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Dr. Charlotte Krause : Her Life & Literature
exceptions ) to keep up messmateship and intermarriage with the
rest.
Thus, it came to pass that the groups within which messmateship and intermarriage were allowed, became smaller and smaller, and that even in such an enormous caste as, e.g., the Śrīmālis are, it has become a difficult problem for the head of a family to find out brides for all the marriageable young men. For in many places of Gujarat and Kathiawar, it would even now-a-days be considered quite an unheard of case and liable to outcasting, if e.g., a Vīsā-śrīmāla Svetāmbara idolator would give his daughter in marriage to a Vīsā-Śrīmāla Svetāmbara Sthānakavāsī even of the very same place; and if a Daśa-osavāla Svetāmbara idolator of Veraval would marry his daughter to a Daśa-osavāla Śvetāmbara idolator of Vala, it would be considered just as heavy a crime. . Owing to the strictness of the prohibition of widowremarriages on one, and the frequency of even old widowers remarriages on the other side, owing to the great mortality of Indian women as a consequence of improper hygienic conditions in childbed and of too early marriages, owing to the prohibition of marriages within certain distantly related clans, and many other reasons, there has always been a scarcity of marriageable women in India, which again resulted in such objectionable customs as the selling of brides for high prices. It was in order to prevent marriageable girls to be given away outside the respective communities, and in order to secure brides for poor and uneducated fellow-citizens for whom it has always been difficult to secure brides, that those circles of caste restrictions were drawn narrower and narrower. It is typical that these restrictions refer only to the giving away of brides, whereas there is complete liberty as to bringing brides home from outside provided they belong to the same chief caste.
Many of the ancient Jaina castes had moreover been decimated by those conversions to Vaişnavism alluded to above. Messmateship and intermarriages between the now heterodox parts of
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