Family relationships in Hindi and Tamil

Around a month back, I decided I would improve my productivity on this “learning in public” front by lowering my threshold for what I can publish, and by learning whatever is convenient in that moment. The result of that decision is this first topic that I am publishing on. Amongst the very many other things that happen during a wedding, there is a lot of meeting each others family. Of course this prompted a series of realisations about the immense size and strength of Indian families. But I also realised that many relationship names with my aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents are just noises to me. I don’t really understand why one person is a ‘chithi’ or a ‘mami’ or an ‘athai’.

So, I decided that this is the perfect example for a low threshold to learn something new and put it together. I asked my good friend, the internet for a family tree of the various relationship names in Hindi and in Tamil. A couple of links proved to be very useful.

Hindi family tree and Tamil family tree

Of course there are a hundred nuances which vary from one sub-culture to another. And so, my Mathur wife helped me refine the Hindi family tree to better fit the relationship names that she was accustomed to using. Similarly, my parents helped me refine the Tamil family tree in line with the ‘tam-brahm’ relationship names that they’re used to.

Rather than explaining each relationship in much more detail, perhaps the following family tree images will help paint a clear picture of what I have newly learnt.

Hindi family tree

Tamil family tree