~ India needs to build social infrastructure for its growing senior citizen population, Sapru said.
Panaji, April 2025: The emergence of nuclear families and the fading away of the joint family system and values may have taken a toll on the manner in which India celebrates its festivals, according to writer and anthropologist Gayatri Sapru, who spelt out a futuristic vision of India at a recent MOG Sundays lecture held at the Museum of Goa in Pilerne.
Sapru, a cultural anthropologist trained at the University of Oxford, through the aegis of her organisation ‘Folk Frequency,’ recently compiled a path-breaking report, ‘India 2030: A Culture-First View of the Future,’ as part of Folk Frequency’s ‘India and the Future series’. The research forecasts shifts in family structures, gender roles, aspirations and identities in the country’s social scape.
“People have stopped celebrating in the metros and all of that because no one is there to send them something. One part of the ritual is missing. Mom is not there to wake you up. Mom is not there to send something. Aunt is not there to complete the ritual. So, brands are actually struggling to make people celebrate festivals,” she said during the lecture.
Sapru said that even well-known brands were finding it difficult to goad people into celebrating traditional festivals with the usual pomp on account of the smaller size of families, which, she said, has resulted in the emulation of a slice of American culture, where the days to “celebrate” are ‘made-up’ instead.
“And this becomes a kind of culture where the made-up festivals become more popular than traditional festivals. And you want to see what that looks like? You can look into American culture. They make up days, they make up reasons to celebrate and that has become a big part now of Indian culture,” she said.
Sapru also cautioned about the possible evaporation of the great Indian oral tradition of communicating history and international care, due to the emergence of nuclear families over time.
“So, this is a big danger because we are a country of oral history. We are a country where grandparents are supposed to teach things. Grandparents take care of us and we take care of them. Without that infrastructure, who is going to be taking care of whom?” she said, adding that there was a need to examine how joint Indian families as units could still exist today.
Her lecture also spanned the shifting aspirations of Generation Alpha, highlighting their wider life interests and non-conventional aspirations. “We are looking at younger people that are more interested in spirituality, in meaning seeking, in mindfulness practices starting as young as 14 and 15, a generation that is called gen alpha… 90 per cent of children in the 10th grade in India right now would like to be YouTube creators.”
Sapru also expressed concern about India’s burgeoning population of senior citizens in the coming decades and the lack of adequate social infrastructure for the segment, a predicament which is too prevalent in Goa, due to a low birth rate.
“There’s a huge problem with the fact that we’re going to see, I think, a 30 to 50 per cent increase in the elderly population in India. The way it’s naturally growing, we just don’t have the infrastructure for it. We don’t have elder care, we don’t have healthcare, we don’t have monitoring systems, we don’t have community-based systems,” she said.
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