Polyandry losing ground in Jaunsar, thanks to overwork

Jaunsar tribal womaen: Changing an old customDeep within the Himalayas, some hundreds of miles north of Dehra Dun, a narrow highway winds its tortuous way through a region known as Jaunsar, to arrive eventually near Jaadi, a little hamlet inhabited by polyandrous tribals. Recently, when India Today visited Jaadi, only the women folk were home; the men were out grazing sheep. Shy initially, they opened up on being presented with a prized commodity: cigarettes.One of them, Soanri, a talkative middle-aged housewife, has been married to a group of five brothers ever since she can remember. Says she: "We Jaunsaris practise fraternal polyandry - only brothers can marry a common wife." Our ancestors, she adds with a straight face, "were the Pandavas, and the system comes down to us from the polyandrous union of the Pandava brothers with Draupadi."But Jaadi, like other Jaunsar villages, has veered steadily towards monogamy in recent years. Exemplifying the change is 21-year-old Debo, who earlier this year divorced her multiple husbands to marry just one man. "It was terribly hard being married to so many," she says. "Just making chapatis for them all, and the in-laws too, so many times a day, used to kill me. I also single-handedly fed and cleaned the animals, carried water up the mountain, and wove woollen coats and blankets, among other things. My present husband does not share me with his brothers, and I can handle the work."Overwork is only one reason why polyandry is losing ground in Jaunsar. According to Girdhari Singh Negi, a forest ranger with a 1,000 square miles of Jaunsari territory under his jurisdiction. Jaunsar women never leave the area on marrying an outsider. "Outsiders therefore tend to settle in Jaunsar, taking a wife and not sharing her with others, as is their custom; and this is spreading monogamy widely," says Negi. He adds that with a greater number of roads penetrating these highland backwoods, the customs of the plains are coming to Jaunsar in a big way.Change: Even the older generation has developed a sneaking admiration for the new order, as it blames the high incidence of venereal disease in Jaunsar on polyandry. Says Sumadi Narayanan, the Malayali nurse who manages the Red Cross centre in Jaadi: "VD was particularly endemic here, because whenever one member of a family became afflicted, he passed it on to all those married to the same woman."While many village girls now marry single men, the settlement still retains its share of conservative die hards like prematurely aged Kaatki, who looks as if she is in her 80s. In keeping with tradition, she has already married off her grand-daughters Anita and Neera, aged six and eleven, each to different groups of brothers, and plans to pack them off to their joint husbands the moment they attain puberty.Jaunsaris proudly claim that polyandry has helped them retain their ancestral lands and property. Says Kaatki: "Other tribals foolishly married one wife each, so that with successive generations, their property became so fragmented, they had to migrate to the Dun plain as humble labourers. We escaped such a fate. In the polyandrous household, it is impossible to tell which child belongs to which father, so property remains joint,"Historically, "high" caste Jaunsaris maintained their racial purity by resorting to polyandry. Rather than dilute their racial characteristics, the "higher" castes solved their chronic problem of too few women by taking common wives. The present gradual withdrawal of the custom has been accompanied by changes in matrimonial customs too. Traditional marriages, which were celebrated by killing a goat or two for a feast, are no longer the order of the day. Nowadays the services of the Hindu pundit and his sacred fire are normally commissioned. Dowry, happily, has not yet raised its vicious head. As one giggly young woman said: "Even our menfolk pay no bride-price, or dowry in reverse, as other tribals do." Told of present-day murders and suicides occasioned by the dowry habit in Delhi, she said seriously: "I have never been outside Jaunsar; I cannot imagine how this happens. Here, if a girl is ill-treated, she does not die. She just returns to the parental fold." In Jaunsar, obviously, no stigma is attached to a girl with a broken marriage.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Jan 3, 2014 09:43 IST--- ENDS ---

Download App

Get 37% off on an annual Print +Digital subscription of India Today Magazine

Polyandry losing ground in Jaunsar, thanks to overwork

Deep within the Himalayas, some hundreds of miles north of Dehra Dun, a narrow highway winds its tortuous way through a region known as Jaunsar, to arrive eventually near Jaadi, a little hamlet inhabited by polyandrous tribals.

PUBLICATIONS

TELEVISION

EVENTS

RADIO

GAMING

USEFUL LINKS

PRINTING

WELFARE

DISTRIBUTION

SYNDICATIONS

WEBSITES

EDUCATION