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POLYANDRY IN THE HIMALAYAS.
MAY, 1878.]
If, then, the Pa hâri is poor, it is chiefly his own fault, and the promiscuous and complicated connections he enters into cannot fairly be charged to his poverty. On the contrary, most of the cases of polyandry in the villages of the Kôtgadh district, in Bussahir and Kulu, are found among the well-to-do people; it is the poor who prefer polygamy, on account of the value of the women as household drudges.
Nothing, perhaps, will give a more vivid insight into the state of polyandry than one or two cases as they have actually occurred. In Pomelai, near Kôtgadh, there are two brothers, the elder of whom, Jhar, got properly married to his wife. Being of the Kanait caste, the ceremony was performed in the usual manner by a Brahman. But, as these two brothers had a house and fields in common, it was privately arranged that the woman should also be the wife of the younger. The fruit of such a union does not generally give rise to disputes; the first-born child is always considered that of the eldest brother, the second that of the next. Legally, I believe, the children all belong to the eldest. No European would probably have become aware of the case at Pomelai, but for a violent quarrel which obliged Jhar to leave his wife to his younger brother, and seek for employment in the house of the missionary at Kôtgaḍh.
In another village, Mongsu, not far from Pomelai, there live three brothers in a family of high caste, the eldest of whom, Primu by name, married a woman who became afterwards the wife of the second, Gangå. The third brother, on the other hand,-Ratti,-has a separate wife.
The most complicated case of polyandry that has come to my notice is that at Kilba, in Kanawar, about a hundred miles from Kôtgadh. Râm Charn, the mukhid or head-man of the village, had three brothers,-Khatti Râm, Basant Râm, and another, and these four brothers had only one wife in common. Her eldest son, Premsukh, was in 1870 about five-and-twenty years old, and her youngest seven or eight. These two, besides a girl called Sundri Dâsi, were the acknowledged children of Râm Charn, the mukhid. Khatti Râm had no children, but Basant Râm, the third brother, had first a girl, Amar Dâsi, aged eighteen, and two boys about fourteen and eleven. All six children acknowledged Râm Charn as head of the family. When Premsukh, the eldest son, who officiated as mukhid in the absence of his father, was married, it was well understood that his wife
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would become the wife of all the brothers as they grew up, including the child then in his infancy. I hear this Premsukh lately married a second wife, as he had no family by the first. Again, the girl Amar Dâsi, daughter of Basant Râm, was not married until she was eighteen, because her father could not find any family which contained a sufficient number of brothers to make it worth his while to part with her. Eventually, however, she was married to an only son who was wealthy.
These three instances of polyandry are culled from a large number I made a note of, and it is hoped they will afford a general insight into the working of the system. But, with all due consideration to the high authority of Mr. Fraser, it is contended that polyandry, as it now exists in the Himalaya, is owing rather to the avarice and the brutish insensibility to, and absence of, general morality than to the poverty of the people. When several brothers agree to have a wife in common, it will be found that, though individually rich enough to keep a wife, there is some property they have, and which they do not wish to
divide.
Fields, grazing-lands, or a forest, or all together, produce sufficient to keep a combined family in respectability, but if divided and again subdivided each part would at last be too small to support two or three people. Polyandry is thus in reality nothing more than a mere custom of community of wives among brothers who have a community of other goods.
Next, I must modify another statement in The Journal of a Tour quoted above. The practice of polyandry, so far as I have been able to learn, is not universal,-it can scarcely be called very common; and, considering what was said by the committee of the Kôtgadh Mission in 1841, there are visible signs, though small, that the custom is falling into disuse. If diligently searched, single cases of polyandry will be found in the Kôtgadh parganâ, in Kulu, in the territory of the R &ņas of Komarsen and Kaneti, and in Bussahir, and this not confined to any special caste, but among Brahmans, Rajputs, and Kanaits without distinction. Though common enough in Kanawar at the present day, it exists side by side with polygamy and monogamy. In one house there may be three brothers with one wife; in the next three brothers with four wives, all alike in common; in the next house there may be a man with three wives to himself; in the next a man with only one wife.
