Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan. GOETHE. Faust II.
Nous ne dépendons point des constitutions ni des chartes, mais des instincts et des mœurs. ANATOLE FRANCE.
Contrasts between India and Europe.
AMONG the various causes which contribute to the growth of a race or the making of a nation by far the most effective and persistent is the jus connubii—the body of rules and conventions governing intermarriage. The influence of these rules penetrates every family; it abides from generation to generation, and gathers force as time goes on. The more eccentric the system, the more marked are the consequences which it tends to produce. With men, as with animals, artificial selection is more potent and works more rapidly than natural selection. In no department of life is the contrast sharper between the East and the West, the stationary and the progressive societies, the races of India and the nations of Europe. The first point which strikes an observer is the almost universal prevalence of the married state. In Europe sentiment and prudence hold divided sway, and the tendency on the whole is rather towards a decline in the number of marriages. In India neither of these motives comes prominently into play. Religion on the other hand, which in the West makes in the main for celibacy, throws its weight in India almost wholly into the other scale. A Hindu man must marry and beget children to perform his funeral rites, lest his spirit wander uneasily in the waste places of the earth. If a high-class Hindu maiden is unmarried at puberty, her condition brings social obloquy on her family, and on a strict reading of certain texts entails retrospective damnation on three generations of ancestors. But the general obligation to marry is hampered by numerous conditions. In the West the field from which a man can choose his wife is practically unlimited. The restrictions based on consanguinity are few, and all but an insignificant number of marriages are determined by the free choice of persons who have attained physical maturity, and believe that they know their own minds. In India, throughout the ever widening area dominated by Hindu tradition or influence, one set of rules contracts the circle within which a man must marry; another set artificially expands the circle within which he may not marry; a third series of conventions imposes special disabilities on the marriage of women. A fourth injunction, not as yet universal but constantly gaining ground, forbids a widow to marry again. Under the regime of infant marriage, wedded life too often commences before physical maturity has set in, and the children thus united make their first acquaintance when they are already husband and wife. Polygamy tempered by poverty, and two forms of polyandry, both tending to disappear under the influence of popular disapproval, complete the series of contrasts between Indian and European marriage customs. We shall consider later on how far the dry figures of the census bear witness to the far-reaching consequences of these restrictions on the natural tendencies of the human race. But before examining the statistics it will be of interest to describe more fully the customs alluded to above. Two of these, endogamy and exogamy, are common to all primitive societies. Polyandry and polygamy are found in several societies which are not primitive. Infant marriage, and the prohibition of widow remarriage are, I believe, peculiar to India.* Hypergamy, though it is met with in other countries, is probably more fully developed in India than anywhere else in the world. In describing these rules it is impossible to avoid constant reference to the social groups—tribes, castes and the like—by which their operation is determined. Marriage is the most prominent factor in the caste system, and the customs which regulate marriage can only be described in terms of caste or of some tribal unit which closely resembles a caste or represents a stage in the process by which caste has been evolved. The only people to whom this remark does not apply are the Burmese and other races of further India. The Muhammadans in most parts of India have been affected in various degrees by the example of Hindu marriage usage; and Indian Christians have not always escaped the same pervading influence.
Endogamy.
The terms endogamy and exogamy—passablement barbares as M. Senart has called them—were introduced more than forty years ago by the late Mr. J. F. McLennan in his well-known essay on Primitive Marriage. The laws governing marriage which these terms denote were then unnamed. Mr. McLennan was, I believe, the first to draw attention to them, and the names devised by him have been adopted by all who have since written on the subject. Endogamy, or “marrying in,” is the custom which forbids the members of a particular social group to marry any one who is not a member of the group. An endogamous division, therefore, is a group within which its members must marry. The following types of endogamous divisions may be distinguished. The enumeration is probably not exhaustive, but it will serve to illustrate the lines on which the principle of endogamy works in India:—
I. Ethnic groups consisting of compact tribes like the Indo-Aryan Rajputs of Rajputana and the Dravidian Mundas, Oraons and Santals of Chutia Nagpur, and also including tribes, like the Bhumij, who have adopted Hinduism and transformed themselves into a caste. In the case of the latter, the assumption of a common origin is borne out by what is known of the history and affinities of the tribe, but after having become a caste, its members set to work to strip themselves of all customs likely to betray their true descent. At the same time the substantial landholders, if there are any among the tribe, usually break off from the rest and set up as Rajputs, a designation which outside of Rajputana proper does not necessarily imply any race distinction, and frequently means nothing more than that the people using it have or claim to have proprietary rights in land. The local Raja of the Bhumij country pretends to be some kind of Rajput, and the smaller landholders of the tribe tend to follow his example. The change of style does not take long to effect, and it is no one’s business to challenge its validity. I have known a man who habitually posed as a Surajbansi Rajput file in court and lay immense stress upon a document in which his grandfather wrote himself down a Bhūmij. His composure was not materially disturbed when the anomaly was pointed out to him.
II. Linguistic or Provincial groups, such as Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Oriya, and Paschima or Bihari Brāhmans. These classes are very large, and include whole castes which in their turn are broken up into endogamous sub-castes. Such groups arise partly from the fiction which assumes that men who live in a different part of the country and speak a different language must be of a different race, and probably also in some measure from the inclusion of different stocks under a single caste-name. It can hardly be doubted, for example, that the large and miscellaneous groups included under the name Brāhman have been recruited to some extent from the local priests of tribes which adopted Hinduism.
III. Territorial or Local groups not corresponding to any distinction of language, such as the Rārhī and Bārendra Brāhmans, the Uttariya and Dakshini (north and south of the Ganges) Doms of Bihar, the Tamāria and Sikharbhūmi Bhūmij of Manbhum, and numerous others. It is curious to observe that in some cases these groups are called after ancient territorial divisions, such as Rārh, Bārendra, Sikharbhūm, etc., which appear on no map, and the names of which may possibly throw some light upon the early history of India.*
IV. Functional or Occupational groups, such as the Mecho and Hālia or Helo sub-castes of Kaibartta, of whom the former sell fish, while the latter, who have now given themselves brevet rank as Māhishyas, confine themselves to cultivation; and the Dulia, Machhua, and Matiāl sub-castes of Bāgdis who are distinguished respectively by carrying palanquins, fishing, and labouring as tank-diggers and earth-workers. Writing about the Hālia sub-caste of Kaibartta in 1891, I ventured on the conjecture that “this sub-caste will rise in social estimation and will altogether sink the Kaibartta.” The forecast has come true. They now call themselves Māhishyas, a name unheard of ten years ago, and pose as a distinct caste. The claim has not yet been fully recognized, but that is merely a question of time and importunity.*
V. Sectarian groups like the Bishnois of Northern India, and the Lingāyats of Bombay. These were originally religious sects which have now closed their ranks to outsiders and marry only among themselves. As a rule, however, groups based upon religious differences within the range of Hinduism do not tend to become endogamous, and the evolution of a caste from a sect is a comparatively rare phenomenon.
VI. Social groups marked off by abstaining from or practising some particular social or ceremonial usage. Thus the Sagâhut sub-caste of Sunris (traders and liquor sellers) in Bihar allow their widows to re-marry by the mained rite of biyāh, while another sub-caste of Sunnis forbid widow re-marriage, and designate themselves biyāhut, “the married one,” from biyāh, the full-blown wedding ceremony which no woman can go through twice.
In theory all the members of each of the numerous groups included in these classes are regarded as forming a body of kindred, though in any particular instance their pedigree may be extremely obscure. In the first or ethnic class, the racial tie which binds the members together and distinguishes them from other tribes forming part of the same class is palpable and acknowledged, and various legends are current which purport to account for it. In the other classes the tendency towards sub-division, which is inherent in Indian society, seems to have been set in motion by the fiction that men who speak a different language, who dwell in a different district, who worship different gods, who observe different social customs, who follow a different profession, or practise the same profession in a slightly different way, must be of a fundamentally different race. Usually, and in the case of sub-castes invariably, the fact is that there is no appreciable difference of blood between the newly-formed group and the larger aggregate from which it has broken off.
For reasons which need not be entered upon here, complete statistics of these countless divisions are never likely to be available. But many of them are known to be exceedingly small, and even the larger ones, when distributed over a large area of country, may be so scantily represented in a given locality that the number of possible marriages open to their members must be inconveniently restricted.
The disintegrating influence of the constant creation of separate connubial groups has not escaped the notice of Indian social reformers. In an able paper on the fusion of sub-castes in India Lāla Baijnāth Lāl, Judge of the Court of Small Causes in Agra, has pointed out the harm which they do “physically by narrowing the circle of selection in marriage, intellectually by cramping the energies, and morally by destroying mutual self-confidence and habits of co-operation.” The writer goes on to propose that social reformers should use their influence “to make those sub-sections of a caste which inter-dine (sic) also intermarry.” The suggestion is sound in itself and is put forward with conspicuous moderation. Its author wisely refrains from advocating intermarriage between members of different castes, and lays stress on the expediency of proceeding gradually and commencing with the smallest groups. But clearly his plan will only meet those cases where the jus convivii is wider than the jus connubii. Ordinarily, no doubt, when people will not eat together, still less will they intermarry. But this is not always the case. Among the Agarwāls, for instance, members of different religious sects intermarry but do not eat together. At marriage the wife is formally admitted into her husband’s sect, and must in future have her food cooked separately when she stays with her own people. A well-known proverb says of the Kanaujia Brāhmans of the United Provinces—Tīn Kanaujia terah chūlhā, “Three Kanaujias want thirteen kitchens,” implying that their notions on the subject of ceremonial purity are so extreme that they will hardly eat even with their nearest relations. Of these people Lāla Baijnāth remarks that “the smallness of their various clans causes the greatest difficulty in obtaining husbands for girls except on payment of extortionate sums of money.” Mr. Burn, however, informs me that, although their usages are not sufficiently defined to be capable of clear description, the groups which cannot eat together are much smaller than those which cannot intermarry. In both cases, therefore, the change suggested would aggravate the very evil which it is intended to cure. Both serve to illustrate the diversity and intricacy of social usage in India and the dangers which beset the path of any one who seeks to introduce what at first sight may seem to be a most obvious reform.
An interesting case has recently been published by Mr. Burn, tending to show how the most modern and enlightened movements, so far from promoting the consolidation of social groups, merely encourage the instinct of separation which is the governing principle of the caste system. Among the mercantile castes of the United Provinces are two large groups known as Bārahseni and Chauseni, the members of which do not intermarry. The former are shop-keepers and confectioners, and pride themselves on not allowing widows to marry again. The Chauseni are usually regarded as an illegitimate or outcast branch of the Bārahseni, but they are endeavouring to improve their status and, as a means to that end, an important section of them “has refused to recognize widow marriage, and even the rest of the group look on the practice with growing disfavour.” Some members of the Bārahseni community have recently joined the modern reformers of the Ārya Samāj, “and a marriage was lately celebrated between a Bārahseni man and a widow of the same group. When the project was announced, the orthodox Hindus held a meeting and endeavoured to stop further proceedings, but without success. Two days after the marriage another meeting was held, and the married couple and those who aided them were solemnly excommunicated. A printed notice has been widely circulated directing all Bārahsenis to avoid dining, marrying, drinking, or holding any communication with those outcasted. A large feast was subsequently held, at which about 4,000 orthodox Bārahsenis were present, but to which none of the guilty members were invited. The feeling has gone so far that some men whose sons had previously married into families now outcasted have recalled their daughters-in-law, and refuse to let them visit their parents. Others have turned their own daughters out of their houses as they are married to outcasts.”*
These proceedings give rise to the awkward question, what is to become of all the people thus expelled from their own society. The Chausenis will not receive them, because they have offended against a rule which the Chausenis themselves are beginning to observe. Nor would the outcasts consent to enter the lower group, since they insist on the entire legality of the marriages which have been contracted. The result is that at present they belong to no caste at all, and, arguing from analogy, it seems probable that they may be driven to set up a new caste of their own.
Exogamy.
Exogamy, or “marrying out,” is the custom which forbids the members of a particular social group, usually supposed to be descended from a common ancestor, or to be associated with a certain locality, to marry any one who is a member of the same group. An exogamous division, therefore, is a group outside of which its members must marry.
The following classes of exogamous divisions are found in India:—
I. Totemistic, being the names of animals, plants, etc., such as Hānsda, wild goose, Hemron, betel palm. A man of the Hānsda division may not marry a woman of that division, and so on. These totemistic divisions are confined for the most part to tribes and castes of Dravidian descent. II. Eponymous, the ancestor who gives his name to the group being either a Vedic saint (as with the Brāhmans and the castes who imitate them), or a chief of comparatively modern date, as with the Rājputs and others. III. Territorial, referring either to some very early settlement of a section or to the birthplace of its founder; prevalent among the Rājputs and the trading castes supposed to be allied with them, and found also among the Kandhs of Orissa and the Nāgas of Assam in a very primitive form, the sept there residing in the local area whose name it bears.* IV. Local, communal, or family sections of small size and comparatively recent origin. V. Titular, or nickname groups referring to some personal peculiarity or adventure of the founder of the sept, or to some office which he is supposed to have held.
Besides these we also find castes which have no sections of any kind, or, which comes to the same thing, have only one section and habitually marry within it, and simply reckon prohibited degrees in much the same way as we do ourselves.
We have seen that endogamy restricts intermarriage in one direction by creating a number of artificially small groups within which people must marry. Exogamy brings about the same result by artificially enlarging the circle within which they may not marry. Here again no complete statistics are available. But in certain proceedings held in Madras in connection with the classification of the Kamalākar caste of immigrants into Tanjore from the Deccan, who call themselves Saurāshtra Brāhmans, it was stated that each of their exogamous divisions contained about 2,000 persons. A somewhat similar result may be arrived at by calculation for the sub-castes of Brāhmans in Bombay. Compare these figures with the largest number of persons that can be imagined to be excluded by our own table of prohibited degrees and the contrast is sufficiently striking. The calculation, however, understates the case. As has often been pointed out, exogamy is one-sided in its operation. In no case may a man marry into his own group, but the name of the group goes by the male side, and consequently, so far as the rule of exogamy is concerned, there is nothing to prevent him from marrying his sister’s daughter, his maternal aunt, or even his maternal grandmother.⁂ Alliances of this kind are barred by a separate set of rules, which usually overlap the exogamous rule to some extent. Marriage with any person descended in a direct line from the same parents is universally forbidden. In order to simplify the calculation of collateral relationship—a complicated business which severely taxes the rural intellect—the following formula is in use throughout Bihar:—Chacherā, mameru, phupherā, muserā, ye chār nātā bachāke shādi hoti hai, “the line of paternal uncle, maternal uncle, paternal aunt, maternal aunt, these four relationships are to be avoided in marriage.” Here the first point to notice is that in the first generation the whole of the paternal uncle’s descendants, both male and female, are excluded by the rule prohibiting marriage within the section. In the second and subsequent generations agnates are barred, but descendants through females are not. For the paternal uncle’s daughters must have married out of the section, so that their children must belong to some other section, and thus second cousins are able to marry. Another point is that the formula does not state the number of generations to which the prohibition extends, and that different castes supply this omission in different ways. The Dravidian races generally incline to laxity. The Santāls, for example, in the Santāl Parganas, are said to make up for their sweeping prohibition on the father’s side by allowing very near alliances on the mother’s side—a fact well illustrated in their proverb “No man heeds a cow-track, or regards his mother’s sept.” Many castes, again, exclude a smaller number of generations on the female side, while others profess to prohibit intermarriage so long as any relationship, however remote, can be traced between the parties.
Hypergamy.
Hypergamy, or “marrying up,”* is the custom which forbids a woman of a particular group to marry a man of a group lower than her own in social standing, and compels her to marry in a group equal or superior in rank. A hypergamous division, therefore, is a group forming part of a series governed by the foregoing rule. The men of the division can marry in it or below it; the women can marry in it or above it.
The following are instances of hypergamous divisions:— (a) The four original classes (varnas) as depicted in the somewhat contradictory utterances of the law books, which seem to deal with a period of transition when caste was being gradually evolved out of a series of hypergamous classes. Thus one set of passages in Manu, Baudhayana, Vishnu and Narada allows a Brahman to marry in succession a woman of each of the four castes; while other texts from the same authorities forbid him to marry a Sudra woman. According to Baudhayana, Gautama, and Usanas marriages in which the wife was only one grade below the husband are freely admissible and the children take the rank of the father, so that the son of a Vaisya by a Sudra woman was counted a Vaisya.† On the other hand, all authorities agree in reprobating marriages between men of lower classes and women of higher.
(b) The groups Kulin, Siddha-Srotriya, Sādhya-Srotriya, and Kāshta-Srotriya among the Rārhi Brāhmans of Bengal as organized by Ballāl Sen. The rule was that a man of the Kulin class could marry a woman of his own class or of the two higher Srotriya classes; a Siddha-Srotriya could marry in his own group or in the Sādhya group; but the Sādhya and Kāshta-Srotriyas might take wives only within the limits of their own classes. Conversely, women of the Sādhya-Srotriya class could marry in their own class or the two classes above them; Siddha-Srotriya women in their own class or in the Kulin class; while Kulin women at one end of the scale and Kāshta women at the other were restricted in their choice of husbands to the Kulin and Kāshta groups.
(c) Among the Marāthas families belonging to groups such as Kadam, Bānde, Bhosle, Powār, Nimbālkar, etc., whose ancestors rose to power during the Marātha ascendancy, will not give their daughters in marriage to Marāthas of lower social position.* In some cases intermarriage has been entirely broken off; and the group is converting itself into a caste which claims descent from the traditional Kshatriyas.
(d) A curious development of hypergamy has taken place of recent years among the Pods, a cultivating and fishing caste very numerous in the districts near Calcutta. Those Pods who have taken to English education and become clerks, pleaders, doctors, and the like, refuse to give their daughters in marriage to their agricultural and fishing-caste fellows though they still condescend to take brides from the latter. The case is closely parallel to that of the Māhisya Kaibarttas mentioned above, and is of interest as exhibiting an earlier stage in the process of caste-making. The educated Pods, it will be observed, have not completely separated from the main body of their caste; they have merely set up for themselves a special jus connubii, the right of taking girls without giving them in return, like the three higher classes in the traditional Indian system. Their number being comparatively small, they probably have not women enough to meet their own needs. But this will right itself in course of time, and they will then follow the classical precedent of the twice-born classes and will marry only within their own group. Later on they will start a distinctive name, probably a pretentious Sanskrit derivative, and will disclaim all connexion with the Pods. They will then have become a caste in the ordinary acceptation of the word, and in a generation or two their humble origin will be forgotten.
Influence of hypergamy.
The examples given above show the custom of hypergamy to be of great antiquity, and to prevail in India over a very wide area at the present day. Its theoretical working is perhaps best illustrated by the following diagram. Let X represent a caste divided into the three hypergamous groups, A, B, and C. Within each group, the capital letters stand for the marriageable men, and the small letters for the marriageable women of the group. The horizontal and diagonal lines connecting the capitals with the small letters show what classes of men and women can intermarry. It will be seen that a man of the A group can marry a woman of his own or of the two lower groups; a man of B can marry into B or C, while a man of C is confined to his own class, and cannot marry a woman from either of the classes above him. Conversely, a woman of the C class can get a husband from A, B, or C, and a woman of the B class from A or B; but a woman of the A class cannot find a husband outside of her own group. Excluding polygamy and polyandry, and supposing the women of each group to be evenly distributed among the groups they are entitled to marry into, the result of the first series of marriages would be to leave two-thirds of the women in the A group without husbands, and two-thirds of the men in the C group without wives. Of course in practice the system does not work in this mechanical fashion. Husbands are at a premium in the upper groups and become the object of vigorous competition; the bride-price of early usage disappears, and is replaced by the bridegroom-price now paid among most of the higher castes in India. The rich get their daughters married above their proper rank; poorer people are driven to reckless borrowing or, in the last resort, to other means, if they would avoid the disgrace of letting their daughters grow up unmarried. There are, unhappily, several ways of redressing the unequal proportions of the sexes and putting artificially straight what has been artificially made crooked. One approved way is for the parents to kill, or to make no attempt to keep alive, all female infants except those for whom they can make sure of finding husbands. This is what the Rajputs of Northern India used to do until a law was passed making things unpleasant for any village which could not show a respectable proportion of girls. The practice seems to be as old as the Yajur Veda, which speaks of female infants being exposed when born; while the remark in the Atharva Veda, that the birth of a daughter is a calamity, may perhaps imply that then, as now, infanticide was connected with the difficulty of getting daughters suitably married.*
Another method is that of wholesale polygamy, such as was practised by the Kulin Brāhmans of Bengal a couple of generations ago. Several middle-aged Kulins are known to have had more than a hundred wives, and to have spent their lives on a round of visits to their mothers-in-law. For each wife they had received a handsome bridegroom-price, diminishing in amount with the number of wives they had at the time of the marriage; they made what they could out of each periodical visit; and they asked no questions about the children. Nearly forty years ago Babu Abhaya Chandra Das described this scandalous state of things in a paper read before the Dacca Institute. He said: “I know of two Kulins, one of whom married about 60 wives, and the other had upwards of 100; each of these men had a book in which he entered the names of villages where he married as well as the names of the fathers of the wives married. At the commencement of the cold weather, each would start on his connubial tour, if I may so express it, with his memo-book, and after collecting money from each wife visited according to her father’s pecuniary circumstances, return home at the beginning of the summer to spend the rest of the year in his village. It is not infrequently the case that fathers and sons and husbands and wives meet as perfect strangers to one another, and become overwhelmed with shame when their mutual relations are known. I heard also of one case in which a Kulin, by mistaking the name, visited the daughter of a certain Bangsaj, who was glad to receive his supposed son-in-law, but a few days afterwards, the real son-in-law paid his visit, and the mistake was then found out to the utter amazement of the father”—and, one would think, to the consternation of the daughter.
The system, I am informed, has even now not wholly died out, but it prevails on a less outrageous scale; a connubial touring season is not so much in evidence; and educated opinion condemns it forcibly. According to a recent writer,* however, “it is still in full force in East Bengal, where such an abominable practice of having many wives still exists.” And an actual case was mentioned to me recently of a Kulin Brāhman living in the neighbourhood of Calcutta who has more than fifty wives, duly entered in a register, whom he visits, for a consideration, during the cold weather. The same writer gives an interesting account of a modern development of the principle of hypergamy which has arisen from the demand for graduate husbands in the marriage market of Bengal.
“Education instead of stifling or mitigating the baneful effects of Kulinism has gone in a horrible degree to strengthen them. In fact, the University standard has become a more powerful engine of oppression for the girl’s father than the so-called Ballāli Kulinism. A Bachelor of Arts, if he is also a bachelor in life, even if he is a homeless pauper living upon his friends’ bounty, and be he a Kulin or a Maulik or Achal, must have, besides ‘a wingless nymph,’ as goes the Bengali adage, for his spouse adorned with jewelry and gold ornaments from head to foot, a cash demand of at least Rs. 4000, besides the personal dower for the bridegroom’s embellishment called barābharun, from a girl’s father of ordinary means, say a Deputy Magistrate or a Sub-Judge. If the father has the misfortune to possess a girl of somewhat dark complexion or in any way ugly or deformed, the demand may run up to Rs. 15,000. Add to this the numerous other items of expenditure to be incurred by the bride’s father on, before, and after the marriage, and the result is simply ruinous to him, to say the least. We have personal knowledge of an incident where the bridegroom’s party, composed of educated men and headed by an M.A., a renowned professor of a Government College, had demanded after the marriage from the bride’s father, who had already paid double the demand contracted, a blackmail which he agreeably termed barayātramaryādā (honorarium to bridegroom’s party) for each member, whether Kulins or Mauliks, composing the bridegroom’s party, for partaking food in the bride’s house. The most ridiculous feature in the whole affair was that the names of the bridegroom, his brother and his father, who had already received a handsome honorarium for his position as the boy’s father, were also enlisted in this general list of bridegroom’s party to exact double honorarium. The bride’s father having refused to comply with this unjust demand as an insult, innovation and contrary to family custom, he was asked to remit this demand immediately by telegraphic money-order on pain of having his little girl detained in a forlorn and far-off country in case of default. In the majority of cases, the bridegroom’s party now demands the whole amount in cash in advance, and many even stoop to the meanness of demanding a registered document binding the bride’s father in a contract so that he may not defraud hereafter. The least causes of dissatisfaction, however frivolous (and these could be easily picked up), subject the poor little girl-wife to all sorts of ill-treatment in her strange father-in-law’s house, so long as she does not grow old enough to assert her independence there. Threats to remarry the bridegroom at once if the bride’s party would not soon suitably make amends for such frivolous omissions and commissions are also in some cases realized to wreak vengeance. The miserable position of a girl’s father is very well depicted in the Bengali adages which say that ‘he has hanging over his head a chain of shoes to strike him at every turn,’ and that ‘bride’s father is soil and bridegroom’s father is peg’ (meyer bāp māti chheler bāp khūnti). In view of the increasing difficulties in daughters’ marriages which are being occasioned in consequence of the daily rising and multiplicity of the items of demand, thoughtful men have already rightly apprehended, that if matters go on in this stride, there would soon be a time when girls’ fathers would be compelled to have recourse to secret infanticide.”
Mr. Dutt’s view of the matter is confirmed by a remarkable speech delivered in Bengali by the Hon’ble Mr. Justice Mittra of the Calcutta High Court and published in the Kayasth Patrika.
“Look at the present situation. I have heard that in Rajputana daughters used to be killed as soon as they were born, because bridegrooms could not be had easily. In these disastrous days of ours, in our country also, in order to rid ourselves of the troubles of a daughter’s marriage, we might also be tempted to do the same at her birth. Now, as it is, the faces of the parents grow lean as soon as a girl is born to them. The birth of a daughter is considered to be the penalty of sins committed in a former state of existence. It is needless to dwell on the present state of Hindu society, as it is too well known. Led by avarice or vanity, though many shut their eyes and raise the plea that there is nothing wrong in ‘committing highway robbery on a thief,’ they fully understand what a disaster has been the effect. Hundreds of girls’ fathers have to sell or mortgage their residential houses; thousands of girl-wives have to suffer in patience maltreatment like prisoners under their fathers-in-laws’ roofs in consequence of their fathers’ inability to meet unjust demands. Placed in a strange house for the first time, the poor girl-wives sorely feel the absence of their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters; they are constantly tormented by the abusive epithets heaped on their parents and they are themselves subjected to intolerable personal ill-usage. These circumstances drive us to the conclusion that it would be far better to kill girls as soon as they are born or to keep them in life-long maidenhood regardless of religion and morality. * * * * * * * A boy’s father, who has not even a house of his own and lives in a hired lodging where he has brought up his son, now aspires to become the possessor of a two-storied house and Govt. Promissory paper on his son’s marriage. Perhaps he is over head and ears in debt and he intends to liquidate that by his son’s marriage. He wants to send his son to England to become a Civilian, he has no money, so he must get it by his son’s marriage. * * * * * Punishments for theft and robbery are provided in the Indian Penal Code, but there is no provision in it for punishing such a father, although his offence is just as bad, and because there is no such provision, he can ruin the girl’s father with absolute impunity.”
These bitter complaints relate to the state of things among the Dakhin-Rārhi sub caste of Kāyasths in Bengal. But they are not confined to that sub-caste. A case has been brought to my notice which shows that the Uttar-Rārhi Kāyasths are involved in similar difficulties arising out of the rule of hypergamy. A gentleman belonging to the Kulin sub-division of this sub-caste had two daughters. For the elder he was unable to find a Kulin husband, so he married her to a Maulik, an offence for which the community made him pay a heavy fine. Shortly before his death, he managed, after much haggling, to arrange a marriage for the second girl with a Kulin boy of suitable pedigree, for whom he had to pay a bridegroom price of Rs. 1000, which was deposited with one of the boy’s relatives under an agreement that it should be spent on his education. The girl was married when she was nine years old, her husband being then fourteen, but she remained with her own family until she had completed her twelfth year, the statutory age for cohabitation. Soon after she joined her husband it came out that his people had made away with the Rs. 1000, and they demanded from the girl’s brother, a clerk on a small salary, a regular payment of Rs. 10 a month for the education of her husband, who had just passed the Matriculation examination of the Calcutta University. When the brother protested his inability to meet this unreasonable demand, the mother-in-law, following the example of Mr. Wackford Squeers, repeatedly beat the helpless child-wife so severely that she fainted from pain. Fortunately the girl had been taught to write and she managed to post a letter describing her sufferings, whereupon a stalwart relative intervened and took her away by force. She is now with her own people, and I understand that they intend to keep her until she is big enough to bid defiance to her mother-in-law.
It seems at first sight surprising that two highly cultivated representatives of the chief literate caste in the most advanced province in India should gravely refer to female infanticide as a solution of matrimonial difficulties arising from a demand for English education which is itself hardly two generations old. Nor is it less remarkable to find the primitive belief that a girl unmarried at puberty is a disgrace to her family, and an offence against religion, surviving in undiminished force side by side with vigorous competition for the modern luxury of a graduate bridegroom. But so long as these conditions prevail, the danger of a reversion to barbarous usages, such as the writers quoted above apprehend, cannot be wholly excluded. The truth of course is—and the sooner it is realized the better—that the development of the literate classes in modern India has proceeded on irregular and one-sided lines. Intellectual and political ideals have assumed undue prominence, while the social and moral reforms without which no wholesome national life is possible have been thrust into the background. History affords no warrant for the belief that the enthusiasm of nationality can be kindled in sordid and degenerate surroundings. Wherever that sentiment has displayed any real vitality, it has been fostered and stimulated by the influence of the women of the race. A society which accepts intellectual inanition and moral stagnation as the natural condition of its womankind cannot hope to develop the higher qualities of courage, devotion, and self-sacrifice which go to the making of nations.
Female infanticide and exogamy.
The voluminous literature relating to female infanticide in India contains many indications that where the practice is not merely sporadic, resulting from the pressure of starvation, but has hardened into a recognized usage, it may be traced to the operation of two distinct causes. In certain stages of tribal society, the practice of killing females seems to be connected with the rule of exogamy. The late Mr. J. F. McLennan observed long ago that the two usages often existed side by side. In the theory of exogamy put forward in his essay on Primitive Marriage, he argued that female infanticide as practised by savages disturbed the balance of the sexes and drove men to capture their wives from other tribes—a custom which in course of time resolved itself into the systematic observance of exogamy. This view was open to the obvious rejoinder that if all tribes killed their female infants at an equal rate, there would soon be no women to capture, and the race would die out. Even without pressing this point, it was difficult to see why primitive man should prefer the dangerous and inconvenient process of capturing a wife from a hostile tribe to the simpler method of marrying a girl belonging to his own local community. Given, however, an adequate cause inducing people to practise exogamy—a cause as effective as the influence of natural selection would unquestionably be—and it becomes easy to understand that in certain states of society a tendency to female infanticide would be a natural consequence, not as McLennan supposed a cause, of the custom of exogamy. For if men were restrained by inexorable usage from marrying the girls born in the sept or local group of blood kindred, the temptation to kill these bouches inutiles would probably be very strong. Not only would girls be useless to the men of the tribe as wives, but the more of them there were, the more would the tribe be preyed upon by neighbours in quest of wives. As a matter of fact, this was very much the view that the Khonds took of the question. In 1842 they told Major Macpherson in so many words that it was better to destroy girls in their infancy than to allow them to grow up and become causes of strife afterwards.* I am indebted to the late Sir John Edgar, k.c.i.e., c.s.i., for a parallel instance from the Nāgas with whom, as with the Khonds, the local exogamous clan is the unit of tribal society. It seems that on a tour through the Nāga country, Colonel McCulloch, Political Agent for Manipur, came across a village which struck him as remarkably destitute of female children. On making inquiries he found that there was not a single girl in the place, for the simple reason that the people killed all that were born in order to save themselves from the annoyance of being harried by wife-hunting parties from a stronger clan. Colonel McCulloch got hold of the mothers, and managed to induce them to spare their girls in future, on the understanding that their neighbours should stop raiding and adopt a more peaceable method of wooing. By a judicious mixture of threats and persuasion, the other clan was led to agree to the arrangement, and many years after, while staying in Manipur, Sir John Edgar was present, when a troop of Nāga girls from the weaker group paid a visit of ceremony to Colonel McCulloch, bearing an offering of cloth of their own weaving in token of their gratitude to the man who had saved their lives.†
Instances of this sort, vouched for by competent observers and drawn from tribes dwelling so far apart and belonging to such widely different stocks as the Dravidian Khonds of Orissa and the Mongoloid Nāgas of Assam, may be regarded as crucial in their bearing on the question of the relation of female infanticide to the custom of exogamy. They seem to show that the practice of killing female infants is a consequence, not a cause, and assuredly not the cause, of the rule that a man may not marry a woman of his own tribe. This consequence, moreover, ensues only so long as society is in a savage state ; and tends to die out, as it has died out among both Khonds and Nāgas, directly a régime of violence is succeeded by a régime of law. As soon as this change has been effected, the value of women tends to rise. They become a saleable commodity, which neighbouring tribes will buy with a price, and the inducement to kill them in infancy ceases to exist. In short, savage infanticide is an incident of the primitive struggle for bare existence which disappears when the severity of the struggle is mitigated by peace.
Female infanticide and hypergamy.
There is, however, another form of infanticide, which is connected not with exogamy but with hypergamy, and which requires to be carefully distinguished from the savage type. Given a tribe like the Rājputs of Northern India, divided into a number of exogamous septs, and strongly impressed with the idea of purity of blood and the importance of correct ceremonial observances, it follows of necessity that in course of time some groups will drop behind the others and will come to be regarded as socially inferior to the rest. To these septs the superior groups refuse to give their daughters in marriage and there arises the state of things illustrated by the diagram on page 165. The balance of the sexes is disturbed ; the superior groups find themselves embarrassed with a surplus of girls ; and the bridegroom-price tends to rise until it presses severely on the means of families unfortunate enough to have several daughters to marry. Family pride, religious prescription, and the necessity of avoiding scandals, render it impossible to let girls grow up with the prospect of remaining old maids ; convents and sisterhoods are unknown ; and the only way out of the difficulty, as it presents itself to the Rājput father, is to permit no more girls to arrive at maturity than can certainly be provided with husbands. The ultimate result no doubt is much the same as among savage people like Nāgas and Khonds, but it is arrived at in a different way and springs from a different principle. The Nāga kills his daughter lest a stronger man than he should desire her, and in effecting her capture should take her father’s head as an incidental trophy. The Rājput makes away with his daughter in the belief that no one will be anxious to marry her, and that the family will be disgraced if she grows up an old maid. In the one case husbands are too scarce; in the other they are obtrusively plentiful. It may be added that this refined form of infanticide is far more difficult to suppress than the savage form. The one dies out of itself as the forcible capture of wives falls into disuse, and life generally becomes easier; the other tends to spread with the growth of family pride and personal luxury, and may even offer substantial resistance to the attempt to stamp it out by penal legislation.
It may be asserted with confidence that the savage form of infanticide no longer exists in India. For many years past tribal raids in quest of wives or of heads have been very effectually discouraged, and the usage has died out with the removal of the cause. Whether the refined or sumptuary form, where a daughter’s life is sacrificed to save the dot demanded by family pride, has entirely disappeared is a question on which there is room for difference of opinion. That it prevailed on a large scale up to comparatively recent times there is only too much reason to believe, and it seems to have been most persistent where one would least expect to find it—side by side with the otherwise chivalrous traditions of the warlike Indo-Aryan races of Upper India.
In 1881 Mr. Coldstream, Deputy Commissioner of Hoshyārpur in the Punjab, wrote on the subject as follows:—
“Forty years ago probably many hundreds of female children were annually buried in this district immediately after birth. When several female children were born in succession, the destruction of the last born was carried out with the following observance—a piece of gur (molasses) was placed in the mouth of the child, a skein of cotton was laid on her breast, and the following incantation recited two or three times:—
“Eat gur, spin your thread, We don’t want you, but a brother instead.”
The infants were usually put into gharras or waterpots and buried in the ground. . . . Illustrating the subject of the small proportional number of females, I will quote some remarks by a highly educated native officer, a Hindu. He writes as follows:—
“Infanticide has not quite disappeared. I am quite sure that in certain old families, those who by custom must spend much money on the marriage of daughters, and are poor, it is still practised. They either suffocate them or give the juice of the āk plant (Calatropis gigantea) in the gurthi, the first nourishment given to a newborn child.”
More recondite methods were also sometimes adopted. A Panjābi friend of mine, a member of a tribe which followed the custom of hypergamy, with whom I was discussing the subject of female infanticide, told me that when he was eight years old he was summoned to his mother’s bedside to sanction and assist at the murder of a newborn girl. His father being away from home, he was called upon to exercise the patria potestas as the eldest male member of the household then present. The child was given him to hold, and the midwife poured over her head two large jars of water, chilled almost to freezing by being put out on the roof during a December night. Her face instantly turned black and she died in the arms of her terrified brother. All the girls that were born met with a similar fate. The mother complied reluctantly with the barbarous usage of the family, but the horror of the thing was with her through life, and when she was dying her remorse conjured up a ghastly vision of the spirits of her murdered children, standing at her bedside armed with iron hooks and crying vindictively to the soul still lingering in her body, “Come out, come out that we may tear you in pieces.” This, however, happened nearly fifty years ago, and my friend assures me that in his tribe at any rate systematic infanticide has disappeared under the influence of popular education, and that twenty girls may now be seen where in his boyhood hardly one could be found.
Official opinion seems to incline, on the whole, to the comfortable belief that these crude manifestations of paternal authority have of late years fallen into disuse. No one has the least desire to unveil the mysteries of high caste households, and there is something to be said for the cynical view that it is better to wink at the secret murder of an uncertain number of babies than to face the certain odium of repressive legislation enforced by the domiciliary visits of an Asiatic police. Hardly any one, however, is prepared to go the length of asserting that infanticide is now nothing more than a dim tradition of the dreadful past. On the contrary the practice is definitely stated to continue, though in a modified, more subtle, and, as some may think, less merciful form. According to the writers of the last three Census Reports, all of whom seem to have taken much trouble to arrive at the truth, the mental attitude of the average Panjābī parent towards superfluous daughters may be summed up in Clough’s couplet:
“ Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not strive Officiously to keep alive.”
Writing in 1883 Sir Denzil Ibbetson quotes Mr. Coldstream’s remark that “there is, I think, some indication given in the statistics of the existence of a certain popular depreciation of female child life,” and goes on to say, “this last sentence appears to me exactly to express the existing state of affairs. That infanticide is practised at all generally I do not believe ; that it is habitual with any class, I doubt ; and if with any, it is, I think, only with some exceedingly limited sections of the community, such as perhaps the Bedi families of Gurdaspur, and even there takes the form of intentional neglect rather than actual murder. But there is not the slightest doubt that the life of a girl is less valued and worse cared for than that of a boy ; chiefly indeed, among the hypergamous classes who cannot find husbands for them, the higher castes of the Eastern Punjab who will not sell their daughters, and the Hindus who spend much money on their marriage and account it shameful to leave them unmarried ; but also in a less degree and as a relic of the old fighting days, and perhaps from the contagion of Hindu ideas, among all other classes of the Punjab people without distinction of race, religion, or locality.”
Ten years later we find Mr. Maclagan, who conducted the Census of 1891, stating his conclusions as follows :—
“It is notorious that in this country female life is less cared for at all ages, and more especially in infancy, than that of males. Whether the neglect of female life in early youth is intentional or not, and whether infant girls are actually killed, are questions to which our statistics can scarcely give more than a very slight clue. The general impression, doubtless, is that in the province at large there is a certain amount of customary neglect which can scarcely be called intentional ; but that in certain areas and among certain classes the evil assumes a more serious form. And the statistical returns may be found of some slight value in indicating the localities and the castes which are most open to suspicion on this account.”*
Mr. Rose, the Superintendent of the Census taken in 1901, writes thus : “On the whole, I should be inclined to think that deliberate female infanticide is rare, and that when perpetrated, it is due to a combination of causes. If it was felt that the child was likely to cause misfortune, and that her marriage would be difficult, it may be that she would be killed. But such cases cannot be numerous. To this the Jāts, Hindu and Sikh, are a possible exception, and the only solution of the problem in their case is that infanticide is a barbarous form of Malthusian practices. This idea was suggested many years ago by Major Goldney, as Deputy-Commissioner of Ludhiana, the district in which the data are the most inexplicable. Even less easy is it to account for the mortality amongst girl-children after the age of infancy. No one who has seen the peasantry, especially the Jāt peasantry, in their villages, at fairs and the like, could for a moment suggest that women and girls in this province are treated, generally, with cruelty or intentional neglect. Sikhs, especially, treat women well. One can only say that ignorance and an unconscious ill-treatment of females at all ages may result from the low estimation in which savage and backward races hold women. Of all the data obtained the most significant is the mortality among female infants in years of famine.” *
The statistics of the subject certainly present some remarkable features. It is difficult to offer any plausible explanation of the fact that the proportion of girls to boys among children under five ranges in British territory from 96 per cent. among Muhammadans, and 92 per cent. among Hindus, to 76 per cent. among Sikhs, while the Sikh figure in one district is no more than 70, and in a particular tribe falls as low as 62 per cent. The idea has been thrown out that the practice of killing female infants, if persevered in for many generations, might induce among the surviving women a hereditary tendency to bear more boys than girls. Darwin’s authority has been cited in support of this conjecture, which was first put forward by Colonel Marshall in explanation of the preponderance of males among the Todās of the Nilgiri hills.† There is obviously no means of testing the speculation, PEOPLE OF INDIA
but in 1891 Mr. Maclagan observed that " castes, such as the Gakkhars and semi-Rajput tribes, such as the Dhunds and Rathis, which used to practise or to be suspected of practising infanticide have now a larger proportion of women than the average; and this fact so far tends to damage the theory that female infanticide leads to a hereditary incapacity to produce female children." In an earlier paragraph of the same report Mr. Maclagan writes: " It has been suggested to me that the methods of dressing young children (when they are dressed at all) may have something to do with the different rates of death among girls and boys. In the centre of the province it is customary to find young girls dressed in petticoats only, and young boys in jackets only ; and as the latter is undoubtedly the sounder method from a sanitary point of view, the boys have a better assurance of life than the girls." He does not himself accept this explanation, which is open to the obvious criticism, first, that in other parts of India where the custom in the matter of children’s dress is the same, no such marked disproportion between the sexes is observed; and, secondly, that when children are under five, even this exiguous ralment is deemed superfluous, and both sexes run about impartially naked. Seeing then, that neither natural selection nor fashion can be appealed to in explanation of the Punjab statistics, we can but take refuge in the sage and comprehensive remark of the latest continental writer on the problem of sex that the question is “involved in the profoundest obscurity.” Only one thing is certain—if legislation cannot compel a man to love his neighbour like himself, still less can it compel him to love his daughter as much as his son. The people themselves must cure the evil, if evil there be. The tradition of ages which leads to the neglect of female children will only give way to a general rise in the standard of domestic ethics. That no doubt will come in time as the spread of education, especially of female education, brings about a higher conception of the position and influence of women in the Eastern world.
Origin of hypergamy.
The origin of the custom of hypergamy is obscure. We find it in full force at the time of the law-books, the earliest of which are believed by Bühler to be somewhat anterior to the fourth and fifth centuries B.C., and it has been shown to be quite alive and now greatly diminished, and at the present day exists chiefly, owing to their conservatism, among the priestly classes. [(The Times, 1906, pp. 478, 601.)] continually assuming new forms at the present day. It is curious that a practice which extends over so long a period, and is so intimately connected with the evolution of caste, should have escaped the notice of all modern writers on the early history of marriage. The authors of the law-books give no account of the causes which produced it, nor would one expect them to do so. They merely say that marriages between men of a higher class and women of a lower class are according to the order of nature (anuloma “with the hair”), while marriages of the converse type are pratiloma, “against the hair” or unnatural. The usage seems to be one which might arise wherever an invading race, bringing with it comparatively few women, took captives from among the people whose territory they occupied. Captured women would become the wives or concubines of their captors; male captives, if not slain off-hand, would be kept as slaves, and would in no case be accepted as husbands for the daughters of the conquering race. One may say, indeed, that wherever slavery has prevailed, or wherever one race has established a marked political ascendency over another, there hypergamy has necessarily established itself. The mixed or coloured races of America, Mulattoes, Quadroons, Mestizos, and the like were, in the first instance at any rate, the offspring of hypergamous unions, corresponding to the anuloma marriages of the Indian law-books. The fathers were Spaniards or Englishmen, the mothers Indians or Negresses. In Rajputana, on the other hand, hypergamy appears to be associated with territorial sovereignty and the possession of landed property. In theory all Rajputs are equal within the tribe, but ruling chiefs will only give their daughters to men of their own class, and a land-owning Rajput, deeming himself no doubt a chieftain in a small way, will not accept a landless man as his son-in-law. A curious story, which seems to belong to the same order of ideas, is told in the Punjab to account for the hypergamous status of one of the Jāt clans. One day, it is said, as the Emperor Akbar was out hunting, he came suddenly upon a Jāt woman who was standing by a well with a heavy jar of water on her head and a full-grown buffalo and its calf on either side of her. The Emperor’s cavalcade frightened the animals and they prepared to break away. But the sturdy Jātni was equal to the emergency. With one hand she seized the buffalo and held it by a horn, with the other she steadied the jar of water on her head, while she secured the calf by putting her foot on its tethering rope. Seeing this display of strength and presence of mind the Emperor exclaimed, “A woman like that should be the mother of heroes,” and shortly afterwards took her to wife in due form. Her people had places of honour given them in the Imperial Darbār, and the clan has been known ever afterwards as Akbari or Darbāri Jāts, ranking at the top of the hypergamous system of the tribe, taking wives from other clans, but giving their daughters to none.*
A singularly complete parallel to the Indian usage of hypergamy occurs in Madagascar, where the Antimerina or patrician caste is divided into six classes, each of which claims descent from a royal ancestor and regards itself as a group of blood relations. According to M. Arnold Van Gennep,† the latest authority on the subject, these groups are endogamous in theory, but a man of a higher class may marry a woman of a lower class. On the other hand, a woman of higher rank is prohibited by strict taboo from marrying beneath her; and if she should so far demean herself as to marry a commoner, she loses her title of nobility and is disowned by her family.
Here one is tempted to hazard the conjecture that the matrimonial relations between patricians and plebeians in Rome before the Lex Canuleia (B.C. 445), may have been regulated by the custom of hypergamy, patricians taking wives from among the plebeians but not giving their daughters in return. This seems to be in accordance with the traditional origin of the plebeians. Had the two groups been as absolutely separate as the imaginary debate reported in the fourth book of Livy seems to imply, it is difficult to understand how the jus connubii could have been granted as readily as is alleged to have been the case, or why the plebs should have been so anxious to obtain the concession. When distinct castes have once been formed, the sentiment of the lower groups as well as of the higher is usually opposed to amalgamation. I surmise, therefore, that at the time of the passing of the Lex Canuleia, the plebs and the patriciate had not actually hardened into castes,‡ and that marriages between patrician men and plebeian women did actually take place, possibly by an inferior grade of ritual. What the plebs wanted and what the law gave them, it is suggested, was the right for plebeian men to marry patrician women. This conjecture seems to derive some support from Livy’s account of the transaction. He says in one place that the denial of connubium to the plebs dated only from the time of the decemvirs; while in another passage he puts into the mouth of the advocate of the plebeian cause an argument which is only intelligible on the assumption that marriages between patricians and plebeians were not wholly unknown. The patrician orator argues that the change will introduce confusion into the system of clans; that no one will know to what gens he belongs; and that the religious observances (sacra gentilicia) incumbent on these family groups will come to be neglected. To this the plebeian replies that the status of the father will determine that of the child (patrem sequuntur liberi), and that the appeal to religion is a mere attempt to prejudice the case. Now if the plebs and patriciate had been distinct castes in the strict Indian sense of the term, no intermarriage would have been possible, and the question of the offspring of mixed marriages belonging to their father’s group could not have arisen. The argument patrem sequuntur liberi would have appealed to no one had it not been a statement of fact with which the audience were familiar. And it cannot have meant that if a plebeian man married a patrician woman the children ranked as plebeians, for if that had been so, there would have been full connubium and no legislation would have been required. It seems to follow that the statement expressed the fact that when a patrician man married a plebeian woman, the children were reckoned as patricians and belonged to the gens of the father—that the relations between the two groups were what we call hypergamous.
Whatever may have been the origin of the custom, whether slavery, conquest, racial superiority, political or plutocratic domination, or territorial supremacy gave it the first impulse, it is clear that, in any locality where it got started, the principle would be likely to extend itself, by the operation of imitative fiction, to the connubial relations of all classes not absolutely equal in rank. This is what seems to have happened in several parts of India, where the influence of hypergamy may be traced in the disturbance of the balance of the sexes, and the prevalence of polygamy or female infanticide.
Widow and infant marriage.
Of all the peculiar usages which are associated with marriage in India none have impressed themselves so distinctly on the census statistics as the custom which prohibits the second marriage of a widow, and the convention enjoining the marriage of a daughter before she attains physical maturity. In the case of the higher castes both of these usages may claim a respectable antiquity. In the lower strata of society, on the other hand, they appear to have been developed, in the form which they now assume, at a comparatively recent date under the pressure of peculiar social conditions. Both, again, are looked upon by the people who observe them as badges of social distinction, and to the fact that they are regarded in this light is mainly due their rapid extension within the last two or three generations. No excuse therefore is needed for examining their prevalence and its causes in some detail.
Prohibition of widow marriage in Vedic times.
For the ultimate origin of the prohibition of widow marriage among the higher castes we must look back, far beyond the comparative civilization of the Vedas, to the really primitive belief that the dead chief or head of the family will need human companionship and service in that other world which savage fancy pictures as a shadowy copy of this. To this belief is due the practice of burning the widow on the funeral pile of her dead husband, which is referred to as an “ancient custom” (purānā dharma) in the Atharva Veda.* The directions given in the Rig Veda for placing the widow on the pile with her husband’s corpse, and then calling her back to the world of life, appear, as Tylor† has pointed out, to represent “a reform and a reaction against a yet more ancient savage rite of widow sacrifice, which they prohibited in fact, but yet kept up in symbol.” The bow of the warrior and the sacrificial instruments of the priest were thrown back upon the pile to be consumed; the wife, after passing through the mere form of sacrifice, was held to have fulfilled her duties to her husband and was free to marry again. A passage in the Rig Veda quoted by Zimmer‡ shows that in some cases, at any rate, the widow married her husband’s younger brother (devar); and it is not unreasonable to suppose that her obligations in this respect were very much what we now find among the castes which permit widow marriage.
Causes of its revival.
At this point the historical record, such as it is, breaks off, and conjecture alone can divine the precise motives which induced the Brāhmans of a later age to revive that custom of primitive savagery which their ancestors had expressly condemned. Closer contact with more barbarous races; the growth of the sacerdotal spirit; the desire, as Sir Henry Maine has suggested, to get rid of the inconvenient lien which the widow held over her husband’s property;—all these motives may have contributed to the result. But when widow-sacrifice had been thus re-introduced, it is primâ facie unlikely that it should have been enforced with that rigid consistency which distinguishes the true savage; and, in fact, the texts prescribe for the widow the milder alternative of a life of ascetic self-denial and patient waiting to join the husband who has gone before. According to some authorities, they also recognize, though as a less excellent path than the two former, the alternative of re-marriage.
Considerations of property, of spiritual benefit, of sacramental doctrine.
I will not attempt to enter upon the controversy as to the precise meaning of the passage in Parāśara’s Institutes, on which the modern advocates of widow marriage rely, still less to discuss its applicability to the present age of the world. It seems more profitable to state the causes which, irrespective of isolated texts, would in any case have favoured the growth of the modern custom which forbids the widows of the highest castes to marry again, and which shows signs of extending itself far beyond its present limits and finally of suppressing widow marriage throughout the entire Hindu community. Some, at any rate, of these causes are not far to seek. In the first place, the anxiety of the early Hindu law-givers to circumscribe a woman’s rights to property would unquestionably tend to forbid her to join her lot to a man whose interest it would be to assert and extend those rights as against the members of her husband’s family. At the same same time the growth of the doctrine of spiritual benefit would require her to devote her life to the annual performance of her husband’s srāddh.* Technical obstacles to her re-marriage also arise from the Brahmanical theory of marriage itself. That ceremony being regarded as a sacrament ordained for the purification of women, and its essential portion being the gift of the woman by her father to her husband, the effect of the gift is to transfer her from her own gotra or exogamous group into that of her husband. The bearing of this transfer on the question of her re-marriage is thus stated by an orthodox Hindu at pages 276-277 of the Papers relating to Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood, published by the Government of India:—
“Her father being thus out of the question, it may be said that she may give herself in marriage. But this she cannot do, because she never had anything like disposal of herself. When young, she was given away, so the ownership over her (if I may be permitted to use the phrase) vested then in the father, was transferred by a solemn religious act to the husband, and he being no more, there is no one to give her away : and since Hindu marriage must take the form of religious gift, her marriage becomes impossible.”
The argument seems academic, but in the atmosphere of pedantry which pervades Indian society an academic argument is as good as any other.
Influence of hypergamy.
Some influence must also have been exerted in the same direction by the competition for husbands resulting from the action of hypergamy. Widows certainly would be the first to be excluded from the marriage market, for in their case the interests of the individual families would be identical with those of the group. The family would already have paid a bridegroom-price to get their daughter or sister married, and would naturally be indisposed to pay a second, and probably higher price to get her married again. The group, in its turn, would be equally adverse to an arrangement which tended to increase the number of marriageable women. Members of the higher castes, indeed, have frequently told me that these reasons of themselves were sufficient to make them regard with disfavour the modern movement in favour of widow marriage. For, said one of them, we find it hard enough already to get our daughters married into families of our own rank, and things will be worse still if widows enter the competition with all the advantages they derive from having got over their first shyness, and acquired some experience of the ways of men. The sentiments of Mr. Weller sounded strange in the mouth of a Kulin Brāhman, but the argument was used in entire good faith, and was backed up by much lamentation over the speaker’s ill-luck in being the father of four daughters, all unmarried.
Practice of lower castes.
The considerations stated above are entitled to whatever support they may derive from the fact that the Muhammadans, and those Hindu castes which permit widows to remarry, know nothing of the custom of hypergamy, and as a rule pay for brides, not for bridegrooms. Among these groups the normal proportion of the sexes, whatever that may be at the age of marriage, has not been affected by any artificial divisions, and there is every reason to believe that widows who are in other respects eligible have no particular difficulty in finding husbands. Polygamy prevails on a limited scale, and a certain proportion of the men have two wives, the second wife being often a young widow chosen by the man himself for her personal attractions, after the first wife, whom his parents selected for him, has lost her looks and become little more than a household drudge. Another point is that the lower castes seem to have a greater capacity than the higher for throwing off sub-castes. Deviations from caste usage, trivial changes of occupation, settlement outside the traditional habitat of the caste, and a variety of similar causes, which in the higher castes would, as a rule, merely affect the standing of certain families in the scale of hypergamy, tend in the lower castes to form endogamous groups, the members of which intermarry only among themselves. The difference is important, as the latter process does not disturb the balance of the sexes, and the former does.
Feeling of the people as to extension of widow marriage.
The present attitude of the Hindu community towards proposals to recognize and extend the practice of widow marriage may, I think, be briefly stated somewhat to the following effect :—The most advanced class of educated men sympathize in a general way with the movement, but their sympathy is clouded by the apprehension that any considerable addition to the number of marriageable women would add to the existing difficulty and expense of getting their daughters married. Below these we find a very numerous class who are educated enough to appreciate the prohibition of widow marriage supposed to be contained in certain texts, and who have no desire to go behind that or any similar injunction in support of which tolerably ancient authority can be quoted. Then come the great mass of the uneducated working classes, with rather vague notions as to the scriptures, but strong in their reverence for Brāhmans, and keen to appreciate points of social precedence. To them widow marriage is a badge of social degradation, a link which connects those who practise it with Doms, Bunas, Bāgdis and “low people” of various kinds. Lastly, at the bottom of society, as understood by the average Hindu, we find a large group of castes and tribes of which the lower section is represented by pure non-Aryan tribes practising adult marriage and widow re-marriage, while the upper section consists of castes of doubtful origin, most of whom, retaining widow marriage, have taken to infant marriage, while some have got so far as to throw off sub-castes distinguished by their abstention from widow marriage.*
It is not suggested that the groups indicated above can be marked off with absolute accuracy. But without insisting upon this, it is clear that the tendency of the lower strata of Hindu society is continually towards closer and closer conformity with the usages of the higher castes. These alone present a definite pattern which admits up to a certain point of ready imitation, and the whole Brahmanical system works in this direction. Of late years, moreover, the strength of the Hinduising movement has been greatly augmented by the improvement of communications. People travel more, pilgrimages can be more easily made, and the influence of the orthodox section of society is thus much more widely diffused. Railways in particular, which are sometimes represented as a solvent of caste prejudices, have in fact enormously extended the area within which those prejudices reign supreme.
Prevalence of infant marriage.
The practice of infant marriage has spread much further and taken root more deeply among the lower castes than its social complement, the prohibition of widow marriage. Both customs, the positive as well as the negative, have been borrowed from the higher castes, and are now regarded as paths leading towards social distinction. But the one is much easier to follow than the other. A man must get his daughter married at latest when she is fourteen or fifteen years old. To marry her five or six years earlier causes him no particular inconvenience, and confers on him whatever consideration may attach to religious orthodoxy and social propriety. On the other hand, to stop the re-marriage of widows, in castes where the balance of the sexes has not been disturbed by hypergamy, must at starting cause some practical inconvenience. Among the lower castes women are much more of a power than they are among the higher; they assert themselves freely on a variety of public occasions, and in many cases they have secured for themselves the right to initiate proceedings for divorce. One can hardly doubt that their influence would be exercised in favour of widow marriage, and that it would tend on the whole towards keeping that institution alive. Some allowance must also be made for the fact that the lower castes do not keep their women in seclusion. A good-looking widow shut up in the family zenana can be more easily sacrificed to notions of social propriety than a woman who goes out and meets possible suitors every day of her life. To whatever cause the difference may be due, it is certain that of two customs, both adopted under pressure of the same motives, the one—infant marriage—is almost universal, while the other—the prohibition of widow marriage—has at present only a comparatively limited currency. Infant marriage in fact is now so widely diffused as to have almost entirely displaced adult marriage within the limits of the caste system proper. The Dravidian races of Chutiā Nāgpur, the Central Provinces and the Madras hills, the Mongoloid tribes of the Himalayan region, Assam and Burma, still maintain a system of courtship and marriage between full-grown youths and maidens which has been minutely described by several sympathetic observers. Directly we leave these tolerably compact tribes and pass on to the less definite groups which form a debatable land between the tribe and the caste, we find either infant marriage in undisputed possession or a mixed system prevailing, which tolerates adult marriage as a resource open to those who cannot afford to do anything better for their children, but at the same same time enjoins the more respectable custom of infant marriage for all parents whose circumstances admit of it.
Origin of infant marriage.
In the case of the lower castes there is little room for doubt that the custom of infant marriage has been consciously borrowed from the higher castes in obedience to that tendency to imitation which we may almost describe as an ultimate law of the caste system. But how did the higher castes come by a custom which is without a parallel, at any rate on so large a scale, elsewhere in the world, and which cannot be referred to any of those primitive instincts which have usually determined the relations of the sexes? Neither sexual passion nor the desire for companionship and service can be called in to account for a man marrying a girl at an age when she is physically incapable of fulfilling any of the duties of a wife. Primitive man knows nothing of infant marriage, nor is it easy to conceive how such an institution could have arisen in the struggle for existence out of which society has been evolved. The modern savage woos in a summary and not over delicate fashion a sturdy young woman who can cook his food, carry baggage, collect edible grubs, and make herself generally useful. To his untutored mind the Hindu child-bride would seem about as suitable a helpmate as a modern professional beauty. If, then, infant marriage is in no way a normal product of social evolution, and in fact is met with only in India, to what causes shall we look for its origin? The standard Brahmanical explanation is palpably inadequate. It represents marriage as a sort of sacrament, of which every maiden must partake in order that she may cleanse her own being from the taint of original sin, that she may accomplish the salvation of her father and his ancestors, and that she may bring forth a son to carry on the domestic worship (sacra privata) of her husband’s family. So far as marriage itself goes, all this is intelligible enough as a highly specialized development of certain well-known ancient ideas. But it does not touch the question of age. Granted that the begetting of a son is essential for the continuance of the sacra privata, as Greek and Roman examples teach us, why should the householder on whom this solemn duty devolves go out of his way to defer its fulfilment by marrying a girl who has not yet attained the age of child-bearing? The Brāhman will reply that the earlier in a girl’s life she accomplishes her mystical functions the better. But this clearly belongs to the large class of ex post facto explanations of which sacerdotal and legal literature is in all ages and countries so full. The priests and lawyers who compile the text-books find certain customs in force, and feel bound to invent reasons for their existence. Being unfettered by the historical sense, and disposed to give free play to their inner consciousness, it is hardly surprising that their reasons should be as often false as true.
Mr. Nesfield’s theory.
An explanation of a more scientific character, put forward by Mr. Nesfield in 1885, seeks to connect the custom with communal marriage and the practice of capturing wives. On this theory infant marriage was consciously introduced with the object of protecting the child-wife from the stain of communism within the tribe and from the danger of being forcibly abducted by a member of an alien tribe. It was, in fact, a revolt against primitive usages which the moral sense of a more civilized generation had begun to condemn. The argument is ingenious, but it does not fit the facts we have to deal with. The society depicted in the Rig and Atharva Vedas must have got far beyond the stage of communal marriage and forceful abduction of wives. Courtship of a very modern tpye was fully recognized, and the consent of the girl’s father or brother was sought only after the young people had themselves come to an understanding. As an additional and conclusive indication that the kind of marriage contemplated by the Vedas was the individual marriage of comparatively advanced civilization, I may refer to a remarkable custom, traces of which have survived in modern Italy—the lustration of the bride’s night-dress after the wedding night.* Such a custom is clearly incompatible with communal marriage, and could only have arisen in a society which set a high value on female chastity and had left primitive communism (if, indeed, such a condition ever existed) ages behind.
Antiquity of the custom; its possible causes.
The change from this Arcadian state of things to a regime of infant marriage seems to have taken place at a very early date. According to Baudhāyana a girl who is unmarried when she reaches maturity is degraded to the rank of a Śūdra, and her father is held to have committed a grave sin by having neglected to get her married. This rule is common to all the lawbooks, and many of them go further still and fix a definite age for the marriage of girls. The later the treatise, the earlier is the age which it prescribes. According to Manu,† a man of thirty should marry a girl of twelve, and a man of twenty-four a girl of eight. Later writers fix the higher limit of age in such cases at ten years or eight years, and reduce the lower limit to seven, six, and even four years. What induced people already practising a rational system of adult marriage to abandon it in favour of a rigid and complicated system of infant marriage? In the nature of things no confident answer can be given; the whole question belongs to the domain of conjecture. One can only surmise that the growth of the patriarchal power of the head of the family must have been adverse to any assertion of independence on the part of its female members, and more especially to their exercising the right of choosing their husbands for themselves. Where family interests were involved, it may well have seemed simpler to get a girl married before she had developed a will of her own, than to court domestic difficulties by allowing her to grow up and fall in love on her own account.* The gradual lowering of the position of women from the ideal standard of Vedic times, and the distrust of their virtue induced by the example of pre-matrimonial license set by the Dravidian races must also have had its effect, and, as is not obscurely hinted in the literature of the subject, a girl would be married as a child in order to avert the possibility of her causing scandal later on.
Apart from these general causes, a powerful influence must also have been exerted by the custom of hypergamy, which, as has been explained above, limits the number of possible husbands for the girls of the higher classes and thus compels the parents to endeavour to secure appropriate bridegrooms as soon as possible. That this motive operates strongly at the present day is plainly stated by one of the writers in the official publication already referred to,† who says:—
“Under these circumstances, when, in the case of a daughter, parents see that, unless they marry her at once, the one or two bridegrooms that there are open for their selection would be availed of by others, and that they would be disabled from marrying her before the eleventh year, and that they would thereby incur a religious sin and social degradation as regards the caste, they would seize that opportunity to marry their daughter, quite disregardful of the evil effects of infant marriages.”
Again, when the custom of infant marriage had once been started, under pressure of social necessity, by the families of the highest group, who had the largest surplus of marriageable daughters, a sort of fashion would have been set and would be blindly followed through all the grades. Two forces are thus at work in the same direction, both tending to disturb the balance of the sexes and to produce abnormal matrimonial relations between the members of different social groups. Enforced competition for husbands on the part of the higher groups, and the desire to imitate their superiors which animates the lower groups combine to run up the price of husbands in the upper classes; while the demand for wives by the men of the lowest class, which ought by rights to produce equilibrium, is artificially restricted in its operation by the rule that they can in no circumstances marry a woman of the classes above their own. These men, therefore, are left very much out in the cold, and often do not get wives until late in life. An unmarried son does not disgrace the family, but there is no greater reproach than to have a daughter unmarried at the age of puberty. Husbands are bought for the girls, and the family gets its money’s worth in social estimation. Bargains, however, must be taken when they are to be had; and no father dares run the risk of waiting till his daughter is physically mature. He is bound to be on the safe side, and therefore he gets her married, child as she may be, whenever a good match offers.*
The case for infant marriage.
Many hard things have been said of infant marriage, and the modern tendency is to assume that a population which countenances such a practice must be in a fair way towards extreme moral degradation, if not to ultimate extinction. An Indian apologist might reply that much of the criticism is greatly exaggerated, and is founded on considerable ignorance of the present conditions and future possibilities of oriental life. He might point out that, in fact, excluding the poetical view that marriages are made in heaven, two working theories of the institution are at present in existence—one which leaves marriages to make themselves by the process of unrestricted courtship, and another which requires them to be made by the parents or guardians of the persons who are to be married. The first, which may perhaps be called the method of natural selection, is accepted and more or less acted up to by all Western nations, except those who follow the French custom of mariages de convenance. The second, a system of avowedly artificial selection, is in force, with few exceptions, throughout the East, and assumes its most rigid form in the usages of Hindu society. He might further observe that in entering upon this subject we must dismiss from our minds all those ideas of love and courtship with which, for most Europeans, the institution of marriage is associated. Whether such ideas will ever gain a footing in India is a question on which it would be rash to hazard an opinion.
To fancy it possible to introduce them on a large scale now would argue an ignorance of the elementary conditions of Eastern life rivalling that of the famous undergraduate who told the examiner that John the Baptist was beheaded because he would dance with Herodias’ daughter. The dream of an Indian Hermann and Dorothea wandering hand in hand through the ripening rice-fields, and plighting their troth in the odorous stillness of the palm-grove, would be an equally grotesque misapplication of Western ideas to Eastern surroundings. Here and there, amongst the Hinduised Unitarians of the Brahmo-Samāj, or in the group of Anglicised Indians who, having finished their education in England and adopted more or less completely European clothes and European manners, seem now to be on the high-road to form a new caste, it may be that marriage will be preceded by courtship of the European type. But even within these narrow circles such cases will for a long time to come be rare, and will be confined to those families which are afflicted with a surplus of daughters and find a difficulty in getting them married under normal conditions. For all Hindus, except the relatively small number who are influenced by European ideas on the subject of marriage, the bare idea that a girl can have any voice in the selection of her husband is excluded by the operation of three inexorable sanctions—by the ordinances of the Hindu religion, by the internal structure of the caste system, and by the general tone and conditions of social life in India. Religion prescribes that, like the Roman bride of early days, a Hindu girl shall be given (tradita in manum) by her father into the power of her husband; caste complications demand that the ceremonial portion of the transfer shall be effected while she is still a child; while the character of society, the moral tone of the men, the seclusion of the women, the immemorial taboos and conventions of family etiquette, render it impossible that she should be wooed and won like her European sister. To persons of a romantic turn of mind the suggestion that infant marriage in some shape must be accepted as an ultimate fact of the Hindu social system will sound like a final abandonment of all hope of reform. But an orthodox Hindu may justly reply that there is more to be said for the custom than appears at first sight. He may fairly argue that if any sort of controlling authority is to make people’s marriages for them, the earlier it commences and completes its operations the better. Where the choice of a husband must in any case be undertaken by the parents, it is clearly tempting Providence for them to defer it until their daughter has grown up, and may have formed an embarrassing attachment on her own account. As for love, that may come—and, from all that one hears and reads of Hindu unions, usually does come—as readily after marriage as before, provided that opportunities for falling in love with the wrong man are judiciously withheld.
The physiological side of the question.
When we have shown that a custom is ancient and that it is deeply rooted in the constitution of Indian society, it may seem that there is not much more to be said. But the physiological side of the question cannot be left wholly out of account. Looked at from this point of view, what does infant marriage really mean and what are its ultimate tendencies? Now, the first point to realize is, that in different parts of India infant marriage prevails in two widely different forms, one of which is at least free from physiological objections, while the other deserves, from every point of view, the strongest condemnation. The former usage, which is current in the Punjab, is thus described by Sir Denzil Ibbetson, a high authority on the usages and domestic life of that part of India:—
“Wherever infant marriage is the custom, the bride and bridegroom do not come together till a second ceremony called muklāwa has been performed, till when the bride lives as a virgin in her father’s house. This second ceremony is separated from the actual wedding by an interval of three, five, seven, nine, or eleven years, and the girl’s parents fix the time for it. Thus it often happens that the earlier in life the marriage takes place, the later cohabitation begins. For instance, in the eastern districts, Jāts generally marry at from five to seven years of age, and Rajputs at fifteen or sixteen, or even older; but the Rajput couple begins at once to cohabit, whereas the parents of the Jāt girl often find her so useful at home as she grows up that some pressure has to be put upon them to give her up to her husband, and the result is that, for practical purposes, she begins married life later than the Rajput bride.”
No one who has seen a Punjābi regiment march past, or has watched the sturdy Jāt women lift their heavy water-jars at the village well, is likely to have any misgivings as to the effect of their marriage system on the physique of the race. Among the Rajputs both sexes are of slighter build than the Jāts, but here again there are no signs of degeneration. The type is different, but that is all.
As we leave the great recruiting ground of the Indian army, and travel south-eastward along the plains of the Ganges, the healthy sense which bids the warrior races keep their girls at home until they are fit to bear the burden of maternity seems to have been cast out by the demon of corrupt ceremonialism, ever ready to sacrifice helpless women and children to the tradition of a fancied orthodoxy. Already in the United Provinces we find the three highest castes—the Brāhman, the Rajput, and the Kāyasth—permitting the bride, whether apta viro or not, to be sent to her husband’s house immediately after the wedding; although it is thought better, and is more usual, to wait for a second ceremony called gauna, which may take place one, three, five or seven years after the first, and is fixed with reference to the physical development of the bride.
Abuses in Bengal.
What is the exception in the United Provinces tends unhappily to become the rule in Bengal. Here the influence of woman’s tradition (strī-āchār) has overlaid the canonical rites of Hindu marriage with a mass of senseless hocus-pocus (performed for the most part in the women’s apartments at the back of the courtyard, which in India, as in ancient Greece, forms the centre of the family domicile), and has succeeded, without a shadow of textual authority, in bringing about the monstrous abuse that the girls of the upper classes commence married life at the age of nine years, and become mothers at the very earliest time that it is physically possible for them to do so. How long this practice has been in force no one can say for certain. Nearly a century ago, when Dr. Francis Buchanan made his well-known survey of Bengal, embracing, under the first Lord Minto’s orders, “the progress and most remarkable customs of each different sect or tribe of which the population consists,” he wrote as follows of one of the districts in Bihar, the borderland between Bengal and the United Provinces:—
“Premature marriages among some tribes are, in Shahabad, on the same footing as in Bengal, that is, consummation takes place before the age of puberty. This custom, however, has not extended far, and the people are generally strong and tall. The Pamār Rajputs, among whom the custom of early consummation is adopted, form a striking proof of the evils of this custom; for among them I did not observe one good-looking man, except the Raja Jaya Prakās, and most of them have the appearance of wanting vigour both of body and mind. This custom, so far as it extends, and the great number of widows condemned by rank to live single, no doubt prove some check upon population.”*
In another place Dr. Buchanan says that in respect of marriage customs, Patna—
“is nearly on a footing with Bhagalpur, but here (in Bihar) the custom of premature marriage is not so prevalent : and it must be observed that in these districts this custom is by no means such a check on population as in Bengal, for there the girl usually is married when she is ten years of age, but in this district the girl remains at her father’s house until the age of puberty, and of course her children are stronger and she is less liable to sterility.*
At the beginning of this century, then, we find the premature inception of conjugal relations described by a peculiarly competent observer as an established usage in Bengal, which was beginning to extend itself among the high castes in Bihar. Concerning the state of things at the present day, a highly educated Hindu gentleman, one of the ablest and most energetic of our native officials in Bengal, wrote to me some years ago as follows :—
“It is the general practice—as indefensible as reprehensible under the Hindu scriptures—for husband and wife to establish cohabitation immediately after marriage. Parents unconsciously encourage the practice and make it almost unavoidable. . . . On the second day after marriage is the flower-bed ceremony ; the husband and wife—a boy and girl, or generally, nowadays, a young man and a girl—must lie together in the nuptial bed. . . . Within eight days of her marriage the girl must go back to her father’s house and return to her father-in-law’s, or else she is forbidden to cross her husband’s threshold for a year. In a few families the bride is not brought in for a year ; but in the majority of cases this is considered more inconvenient than the necessities of the case would require, and the eight days’ rule is kept, so as not to bar intercourse for a year. It would cost nothing worth the reckoning, and the good would be immense, if the one-year rule were strictly enforced in all cases ; or better, if the interval were increased from one to two years, and the subsidiary eight days’ rule expunged from the social code. . . . The evil effects of the pernicious custom, which not only tolerates, but directly encourages unnatural indulgence, need no demonstration. Among other things, it forces a premature puberty, and is thus the main root of many of the evils of early marriage, which may be avoided without any affront to religion.”
This opinion—the opinion of an orthodox Hindu of high caste, who has not permitted his English education to denationalize him—marks the social and physiological side of infant marriage in Bengal.
Reform in Rajputana.
The matter is one to be handled with discretion. No one would wish to kindle afresh the ashes of an extinct agitation. Happily there is reason to believe that the leaders of Indian society are fully alive to the disastrous consequences, both to the individual and the race, which arise from premature cohabitation and are anxious to use their influence to defer the commencement of conjugal life until the wife has attained the full measure of physical maturity requisite to fit her for child-bearing. Here the great clans of Rajputana have set an example which deserves to be followed throughout India. Themselves among the purest representatives of the Indo-Aryan type, they have revived the best traditions of the Vedic age and have established for themselves the ordinance that no girl shall be married before she is fourteen years old and that the marriage expenses shall in no case exceed a certain proportion of the father’s yearly income. That, I venture to think, is the aim which those who would reform society should, for the present, set before themselves If they succeed in doing for India what Colonel Walter did for Rajputana, they will achieve more than any Indian reformer has yet accomplished. To bring back the Vedas is no unworthy ideal.
Rules of the Walterkrit Sabha.
The Rajputana movement is so remarkable in itself and contains the germs of such high promise that it calls for fuller notice. Nearly twenty years ago, at the suggestion of Colonel Walter, then Agent to the Governor-General in Rajputana, all the Sardārs of the various States of Rajputana assembled at Ajmer for the purpose of discussing arrangements for regulating the expenses incurred on the occasion of marriages, deaths, etc., among Rajpūts of all ranks except the ruling chiefs. By the unanimous decision of these leaders of Rajput society, a series of observances were prescribed which, revised from time to time, have now assumed the form of definite rules enforced by the influence of a society known, in grateful commemoration of its founder, as the Walterkrit Rajputra Hitakārini Sabhā. The chief Political Officer in Rajputana is the President of the Society, and in every State a committee is appointed, consisting of a Sardār, an official and members of the Chāran and Rāo castes, to make arrangements for carrying out the regulations regarding marriages and deaths and other instructions embodied in the rules.
As to Expenses.
Under the head of marriage expenses, if the marriage is that of a Thākur himself or of an eldest son, sister or daughter, the limit of expenditure is fixed on the following scale : When the value of the State is below Rs. 1,000, not more than two-thirds of the annual income may be spent at the marriage ; for values between Rs. 1,000 and Rs. 10,000 the proportion is reduced to half ; for incomes between Rs. 10,000 and 20,000, to one-third, and for incomes above Rs. 20,000 to one-fourth. In the case of marriages of sons other than the eldest, or nephews and nieces and brothers of the Thākur who are dependent for support upon him, the expenditure may not exceed one-tenth of that admissible in the cases stated above. The abuses attendant on the extravagant largess which used to be distributed among bards and musicians on the occasion of marriages have been got rid of by limiting this expenditure to a percentage of Rs. 6-12-0 on the annual income of the State, and by further restrictions limiting the number of those who may claim such presents to the residents of the territory in which the marriage takes place. Only the father of the bridegroom is liable to make such payments ; the father of the bride cannot be charged.
As to betrothal.
In the old days in Rajputana the ceremony of tikā or betrothal was performed with great pomp and show, and the presents made to the bridegroom’s father included elephants, horses, and camels. It was on this ceremony that the reputation of the bride’s father more especially depended, and the fortunes lavished upon it not only reduced a number of Rajputs to poverty but were also, as the Sabhā are careful to point out, “detrimental to the future happiness of the marrying couple.” The expenditure on tikā represented in fact the price of an eligible bridegroom, and the various social considerations affecting the market value of husbands gave rise to unseemly haggling between the parties to the bargain. The Committee have therefore decided that the sending of tikā or betrothal presents should be altogether stopped. The customary presents of opium, betel leaves and other articles of trifling value are allowed to continue, but the betrothal is to be arranged by letter only. The rules lay down that “the usual mark or tikā shall be made on the intended bridegroom’s forehead, and betel leaves and cocoanut together with cash not exceeding one gold mohur and not less than one rupee shall be placed in his hand ; presents of such fruits as are usual shall be placed on his lap ; the people present on the occasion shall also receive opium and sweetmeats or fruits.” Servants and others who have hitherto been entitled to receive presents are to be paid according to rates varying from Rs. 5 for a State worth less than Rs. 1,000, to Rs. 100 for States worth more than Rs. 50,000. But even this is not obligatory, and it is expressly stated that anybody may spend less if he likes.
As to age.
As has been pointed out above, the expense involved in getting a daughter married has everywhere been the main factor in bringing about the evils which have grown up, and this explains the prominence given in the rules to the question of expenditure. The Society, however, did not stop there. They plainly stated their opinion that, “as a rule, boys and girls are married at an early age, notwithstanding that the evils of such a custom are well known to all and need no description.” They then proceeded to lay down that boys and girls should not be married before the ages of 18 and 14 respectively, and in order to guard against evasions of this rule, they provided that a half-yearly register of births, deaths and marriages should be kept up and submitted to the special committees at the capitals of the different States through the district officials or Nizāmats. A further rule prescribes that “whereas in this country marriage contracts are not made by the girl’s choice, her guardians being entrusted with that duty, it is advisable that girls be not kept unmarried above the age of twenty years.” With the object of discouraging polygamy, it has been ruled that no second marriage should take place during the life-time of the first wife unless she is afflicted with an incurable disease or has no offspring. As regards widowers, it is laid down that when a widower has attained the age of 45 years and has a son living, he should not contract another marriage; but if he is healthy and strong, he can marry a second wife, provided that the bride is above the age prescribed by the rules. Where, however, a widower of 45 years has an infant child by his deceased wife and it is difficult for him to bring up the child as well as to look after the household affairs, the State Committee can make a special exception to the rule after satisfying itself that it is proper to do so.
Marriage expenses are controlled by the rule that the number of persons accompanying a wedding party may not exceed twenty, except in the case of marriages on a large scale when it is to be determined at the rate of two men for every hundred rupees that may be spent by the girl’s father. The marriage procession is to arrive at the house of the bride’s father on the day fixed for the marriage, stay there for two days and take leave on the fourth or on the fifth day at the latest, if the fourth day is considered inauspicious for departure.
The poverty of some classes of Rajputs has led to their obtaining the necessary funds for their daughter’s marriage from the bridegroom’s father. This the Society condemns as “a most objectionable practice, and one that is opposed to the Dharma Shāstrās.” In the case, however, of those Rajputs who have neither land nor maintenance and only earn their livelihood as cultivators, it is permissible to take a bride-price of not more than Rs. 100 from the bridegroom’s father and to spend that sum upon the marriage.
Legislation. Mr.Ghose’s scheme.
The reports submitted by the Society during the last eighteen years show a progressive improvement in respect of compliance with the rules. The scale on which their beneficent influence is now being exercised may be gathered from the fact that out of 5,038 marriages performed among Rajputs in 1903, the rules regarding age were complied with in 4,928 cases and were violated only in 110, of which 55 occurred in the State of Udaipur, where the tendency to stand upon the ancient ways is probably more marked than in other parts of Rajputana. Out of this large number of marriages the rules were infringed in 25 cases in respect of expenditure, in 17 cases in respect of presents to bards and musicians, and in 65 cases in respect of the numbers of the marriage-party. When it is borne in mind that the operations of the Society have the sanction of no criminal law and that their success depends solely upon the influence that can be exercised by the State Committees, most people, I venture to think, will hold that the Walterkrit Sabhā has not only attained most remarkable results within its own sphere of activity, but has set to the rest of India a striking example of what can be done by patriotic combination to promote the cause of social reform.*
Attempts have also been made to attain the same end by legislative action. More than fourteen years ago Mr. Manmohan Ghose, a Bengali barrister in large criminal practice, put forward a proposal that a general law should be passed for British India “declaring that no marriage shall be valid if either of the contracting parties at the time of celebrating their marriage is below a certain minimum age,” which he proposed to fix for the present at twelve years. He admitted that such a measure involved interference with the supposed marriage laws of the Hindus, and was certain to be opposed by a great many orthodox people on that ground. But he pointed out that some doubt existed as to what was the true Hindu law on the subject, and he observed that so eminent a Sanskrit scholar as Dr.Bhandārkar had held that there was really nothing in law or in the Hindu scriptures to make it obligatory upon a Hindu to marry his daughter before she is twelve. He added that if Dr. Bhandārkar were right, the prevailing idea in Bengal and elsewhere that a girl must be married before a certain period in her life irrespective of her age was erroneous, while the fact that the highest class of Brāhmans (Kulins) frequently do not marry their girls before they are past the age of twenty-one pointed to a similar conclusion. Mr. Manmohan Ghose considered that such a measure would have the effect of putting down the pernicious custom of child-marriage with its concomitant evils; that it would meet with no serious opposition in the advanced province of Bengal; and that it need not be extended to backward provinces until in the opinion of the Local Government they were ripe for such a measure. His views found no support among his countrymen in Bengal.
The Mysore Act.
Three years after the publication of Mr. Manmohan Ghose’s proposal, the Mysore State introduced a regulation to prevent infant marriages among the Hindus in the territory of Mysore. The scope of this enactment falls far short both of the Rajputana practice and of Mr. Manmohan Ghose’s restricted suggestion, for it defines an infant girl as a girl who has not completed eight years of age. Any person who causes the marriage of an infant girl or aids or abets such a marriage, and any man over eighteen years of age who marries an infant girl, is liable on a prosecution sanctioned by the Government to be punished with simple imprisonment up to six months. It is obvious, however, that so far as the great majority of marriages are concerned, the Mysore law only touches the fringe of the evil, since a boy under eighteen can, if his people choose to run the risk of a prosecution, be married to a girl under eight, and no restriction at all is placed upon infant marriages between the ages of eight and fourteen. The law, indeed, seems to be mainly aimed at the practice of aged widowers marrying child-wives. Here it enacts that any man who having completed fifty years of age marries a girl who has not completed fourteen years of age, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years or with fine or with both. Seeing that at the age of fourteen most girls are already married, it follows that a man over fifty can have very little chance of securing a wife.
The Mysore Government points to the increase of aged widowers in the recent census as illustrating the effect of its legislation. This, however, seems to be its sole effect. For the census figures show that the proportion of married girls under ten to 1,000 of the female population had varied between 1891 and 1901 only from 8 to 3, while on the other hand the proportion of girls unmarried at that age had declined in the same period from 281 to 275. The utmost that can be said, therefore, is that the law passed in 1894 may have reduced the proportion of girls married under ten by about five per thousand.*
The Baroda Act.
The Early Marriage Prevention Act passed by the State of Baroda in July, 1904, is designed, as appears from the preamble, “to draw the increased attention of the public towards physical training, whereby the future progeny may be healthy and long-lived.” It defines a minor girl as one who has not completed her twelfth year, and a minor boy as one who has not completed his sixteenth year. If the guardians of a minor girl, whose age is above nine, desire to get her married, they must apply to a tribunal consisting of the local sub-judge and three assessors of the petitioners’ caste. If the tribunal is satisfied that in the event of the marriage not taking place on the date proposed, it will probably not take place at all or not within one year of the bride attaining her majority, or that the parents and guardians of the girl are not likely, owing to old age and infirmity, to survive until she comes of age, and that she has no other guardian, or that inevitable difficulties of a similar nature are likely to occur, they may grant permission for the marriage to take place. If the sub-judge disagrees with the assessors, the case is referred to the district judge, whose decision appears to be final. The following comments on the working of the Act appear in the Baroda Administration Report for 1904-5:—
“People living outside the limits of this State have an inadequate conception of the degree to which public opinion influences legislation in Baroda. The utmost consideration is shown to such opinion; and His Highness the Mahārāja consented to reduce the limit of age for the marriage of girls from 14 to 12 in deference to the popular wish. Other modifications were also made in the original Bill, so as to make it less obnoxious to orthodox communities.
Its practical working.
“Results of the Early Marriage Prevention Act.—It is now over a year since the Act for the Prevention of Early Marriages came into operation, and it would not be without interest to take stock of the results achieved during this first year of its operation. That freedom to contract marriages within the prohibited limits of age, with the permission of the Civil Courts, has been freely availed of, would appear from the fact that no less than 695 applications were presented for such license ; and the circumstance that such permission was accorded to 68 per cent. of such petitions, shows a liberal and sympathetic solicitude on the part of the Courts for the religious and social susceptibilities of the people. Some leniency was desirable in the first year of the execution of this law, to which the people had not been accustomed. At the same time it was necessary to enforce the new law, so that it might not be regarded as a dead letter; and 718 offenders were punished with fines, in sums ranging from one rupee to twenty-five rupees, during the year in the whole State. Seventy-eight per cent. of the fines inflicted under this Act fell below five rupees, and only four per cent. exceeded ten rupees. No better proof can be afforded of the indulgence with which offences against this special enactment have been dealt with.
" The Act has already had a wholesome educative effect on the higher classes of the Hindu society ; for we find that the percentage of convictions among the three higher castes did not exceed five. The largest number of offenders belonged to the Dhed and Bhangi classes, which had no less than 39 per cent. of convictions against them. The Kunbis or the cultivating classes had only 11 per cent., while the artisan classes had also an equal number. The percentage among Brahmans and Banias was less than two, and that among Mahomedans was about four—a circumstance which clearly proves that it is only custom, and no religious behest or scriptural text, which supports the practice of early marriages. And when once the force of usage is broken, the progress of the desired reform is smoothed and accelerated even beyond our most sanguine expectations.”*
Sardār Arjun Singh’s scheme.
The latest scheme for reforming the marriage usages of India by means of legislation is that put forward by Sardār Arjun Singh of Kapurthala at a meeting of the East India Association held in London on the 31st July, 1905, and published in the Asiatic Quarterly Review for October, 1905. The Sardār sums up his proposals in the following words :—
“ Allowing that the Government interference is not desirable, has not the Government got other means to eradicate, or at least to mitigate, the custom of early marriages, and thus save the female children, or, at least a proportion of them, from improper widowhood ?
“ Let the Government pass an Act, the operative part of which may be somewhat in the following form :—
“ 1. This Act shall apply (a) to those persons only who belong to such caste, out-caste, religion, or community, which, after holding public meetings, pass a resolution to come under the protection of this Act; (b) to those districts only in which such meetings shall have been held for such purpose.
“ 2. Under this Act, no marriage shall have the legal force, unless at the date of marriage the husband has completed his twelfth and the wife her tenth year.
“ Let the Government also exert its influence on different castes and communities in every district to hold meetings and come to a definite conclusion.
“ By such an action on the part of the Government we may be sure that almost every caste, every religion, and every community in the whole of India, by the influence of the Government and under the leadership of educated people, will, with great pleasure, place itself under this Act.
“ The Government will do immense good to the well-being of the whole country, save 115,285 girls from child-widowhood every ten years, and shall win the hearts of the people.”
Indian Views of it.
This projet de loi met with a rather chilling reception from the Indian speakers at the meeting. One Hindu gentleman “thought it was high time the Government interfered. If the matter was to be left at the option of the people, it would require centuries before the position of the Indian woman would be uplifted and the custom of early marriages obliterated. It would be a pity to wait so long when the same thing could be done by Government in a shorter time.” A Muhammadan followed with the pertinent observation that “every one who had received English education agreed that the custom was pernicious; every one would like to see it abolished; but many friends of his, who had studied at the Universities, when they went back to India, were entirely unable to stem the tide of public opinion. Why was that? It was because the ladies of the house did not agree with them, and they did not carry female opinion with them.” This led him to the conclusion that “it would be far better to have no legislation on the subject, but to work out their own ideas, and to feel that they had been the authors of their own salvation.” It was now the turn of a Hindu to point out that the Ārya Samājists were even more advanced in this matter than the Brahmos and had “declared that any marriage of a boy under twenty-five and a girl under sixteen was unauthorized by law, was against religion, and was to a certain extent immoral;” while the authorities of the Central Hindu College at Benares “had ruled that no married boy would be admitted to their school.” The speaker expressed himself as opposed to legislation, and was supported in this by a Muhammadan who took the opportunity of protesting against the lecturer’s conjecture that infant marriage was devised by the Hindus to secure their young women from the outrages of invaders from Central Asia. Finally, the Chairman, Sir Lepel Griffin, summed up the debate in a speech of admirable discretion, in the course of which he admitted that it was news to him to hear that the Mysore and Baroda States had legislated on the subject, and intimated a doubt whether the lecturer’s proposal to fix the minimum age at twelve for boys and ten for girls would not be “almost a retrogade step.”
Prospects of reform.
It is perhaps a little surprising that a meeting of this kind, with a distinguished ex-political officer in the chair, should not have been aware that the very problem which they were engaged in discussing had been successfully approached in Rajputana nearly twenty years ago. In the face of that illustration of what people can do for themselves we may be absolved from discussing in detail the scheme for permissive legislation propounded by Sardār Arjun Singh. Few persons will share its author’s belief, so characteristic of the modern Indian, in the efficacy of a public meeting as an instrument of social reform ; while no one can fail to be struck by the pathetic admission of one of his critics that young men brought up on English history and literature, and more or less imbued with European ideas of domestic morality, find their worst foes in the ladies of their own households. The fact, of course, is that in matters of this kind the Anglicised middle classes are hardly in a position to give a decisive lead. Their social standing is not such as to command universal respect, and their orthodoxy is often open to suspicion. The people who can exercise a real influence and set an example that will be followed are, in the first place, the ancient aristocracy of India, the men who in Rajputana have created and carried on the Walterkrit Sabhā. Below them, as the working agents who will transmit to the masses the impulse proceeding from their natural leaders, come the panchāyats or caste councils, the caste and clan Brāhmans, the genealogists and astrologers, the village barbers, and the professional match-makers, male and female, who conduct the elaborate process of haggling by which Hindu marriages are put on the market. The influence of the ghataks or marriage brokers is very great. Five hundred years ago a famous ghatak remodelled for matrimonial purposes the highest sub-caste of Bengal Brāhmans, and his classification holds good to the present day. The caste councils, which bear a sort of resemblance to a club committee, are equally powerful, and perhaps more accessible than the ghataks to liberal ideas. Both have the utmost respect for the Hindu scriptures coupled with the scantiest knowledge of their contents, and reforms on the Rajputana lines might with equal regard for truth and expediency be presented to their minds as a revival of pristine usage making for ceremonial righteousness.*
Difficulties of legislation.
In favour of legislation, some people will doubtless urge that in the East where so many things are, according to Western ideas, upside down, the relations between positive law and positive morality are also reversed. In Europe, one is told, morality must always be in advance of law. It took generations of quibbles and all the efforts of Bentham and Romilly to lift the English criminal law to a level approaching that of the conventional ethics of the day. In India, it will be said, if law is to wait until popular morality is ready, things will remain as they are until the end of time. To this it may be replied first, that in Rajputana the end in view is being attained without the intervention of the State; secondly, that the Mysore and Baroda laws hardly rise above the level of popular usage, and may well have the effect of impeding reform by stereotyping the very conditions which it is desirable to improve; thirdly, that there is very little to show that these enactments are not a dead letter; fourthly, that any law dealing with this subject cannot, in the nature of things, be restricted to a particular class. Its operation must be general, and it would be liable to be defeated by the ancient and familiar device of boycotting the advocates of premature reform. Exclusive dealing in husbands cannot be put down by law. It may or may not be possible to compel a Tipperary grocer to sell sugar to a man who has taken a boycotted tenement; it would certainly be impossible to compel an Indian father to give his son to a girl whose parents had forgotten to get her married at the proper time.
The two forms of polyandry.
Two forms of polyandry are recognized in the literature of the subject: the fraternal, where a woman becomes the joint wife of several brothers; and the matriarchal, where she has a number of husbands who are not necessarily related to each other. The essential feature is that the woman lives with several men at the same time. If her husbands are not synchronous but successive, if she lives with one husband for a year or so and then takes another, the arrangement may be morally reprehensible, but it is not what is meant by polyandry. Under both systems there is necessarily extreme uncertainty as to the parentage of the joint wife’s children. Where the matriarchal form of polyandry prevails, this uncertainty affects the law of succession to property, since it is impossible to prove that a man living in a polyandrous group has ever had any children of his own. Consequently inheritance is traced through females, and a man’s ordinary heir-at-law is his sister’s son. Where fraternal polyandry is in fashion, the problem of paternity is equally obscure, and it is impossible to say for certain which of the brothers is the father of a particular child. But for working purposes it is assumed that one of them must be, and therefore the children belong to the same exogamous group as their fathers and inheritance to the joint property is reckoned in the male line.
There is abundant evidence to prove that matriarchal polyandry was at one time an established custom among the Nāyars of the Malabar coast. Thus Cæsar Fredericke, who travelled in those parts in the year 1563, writes of them:
Matriarchal polyandry.
“These men go naked from the girdle upwards, with a clothe rolled about their thighs, going barefooted, and having their haire very long and rolled up together on the toppe of their heads, and alwayes they carrie their Bucklers or Targets with them and their swordes naked, these Nairi have their wives common amongst themselves, and when any of them goe into the house of any of these women, he leaveth his sworde and target at the doore, and the time that he is there, there dare not be any so hardie as to come into that house. The King’s children shall not inherite the kingdom after their father, because they hold this opinion, that perchance they were not begotten of the King their father, but of some other man, therefore they accept for their King one of the sonnes of the King’s sisters, or of some other woman of the blood roiall, for that they be sure that they are of the blood roiall.” *
The Portuguese traveller, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, says much the same: † “By the laws of this country these Nāyars cannot marry, so that no one has any certain or acknowledged son or father; all their children being born of mistresses, with each of which three or four Nāyars cohabit by agreement among themselves. Each one of this confraternity dwells a day in his turn with the joint mistress, counting from noon of one day to the same time of the next, after which he departs, and another comes for the like time. They thus spend their lives without the care or trouble of wives and children, yet maintain their mistresses well, according to their rank. Any one may forsake his mistress at his pleasure, and in the like manner the mistress may refuse admittance to any one of her lovers when she pleases. These mistresses are all gentle-women of the Nāyar caste, and the Nāyars, besides being prohibited from marrying, must not attach themselves to any woman of a different rank. Considering that there are always several men attached to one woman, the Nāyars never look upon any of the children born of their mistresses as belonging to them, however strong a resemblance may subsist, and all inheritances among the Nāyars go to their brothers or the sons of their sisters born of the same mothers, all relationship being counted only by female consanguinity and descent. This strange law prohibiting marriage was established that they might have neither wives nor children on whom to fix their love and attachment and that, being free from all family cares, they might the more willingly devote themselves to warlike service.”
A series of observers, among whom may be mentioned Alexander Hamilton (1744), Jonathan Duncan (1792), Francis Buchanan (1807), James Forbes (1813), and the Lutheran Missionary Graul (1849–1853), confirm the accounts given by the travellers of the sixteenth century. During the last fifty years, however, polyandry in the strict sense of the term seems to have fallen into disuse. Mr. Fawcett, of the Madras police, writing in 1901, says that he has “not known any admitted instance of polyandry amongst the Nāyars of Malabar at the present day,”* and twenty years earlier Mr. Wigram wrote in his treatise on “Malabar Law and Custom,” as follows:—
“Polyandry may now be said to be dead, and although the issue of a Nāyar marriage are still children of their mother rather than of their father, marriage may be defined as a contract based on mutual consent, and dissoluble at will. It has been well said (by Mr. Logan) that nowhere is the marriage tie, albeit informal, more rigidly observed or respected than it is in Malabar: nowhere is it more jealously guarded, or its neglect more savagely avenged.”
The ceremonial husband.
It is a peculiar and characteristic feature of Nāyar matrimonial usage that every woman goes through two forms of marriage. The first, tāli kettu or tying of the tāli, is purely ceremonial, and must take place before a girl attains puberty. Its essential incident consists in the nominal husband tying round her neck a tiny plate of gold shaped like the leaf of the Indian fig tree. The accompanying ritual is costly, and to neglect it entails social ostracism. Consequently, for economical reasons, one man is often engaged to tie the tāli on a number of girls of all ages from three months to twelve years. Having played his part in the ritual and received the customary fee, the ceremonial husband goes his way and is never heard of again. His functions are purely formal, and he has no conjugal rights over any of the girls whom he has technically married. Opinions differ as to the origin of the tāli kettu marriage, and some observers regard it as a Brāhman innovation of comparatively recent date. A different explanation is suggested by Capt. Hamilton’s statement that “when the Zamorin marries, he must not cohabit with his bride till the Nambourie, or chief priest, has enjoyed her, and, if he pleases, may have three nights of her company, because the first fruits of her nuptials must be an holy oblation to the god she worships. And some of the nobles are so complaisant as to allow the clergy the same tribute, but the common people cannot have that compliment paid them, but are forced to supply the priests’ places themselves.”* It seems possible that the ceremony may be a survival of a primitive taboo on virginity which has in course of time become purely formal and has been overlaid by observances borrowed from Hindu sources. This view derives some support from the fact that the ritual resembles in certain respects that which is used for the consecration of a Deva-Dāsi or temple prostitute.
The actual husband.
On attaining physical maturity a Nāyar girl contracts a second marriage variously known as Sambandham (association); guna dosham (for better for worse); pudavamuri (the giving of a cloth); kitakoram (the marriage of the bed). The ceremony is of the simplest kind and consists mainly in the bridegroom presenting betelnut, clothes, and money to the bride at night in the bridal chamber before her female relatives. As to the negotiations which precede it opinions seem to differ. One authority describes it as “generally effected with mutual consent,” while another says that “in most cases the bride and bridegroom are utter strangers to each other until this night.” All agree that Sambandham is followed by consummation, and that it is terminable at the will of either party. Frivolous divorces, however, are said to be rare and to be discouraged by public opinion and by the influence of the karnavan, the autocratic head of the Malabar tarwād, a joint family tracing its descent in the female line from a common ancestress. Where the husband can afford it, his wife lives with him; in other cases she lives with her tarwād and he visits her there—a plain survival of the earlier conditions described above. The children are usually educated by the tarwād.
Taking the evidence as a whole, it seems to point to the conclusion that within the last two or three generations the refining influence of higher education has induced the Nāyars to abandon the practice of polyandry and to attach to the Sambandham connexion the full sanctity of a monogamous union. Their marriage ritual and their law of inheritance still retain unmistakable traces of polyandrous usage, but the tendency is to relegate these to the background. A series of judicial decisions have given to any member of a Malabar joint family the absolute disposal during his lifetime of property acquired by himself, and recent legislation has enabled him to bequeath such property by will to his children by his Sambandham wife.
Fraternal polyandry in Tibet and Sikkim.
In the Himalayan region where fraternal polyandry is in vogue, there are no indications of any moral revolt against the system, unless indeed the germs of such a feeling may be traced in the slight shyness which people are apt to display when questioned on the subject, and in their manifest preference for discussing the connubial arrangements of some family other than their own. In Western Tibet even these faint signs of grace are wanting, and the account given by the latest observer points to the prevalence of considerable sexual depravity.
“Each household contains for all practical purposes three or four families,* and one can imagine the atmosphere in which the children are brought up with polyandry all round them, and when the time comes for a girl to enter another similar household, and be the bride of numerous brothers, it may truly be said that there is no modesty left in her. Merchants and officials from Lhasa can anywhere get women throughout Western Tibet to live with them temporarily for the mere asking, even of the best local families.”
At the time of the last Census polyandry as practised in Sikkim and Eastern Tibet was enquired into by Mr. Earle, then Deputy-Commissioner of Darjeeling, on the basis of a set of questions drawn up by me in 1891. The information collected was carefully verified and may be regarded as substantially correct.
“If the eldest of a group of brothers marries a woman, she is regarded as the common wife of all the brothers. It does not, however, necessarily follow that she will cohabit with all the younger brothers. She exercises much liberty in this respect, and it will depend upon her pleasure as to whether she will cohabit with any particular younger brother. If the eldest brother (i.e., the real husband) dies, the wife passes to one of the younger brothers according to her own selection. Should her choice fall on the next brother, she will still be the common wife of the younger brothers. Should, however, she select any of the younger brothers, she will be the common wife only of those younger than him, and, if he be the youngest, she will be his wife only. If the eldest brother of a group of brothers does not marry, but the second or third brother does so, then the wife will be the common wife of such second or third brother and his younger brothers only. Elder brothers, in such cases, will separate and leave the family, having no claim on the wives of the younger brothers. Cousins, both on the father’s and mother’s side, and half-brothers may be admitted as members of the group of brothers only if the husband agrees and has no brothers of his own. Several cousins cannot take a wife between them except in the instance just quoted. There are instances in the Darjeeling district, but apparently not in Sikkim or Tibet, of a number of men, not brothers or near relations, taking a wife between them, but this appears to be a novel practice introduced for purposes of economy. There appears to be no tradition of any such custom in Sikkim and Tibet in former times.” Property descends in the male line, and there are no traces of inheritance through a sister’s son. The eldest brother counts as the father of the joint wife’s children and the other brothers are spoken of as their uncles.
Origin of polyandry.
When asked about the origin of the custom, people usually give sumptuary reasons recalling those which have given rise to the suspicion that fraternal polyandry was not unknown among the Venetian nobility of the sixteenth century. One is told that a man who is too particular to share a wife with his brethren must pay for the luxury of a household of his own in the form of a separate assessment to revenue; that polyandry keeps the family property together, that it promotes harmony among the brothers, and so forth. I have never heard it assigned to a scarcity of women, and there is no reason to believe that the proportion of the sexes in Sikkim and Tibet is not fairly equal.* Religious zeal, however, encourages professed celibacy especially among the men, and according to Mr. Earle “superfluous women become nuns or prostitutes or remain single."†
Statistics of marriage.
We may conclude this chapter with a brief glance at the statistics of the subject which are alive with human interest. From the point of view of the European old maid India seems at first sight a sort of connubial paradise, where the selfishness of male celibacy is condemned by religion and discouraged by fashion, and every girl who is not physically disqualified for marriage may count with certainty upon finding a husband. Of the entire female population between the ages of fifteen and twenty, four out of every five are married, while in the more critical period from twenty to thirty only one woman out of seven remains single. The Eden so easily won is, however, quickly lost; even in India males marry later than females, and the disparity of ages finds expression in the figures, which show that among women of all ages more than one in six is a widow, while in the case of men the corresponding proportion is only one in eighteen. In England, where from three-fifths to twothirds of both sexes are single and not more than a third are married, the proportion of the widowed is only one in thirty for males and one in thirteen for females. The actual number of widows in India in 1901 was nearly twenty-six millions, while the widowers numbered only eighteen millions. Between the ages of forty and sixty every other woman is a widow, and even at the earlier period of from thirty to forty, one woman in five finds herself in the same unfortunate condition.
Among Hindus.
These general characteristics—the universality of marriage, the prevalence of early marriage, and the frequency of premature widowhood—are in the case of Hindus accentuated by the influence of religion or inviolable usage. Both sexes marry earlier than is the case with the population at large, and of the unmarried girls only one in every fourteen has turned her fifteenth year. Nearly half of the girls between the ages of ten and fifteen are married, while of those between fifteen and twenty only one-fifth have failed to find husbands. This vision of domestic felicity is clouded by the fact that one in every five Hindu women is a widow. Many of them are condemned to a life of penance and humiliation at a comparatively early age, while some are mere infants who have never known their husbands and have had no chance of bearing a child.
Among Muhammadans.
Judged by a European standard, the matrimonial relations of the Muhammadans are less abnormal than those of the Hindus. Marriage is a civil function; its cost is not swollen by the demands of a swarm of greedy priests; the field of selection is larger and is less affected by artificial restrictions relating to social status; and there is no bar to widows marrying again. The males marry later in life, and the pitiful spectacle of a struggling student hampered by a wife and children while he is still cramming for University examinations is less frequent than among Hindus. In the case of females the contrast is still more marked. Among Muhammadan girls between the ages of five and ten only seven per cent. are married compared with twelve per cent. among Hindus; while between ten and fifteen the proportion of child-wives is thirty-nine for Muhammadans and forty-seven for Hindus. The marriage expenses are on a less extravagant scale; bridegrooms are not bought and sold for fantastic prices; and the balance of the sexes is not disturbed by the pernicious custom of hypergamy.
In respect of widowhood the Muhammadans are also more favourably situated. It is true that the descendants of Hindu converts, and especially the Jolāha weavers and Dhuniya wool-carders, are not free from the Hindu prejudice against the re-marriage of widows. But this feeling finds no support from the religion and traditions of Islam and is rebuked by the example of the Prophet himself. It is therefore weaker and less general than among Hindus, and unions between widowers and widows are recognized as legitimate and even appropriate. These influences are reflected in the statistics, which show only ten per cent. of widows among women between fifteen and forty, while in the case of Hindus the proportion is as high as fourteen.
P.S.—Since this chapter was in type public attention has been drawn to the subject of Kulin polygamy by an animated correspondence in the columns of the Times. Those who are curious in these matters will find in Appendix VIII some extracts from letters by Sir Henry Cotton, Sir George Birdwood, Sir G. Grierson, Mr. John Christian, and Mr. Bernard Shaw, together with the report of the Committee appointed in 1867 by the Bengal Government to inquire into the subject with reference to a proposal for legislation which was made by the Mahārāja of Burdwan and the well-known Hindu reformer, Iswar Chandra Vidyasāgar.
Without following Mr. Bernard Shaw in his rather advanced suggestions for the breeding of the Super-Man, any one who approaches the question from a scientific point of view may be permitted to join with him and Sir George Birdwood in condemning as insular and inappropriate the tone of virtuous indignation that appears in some of the letters in the Times. The merest glance at the vast literature which is occupied with the origin of human marriage ought to convince most reasonable people that all sorts of connubial permutations and combinations have been in vogue in different times and places, and that these have resulted, not from any innate depravity on the part of those who practised them, but from the action of some overmastering social force which disturbed the balance of the sexes and brought about matrimonial connexions which we now regard as more or less abnormal. If, then, Kulin polygamy is nothing more than an unhappy but inevitable consequence of exaggerated hypergamy, is it quite rational to denounce the unfortunate victims of a perverted system for preferring a fractional share in an itinerant husband to the reproach of having no husband at all and to the painful repression of the craving for maternity which is nowhere stronger than in India? To treat the symptom does not necessarily cure the disease, although it may induce new symptoms. Supposing Kulin polygamy to be effectively abolished by repressive legislation or social disapproval, the surplus of marriageable girls resulting from hypergamy would still remain. What is to become of them? European experience suggests that enforced celibacy on a large scale is not invariably an ideal condition. If, therefore, a fresh set of evils is to be avoided, the reformers would do wisely to follow Mr. Girindra Nath Dutt’s advice and strike boldly at hypergamy, whatever form it may assume. This they can only deal with themselves, since legislation on the subject would plainly be futile. Indigenous complaints demand indigenous remedies.
Whatever may be the case in Bengal, the following extract from the recently published District Gazetteer seems to be conclusive as to the existence of polygamy among the Brāhmans of Muzaffarpur, a district forming part of the ancient tract of Mithila, whence, according to Mr. Girindra Nath Dutt, the system of Kulinism was borrowed some centuries ago by the Brāhmans of Bengal. Most of the Muzaffarpur Brāhmans belong to the Maithil or Tirhutiyā sub-caste, which is divided into five hypergamous groups—Srotriya or Sote, Jog, Pānji-baddh, Nagar and Jaiwār. The men of each group may take wives from the groups ranking below it in this scale of social precedence, but the women can only marry in their own or in a higher group.
“Polygamy,” says Mr. O’Malley, the author of this interesting volume, “is practised among these Brāhmans by the Bikauwā or ‘Vendor’—a class of Maithil Brāhmans who derive their name from the practice of selling themselves, or more rarely their minor sons, to the daughters of the lower groups of the series given above. Some have as many as forty or fifty wives, who live with their own parents and are visited at intervals by their husbands. Bikauwā Brāhmans who have married into the lower classes are not received on equal terms by the members of their own class, but the women whom they marry consider themselves raised by the alliance. The price paid for a Bikauwā varies according to the class to which he belongs and the means of the family of the girl whom he is to marry. It may be as little as Rs. 20: it has been known to rise as high as Rs. 6,000.” *
Footnotes
- [The custom of infant marriage and the prohibition of remarriage of widows prevail in other countries besides India (E. Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage, 1891, p. 213 et seq., 127.)]
- Tagore Law Lectures, 1879, pp. 187, 188.
- Zimmer, Altindisches Leben, p. 314, Gubernatis, Usi Nuziali, p. 432. [Marriage in the early Vedic texts appears essentially as the union of two persons of full development. Child-wives first occur regularly in the Sūtra period, though it is still uncertain to what extent the rule of marriage before puberty then obtained. (A. A. Macdonell, A. B. Keith, Vedic Index of Names and Subjects, 1913, i. 475 et seq.)] † Laws, IX. 94.] [^* A further extension of the practice is shown in the custom of betrothing unborn children which is reported among the Kunbis of Western India, and the Uppara salt-makers of Madras (Census Report, Baroda, 1911, vol. i., p. 148; Central Provinces, 1911, vol. i., p. 137).] † Papers relating to Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood in India, p. 178. [* In the Central Provinces “infant marriage is not, so far as can be inferred from the present practices, an indigenous custom among the tribes, but has sometimes been adopted by those of them who have been brought into contact with Hindu ideas, and are attempting by adopting Hindu customs, to raise their status. . . . It would seem to have had its origin in the increasing demand for women’s labour as life changed from nomadic to more settled conditions, together with the growing sense of individual property, and the altered view of the position of woman which accompanied the development of the patriarchal system” (Census Report, Central Provinces, 1911, vol. i., p. 137 et seq.). Mr. Gait regards the theory that infant marriage was borrowed from Hinduism as untenable: “Like others of the same kind, it ignores the important part played by the aborigines in the development of Indian religious ideas and social practices” (Census Report, India, 1911, vol. i., p. 264). In parts of Bengal, Behar and Darbhanga the prevalence of infant marriage is attributed to the teaching and influence of the Maithil Brahmans, to whom the celebration of the marriage ceremony is a source of profit (Census Report, Bengal, 1911, vol. i., p. 339).]
- Charles A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, 1906, p. 190.