Inter-tribal marriages in India
- With special reference to North East India -
- Part 1 -

Dr Priyadarshni M Gangte *

INTRODUCTION :

Marriage as a social institution is an arrangement that enables persons to live together and co-operate with one another in an orderly social life and institutionalised relationship. It is essentially a rearrangement of social structure. In order to understand how it works.

We have to examine how it binds persons together by convergence of interest and sentiment and how it controls and minimises those conflicts that may possibly occur due to divergence of sentiment or interest. We may as well examine as to how it contributes to its working as a system. In doing so, we may come to an understanding or explanation as to how the system came into existence.

Marriage makes certain existing relationship particularly that of the bride to her family changed. New social relatives are created. It creates a relationship between the husband and the wife in the first place. It also creates new relationship between the husband and the wife's relatives and between the wife and the husband's relatives on the one hand, and between the relatives of the husbands and those of the wife who are, on both sides, interested in the marriage and in the children that are expected to result from it.

In fact, marriage, like birth, death, or initiation at puberty, is rearrangement of structure that is essentially recurring in any society. It is a moment of continuing social process regulated by custom which is institutionalised way of dealing such event.

When marriage involves some modification or partial rupture of the relations between the bride and her immediate kin, it is least marked or felt, if the husband goes to live with his parents-in-law in a matri-local society. But it is most marked if the bride leaves her family and goes to live with her husband and his family in patri-local society. Her absence makes her own family suffer a loss. But it would be wrong to interpret the same as economic loss.

It is the loss of a person in the family, and it is a breach of family solidarity. This aspect is given symbolic expression between the two kin groups in the forms of hostility by attempting to take or kidnap the bride by force. Either the girl or her kin or both, are expected to make a show of resistance at her being taken away.

Prof. Radcliff Brown (1960: p.50) says, "Customs of this kind are the ritual or symbolic expression of the recognition that marriage entails the breaking of the solidarity that unites a woman to the family in which she has been born and grown up". In fact, such customs may be interpreted as manifestations of recognition accorded to the structural change that has been brought about the marriage.

The question of prevalence of payment of bride price in some tribal societies is an important aspect in marriage. Such payment of bride price may be taken as an indemnity or compensation given by the boy's party to the bride's kin for the loss of their daughter. It may also be regarded that such payment gives the husband and his kin certain rights over his wife and the children she bears.

Another indispensable aspect that should be understood is sets of regulations that govern marriage between persons related by kinship or through marriage. In some tribal societies there are rules which prohibit marriage between persons who stand in certain relationship. In some cases there are certain relatives between whose marriage is not merely permitted but is desirable.

The term 'preferential marriage' is commonly applied to customs of this kind. The most common form of this system is found in the cross-cousin marriage. Having sufficiently covered some pertinent features on marriage over which attention needs to be focused, it is now expedient that we examine them as to how they are operative among the tribals of the North-East India. For a thorough understanding of the subject matter, it is essential that a brief background as to prevalence of systems of marriage and divorce among the tribals of North-East India is highlighted.

The entire North-East India comprising Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, known as 'Seven Sisters' is frequented by different groups of people from time immemorial in the form of migration from Burma and other places. Thus we find people of Mongoloid strains in respect of their physical features, culture, language, etc.

They are subsequently identified and differentiated one from the other based on various historical processes of stress and strains; communication difficulties had contributed in no small measure to their being in isolation for a number of generations. In the process, ultimately different groups were either alienated one from the other or aligned among themselves, and thus came to bear various ethnic appellations identifying themselves as distinct tribes with distinct culture and tradition.

Prof Bhowmick (1980:3) said, "... present day cultured of these groups bear such mark of incorporation into the core of their cultural matrix."

There are altogether 131 tribes with identifiable characteristics and traits distributed in different areas of this region (Sharma 1978) and as weaker sections of the people, the Govt of India categorised them as 'Scheduled' so as to make the upliftment schemes available to them as provided in the Constitution of India.

It is true that this enchanted land known as the North-East region attracted waves of diverse ethnic groups through ages. It has come to stay as the confluence of the most colourful mosaic of ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity (Government of Assam, 1976:30). Together with this, there are different social systems among the tribal groups which can be divided hardly into three categories as follows :

1. the matrilineal tribes. In this, the Khasis, the Jaintias and the Garos of Meghalaya are included.
2. the homogeneous patrilineal tribes. The Kuki-Mizo tribes of Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura constitute this category.
3. the heterogeneous patrilineal tribes. The Naga of Nagaland and Manipur and the Arunachali tribes of Arunachal Pradesh are the groups of this category.