Publisher's Synopsis
INTRODUCTION India is the home to over a billion people, accommodating incredible cultural diversity between languages, geographic regions, religious traditions and social stratifications. The North, South, East, West and Northeast have their own distinct cultures and almost every state has carved out its own cultural niche. Indian culture is indeed a complex one. Therefore, India has rightly been described as a Mini World, an ethnological museum that is fierce in its beliefs, proud of its unique way of life. Indian cultural traditions can be traced back to at least five thousand years. Immigrations, invasions, colonial rule and modernization have brought with them streams of alien influences, only parts of which were assimilated into the primordial Indian worldviews; the remaining ones coexist within the overarching Indian worldviews. One important dimension of particularly Indian culture that affects family functioning is collectivism (Avasti, 2011; Desai, 2007). Collectivistic societies give importance to family cohesion, cooperation, solidarity, and conformity (Skillman,2000). In the Indian societies, social units with common fate, common goals and common values are centralized; the person is simply a component of the social, making the in group the key unit of analysis (Triandis, 1995). Concept of Culture The core of a culture consists in the shared assumptions, beliefs and values that the people of a geographical area acquire over generations (Hofstede 2001), he also purported that culture is learned and not inherent. Assumptions, beliefs and values tend to establish and reinforce the norms that people (viz., society) adopt to decide what is appropriate behaviour in a particular situation. Assumptions, beliefs, values and norms are intermeshed and mutually interactive; they constitute the directional force behind human behaviour, which creates physical artefacts, social institutions, cultural symbols, rituals and myths. Thus human behavior, in turn reinforce people's beliefs, norms and value systems enabling the society of which they are part, to maintain cultural continuity,
