youngest of them; they then proceed to divide the property, including their sisters, who are exactly assimilated to cattle.[1] The Ooraons share the widows amongst the brothers and cousins in the same way as the Mundas share their sisters.[2]
We find, therefore, no uniformity in the familial organisation of the Bengalese aborigines; and it is the same in regard to their exogamy or endogamy. Exogamy is common. Thus the Juangas are divided into exogamous tribes.[3] The Khonds think it humiliating to marry the women of their own tribe. It is more manly, in their opinion, to go and take a wife from a distant neighbourhood.[4] The Munniporees are divided into four clans, who do not intermarry.[5] Among the Santals, it is forbidden to men to marry in their own clan; but their children belong to the paternal clan.[6] The Limboos (near Darjeeling) are also exogamous, but evidently oscillate between the maternal and paternal family; for the daughters remain in the tribe or rather in the clan of their mother, whilst the sons belong to the paternal clan, but only after the father has paid a certain sum to the mother.[7] The Garos are divided into several clans or maharis, and, amongst them, a man must not marry in his own clan, but in another appointed clan, in which from time immemorial his family has been accustomed to take wives.
Other aborigines of Bengal are endogamous. Thus it is imperative for the daughters of the Abors to marry in their own clan, or the sun and moon would cease to shine.[8] According to Heber, the Karens of Tenasserim are more than endogamous, for among them marriages between brother and sister, father and daughter, are frequent enough in the present day.[9]
What may we deduce from these contradictory facts? A general conclusion, which I have expressed several times
- ↑ Dalton, Ethnology of Bengal, p. 200.
- ↑ Id., ibid. p. 272.
- ↑ Id., ibid. p. 158.
- ↑ Macpherson, Report on the Khonds.—Account of the Religion of the Khonds in Orissa, p. 57.
- ↑ MacCulloch, Account of the Valley of Munniporees, etc., pp. 49, 69.
- ↑ Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal, p. 236.
- ↑ A. Giraud-Teulon, Orig. du Mariage, p. 266.
- ↑ Dalton, Ethnology of Bengal, p. 28.
- ↑ Herbert Spencer, Sociology, vol. ii. p. 218.
