten-mark question focused on change, so the examiner wants the dimensions along which urban Indian families have altered, not a general essay on the family. The word urban is the crucial qualifier — the answer must show how city life, with its distinct economy, housing and mobility, reshapes family form. Changing dimensions signals that you should identify several axes of transformation, each briefly illustrated.
A strong answer resists the cliché that the joint family has simply given way to the nuclear family. The Indian evidence, as A. M. Shah showed, is more subtle — households may become residentially nuclear while kinship obligations remain joint in function.
How to approach it
Identify four or five dimensions of change and treat each in a sentence or two. Useful axes include household composition, the balance between joint and nuclear forms, gender roles and the rise of the dual-earner household, authority and decision-making, and the functions the family performs. Ground the discussion in Indian kinship scholarship — I. P. Desai and A. M. Shah on the persistence of jointness, and M. S. Gore on urbanisation and family change.
For the wider treatment of kinship, marriage and household forms, see the note on family and marriage in India.
Model answer
Family structure in urban India has changed along several dimensions, though the change is more complex than a simple shift from joint to nuclear forms.
The first dimension is household composition. Urban housing constraints, employment mobility and migration have encouraged smaller, residentially nuclear households. Yet as A. M. Shah argued, residential separation does not dissolve kinship — many urban families remain functionally joint, pooling resources, sharing responsibilities and maintaining strong obligations across households. I. P. Desai's study similarly found jointness surviving in sentiment and function even where members lived apart.
The second dimension is gender roles. The entry of women into urban employment has produced the dual-earner household, altering the domestic division of labour and giving women greater economic voice. This has begun to reshape decision-making within the family, even if traditional expectations persist.
The third dimension is authority and relationships. Urban families tend towards more companionate and egalitarian relations between spouses and greater autonomy for the younger generation, weakening the older patriarchal and gerontocratic authority that M. S. Gore associated with the rural joint family.
The fourth dimension is the family's functions. Many tasks once performed within the household — education, care of the elderly, recreation, even some caregiving — are increasingly shared with external institutions such as schools, creches and paid services, so the urban family becomes more specialised in its emotional and reproductive roles.
A fifth dimension is the emergence of newer household forms — single-person households of young migrants, delayed marriage, and greater diversity in living arrangements — reflecting the individualising pressures of urban life.
In sum, the urban Indian family is marked by residential nuclearisation alongside enduring kinship ties, more egalitarian internal relations, changing gender roles and a narrowing of its institutional functions. The joint family has not vanished so much as adapted its form to the conditions of the city.
Examiner's perspective
At ten marks, examiners look for named dimensions rather than a flowing description, and they especially reward the nuance that residential nuclearisation coexists with functional jointness — this is where A. M. Shah and I. P. Desai earn their place. A frequent weakness is asserting the death of the joint family, which the Indian evidence does not support. Including the dual-earner household and the changing division of domestic labour signals awareness of gender, and a crisp concluding line on adaptation rather than replacement leaves a strong final impression.