in Caste Relationship
in Caste Relationship
 | |
| |
| |
|
The Role of Marriage in Caste Relationships:
It is a fact well known to students of Indian society that marriage is an indispensable consideration among castes. The question of the role of marriage in caste relationships, however, is by no means settled. The caste is endogamous; if the caste includes sub castes, then the sub castes will be endogamous. So persistent is the characteristic of castes that sometimes they have been referred to as marriage circles. We know that intermarriage is a most potent leveler of cultures and races; so much so, indeed, that we might assume that no group can maintain its identity or solidarity if it permitted free intermarriage with out-groups.
We may observe further that endogamy is a protective device utilized by social groups that feel they have some biological or cultural heritage to preserve. The Caste prevents intermarriage so that it may isolate itself, and not vice-versa. In India endogamy serves as a means of maintaining unnumbered little cystlike cultural variants invidiously juxtaposed. We should probably be grossly misled, however, if we were to think of endogamy, rather than that which its prohibition is intended to protect, as of primary significance. Edward Westermarck says with finality: “Endogamy is the essence of the caste system.”
This point of view has actually resulted in many questionable conclusions. A.H. Benton sees the social utility of sex as providing the need for marriage restrictions. To him, sex itself, the value of women to men secured in marriage, is the advantage which one caste gains over another in its practice of endogamy. In other words, marriage per se is the essential circumstance. Says this writer:
My contention is that the system at the outset had had for its object the due adjustment of sexual relations…. The basis and starting point of the whole system are obviously the fact that the community consists of sections, the members of which are under agreement to exchange brides with each other on certain customary conditions… All men must find their brides, each in that section of the population which has arranged for mutual interchange.
Thus a sort of contractual conservation of women, a struggle for sex satisfaction among men, appears to be here a dominant purpose of caste. Equally misleading is the idea of natural antipathy between man and man, which becomes explicit in a superior group’s refusal to give its women to inferior men.
Evidently it is not the absence of intermarriage between group and group which is the test of caste, but rather the type of phenomenon which marriage restrictions seek to isolate. The cultural values are developed first, endogamy is primarily an isolating contrivance. Therefore, we cannot know whether caste exists until we have studied and identified the form of social organization isolated. In fact, Risley has observed some religious sects that have succeeded in maintaining their integrity not by endogamy but by extremely rigid non-commensal practices.
However castes might have originated, it is true that caste rules and customs are vital. Confusion of these rules results in ill-being to all caste members. “The special caste rules make of their community, in effect, a distinct species.” We should make it clear that caste bastardy is not a matter of blood but rather a disruptive mixture of the ordered life of the community. It is a consummate cultural cross in a society whose continuity is based upon cultural individuation. Castes, indeed, are cultural sanctuaries preserved from defilement by endogamy. Each caste has a sacred way of life, a dharma, which it calls its own, and this is what it seeks to protect.
H.H. Risley and E.A. Gait conclude that “marriage is the most prominent factor in the caste system.” Form the same point of view, however, marriage is also the most prominent factor in the social-class system, or the race system, or any other system of group isolation. It may be revealing to recall that a former European king was allowed every social familiarity with a certain women of plebeian descent, but on his marrying her was forthwith induced to abdicate. The principle which operated so decisively in this case is also more or less operative throughout the whole social-class hierarchy. The greater the disparity in social-class status, the more rigid the sanctions against intermarriage.
Endogamy, then, is a sort of fence behind which a variety of social interests and types of social organization may be protected. The group first becomes organized about some vital social interest before it decides upon its protection by non-intermarriage isolation. The interest may be political, as in the caste of conquerors desiring to maintain ruling status. “Government minorities, even when of the same race and approximately the same cultures as the governed, hold themselves aloof; and when their status is threatened by intermarriage they enact against it—the statute of Kilkenny (1366) forbidding the English of the Pale to intermarry with the Irish is typical of such legislation.” or the interest may be nationalistic as, for example, the German Nazi laws against intermarriage with Jews and Poles. The interest may be religious, as that between sect and sect. “The marriages of the faithful with aliens to the Catholic Faith were…universally forbidden at the close of the fourth century … All marriages with those outside the Church were forbidden.” Among some groups such as the Jews, it is a religo-cultural interest which is to be preserved. “With them the problem has been and is still primarily one of the integrity of jewish homelife, and therefore of the social solidarity of the Jewish people.” The Jews, partly because of some “deep-seated dread of extinction,” have achieved solidarity by isolating themselves through marriage restrictions; the fact of being Jewish, however, does not tend to give them internal status homogeneity.
The interest may be mainly economic as, for example, that protected by social-class sanctions against marriage between persons of different classes, or between persons of different estates. It may be racial, in an immediate or proximate sense, as in the case of blacks and whites in South Africa. Finally, it may be a composite of cultural factors, as in the case of marriage restrictions between caste and caste in India, or of the ethnocentric isolation of certain foreign groups in the United States.
Marriage restriction, then, is a dependent social phenomenon having as its determinant some primary social interest, which interest may vary with the situation. The group initiating the restriction ordinarily has some apparent advantage which it seeks to preserve. In his discussion of caste formation Risley says, “The first stage is for a number of families, who discover in themselves some quality of social distinction, to refuse to give their women in marriage to other members of the caste.”
The sanction of the dominant group is seldom, if ever, against inter-marriage as such; but rather against equal cultural participation. Where each group has de facto equal freedom to participate in the culture, intermarriage will not be a social problem, and of course there will be no social sanctions against it. Endogamy obviously may be an imposition. In the United States peoples of color are not endogamous by election.
Caste-women may marry up without disturbing caste integrity; such a relationship has been called 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… The men of the division can marry in it or below it; the women can marry in it or above it.
Hypergamy is possible because of the cultural nature of caste, the position of women in India, and the custom of early marriage.
In Brahmanic India the marriage contract is a religious one, and the bride and groom ordinarily have no part in its negotiation. The problem of contracting for marriage is left solely in the hands of parents or guardians; therefore, no possible interest of the marital pair could contravene that of the parents. The interest of the parents is that of the family and the caste and, of course, not sex. Thus romantic love is virtually ruled out in India. Says the Abbe Dubois, “What we call love-making is utterly unknown amongst the Hindus.” Children are ordinarily married before they reach the age when meaningful love is possible, and naturally:
The inclinations of the persons about to be married are never consulted. In fact, it would be ridiculous to do so amongst the Brahmins, seeing the age at which they marry their daughters. But even the Sudras, who often do not marry their daughters until they have attained full age, would never dream of consulting the tastes and feelings of their children under these circumstances. The choice is left entirely to the parents. That which chiefly concerns the young man’s family is the purity of the caste of his future wife. Beauty and personal attractions of any kind count for nothing in their eyes. The girl’s parents look more particularly to the fortune of their future son-in-law, and to the character of his mother, who after the marriage becomes the absolute mistress of the young wife.
In most castes parents are under strict obligation to marry their children early, and allowing a child to reach maturity unmarried may result in serious caste penalties. We should expect this, for Hindu adults are very much concerned with keeping their community closed. They cannot permit romantic marriage. We should also expect to find that, as the system developed and castes multiplied, there would be a greater necessity for child marriage. Cultural differences becoming less distinct, they would naturally tend to be less convincing as barriers to Hindu youth. Geographically, too, we should expect the custom of child marriage to expand coterminously with Hinudism.
In India early marriage is prescribed particularly for females. The Law Books put the age of marriage for reputable men rather high, but for women it seems inordinately low. Manu says, for instance: “A man, aged thirty years, shall marry a maiden of twelve who pleases him, or a man of twenty-four a girl of eight years of age; if the performance of his duties would otherwise be impeded, he must marry sooner.” Moreover, the fact that widowers may remarry at will makes possible the marrying of older men. “It is no uncommon thing,” observes Abbe Dubois, “to see an old man of sixty or more, having lost his first wife, marry for the second time a little child five or six years old, and even prefer her to girls of mature age.”
Ordinarily, however, both boy and girl are married before puberty; and, as we have seen, therein lies a significant means of controlling the caste system. In Brahmanic India the control of marriage by adult members of the family provides an effective guard against out-marrying, while the subjugation of women secures to men the final decisions about caste interests. Both hypergamy and permanent widowhood contribute also to the social ascendancy of males.
Among Hindus marriage is not only a sacrament of primary importance but also a lifelong concern of the individual, the family and the group to which he belongs. As we have already stated, the hindu woman outside the married state is a rather meaningless entity, while an unmarried man is both socially inconvenienced and spiritually blamable. Marriage is not looked upon as a matter of personal predilection but as a necessity – so much so, indeed, that “among a number of Hindu castes, as also among the Todas of southern India, the corpse of a person dying unmarried is married before cremation as a necessary qualification to future happiness.” In India, then, every adult and a goodly proportion of infants are supposed to be married. Says one writer of wide experience:
The first point which strikes the observe is the almost universal prevalence of the married state… Religion… 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.
Marriage itself, then, constitutes a social condition of extreme importance – a fact which is of some significance when comparing marriage among castes with the marital relationships existing in other parts of the world.
