SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN 59 (3), September – December 2010, pp. 367-391 © Indian Sociological Society The Collective Family and Migration Capital: Women Workers in Bengaluru’s Garment Industry Narendar Pani and Nikky Singh As the debate on the family in India has developed a greater focus on practice, there has been a need to understand the vast diversity of this institution. While such an emphasis on detail is essential, it also tends to take attention away from more comprehensive concepts that are needed to understand processes that cover different types of families. Among these processes is the role the family plays in migration. In this paper we use a field view of the households of women working in Bengaluru’s garment industry to develop concepts of collective house- holds and collective families. We then use a modified version of the concept of migration capital to argue that collective families play a critical role in the process of migration, cutting across the economic, the social and the cultural. [Keywords: Bengaluru (Bangalore); family; household; migration; women workers] The debate on the nature of the family in India is an old and still continuing one. At one level, the debate has been over whether the Indian family is moving from being a joint family to a nuclear one, with some sociologists speaking of the myth of disintegration of the joint family (Patel 2005). At another, it has been a question of whether the idea of a Hindu joint family itself owes more to texts than to actual practice. The shift in focus to what actually exists in the field has been accompanied by a desire for greater conceptual rigour. This has resulted in increased attention being paid to the household. The variation across households had led to several household-classification schemes being ‘devised by sociologists to enable them to capture with greater precision the multiple