GARO MARRIAGES.
BY SIR J. G. FRAZER.
In an article under this heading in the last number of Folk-Lore[1] Mr. T. C. Hodson says: “It may help to remove misunderstandings if this examination of Garo marriages begins with a transcript of the exact text of the passage in the Assam Census Report for 1891, on which Sir James Frazer bases his view that ‘among the Garos marriage with a mother's brother's widow appears to be a simple consequence of previous marriage with her daughter.’ The text is as follows: ‘Mr. Teunon informs me of a case in which a man refused to marry the widow who was in this instance a second wife, and not his wife's own mother; and the old lady then gave herself and her own daughter in marriage to another man. In a dispute regarding the property which followed, the laskar reported that the first man having failed to do his duty, the second was entitled to the greater part of the property.’ In this case, therefore, the marriage with the daughter followed as a consequence of the marriage with the widow.”
On this I have to observe that my view, which Mr. Hodson quotes quite correctly, was not based, as he seems to think, on the single passage of the Assam Census Report for 1891; but that it was based on five passages of four different writers, all of them high authorities on Indian ethnology—the late Colonel E. T. Dalton, the late Sir W. W. Hunter, Sir Edward A. Gait, and Major A. Playfair. The passages are not quoted by me in my book, but exact
- ↑ 1 June 30th, 1921, p. 133.
