# One Bride For Two Brothers: A Custom Fades In India



## spnadmin (Jul 19, 2010)

Forwarded for posting by Mai Harinder Kaur

                MALANG, India — Buddhi Devi was 14 when she was betrothed. In India,  that is not unusual: many marry young. Her intended was a boy from her  village who was two years younger — that, too, was not strange. But she  was also supposed to marry her future husband’s younger brother, once he  was old enough.        

*Brian Sokol for The New York Times*

 In the rugged Lahaul and Spiti District, the margin  between starvation and survival is slender.                            

    Now 70 and a widow who is still married— one of her husbands is dead —  Ms. Devi is a ghost of another time, one of a shrinking handful of  people who still live in families here that follow the ancient practice  of polyandry. In the remote villages of this Himalayan valley,  polyandry, the practice of multiple men marrying one wife, was for  centuries a practical solution to a set of geographic, economic and  meteorological problems.    

 People here survived off small farms hewed from the mountainsides at an  altitude of 11,000 feet, and dividing property among several sons would  leave each with too little land to feed a family. A harsh mountain  winter ends the short planting season abruptly. The margin between  starvation and survival is slender.        

 “We used to work and eat,” Ms. Devi said, her face etched by decades of  blistering winters, her fingers thick from summers of tilling the soil.  “There was no time for anything else. When three brothers share one  lady, they all come back to one house. They share everything.”        

 Polyandry has been practiced here for centuries, but in a single  generation it has all but vanished. That is a remarkably swift  development in a country where social change, despite rapid economic  growth, leaping technological advances and the relentless march of  globalization, happens with aching slowness, if at all.        

 After centuries of static isolation, so much has changed here in the  Lahaul Valley in the past half-century — first roads and cars, then  telephones and satellite television dishes, and now cellphones and  broadband Internet connections — that a complete social revolution has  taken place. Not one of Ms. Devi’s five children lives in a polyandrous  family.    

 “Times have changed,” Ms. Devi said. “Now nobody marries like this.”        
 Polyandry has never been common in India, but pockets have persisted,  especially among the Hindu and Buddhist communities of the Himalayas,  where India abuts Tibet.    

 Malang sits in the Lahaul Valley, one of India’s most remote and  isolated corners. For six months heavy snow cuts off the single mountain  road that connects the region to the rest of the country. In summer,  its steep mountainsides shimmer with wildflowers, and glacial rivers  irrigate small valley farm fields and orchards, which yield generous  crops of peas, potatoes, apples and plums.    

 Sukh Dayal Bhagsen, 60, is from the neighboring village of Tholang. As a  young man he joined his elder brother’s marriage to a woman named Prem  Dasi. It was never discussed, but always assumed, that he would do this  when he reached marriageable age, he said.    

 “If you marry a different woman, then there are more chances of family  disputes,” Mr. Bhagsen said. “Family property is divided, and problems  arise.”    

 Three brothers married Ms. Dasi, who bore five children.

 The logistics of sharing one wife among several men are daunting. All  the children, regardless of who their biological father is, call the  eldest brother pitaji, or father, while the younger brothers are all  called chacha, or uncle.    

 “Each child knows who his father is, but you call your eldest uncle  father,” said Neelchand Bhagsen, Sukh Dayal Bhagsen’s 40-year-old son.    

 The wife decides the delicate question of who is the father of a child,  and her word in this matter is law.    

 “A mother knows,” Ms. Devi said, unwilling to discuss the sensitive  particularities of this knowledge further.    

 The practice also acted as a form of birth control. Five brothers with a  wife each could easily produce dozens of children. But polyandrous  families seldom had more than six or seven children.    

 Although the society of the Lahaul Valley is patrilineal, the practice  of polyandry gave women considerable sway over many matters. “The wife’s  voice is the dominant voice in the household,” Neelchand Bhagsen said.         

 When his mother demanded a new house for the growing brood in 1979,  there was no question that it would be built.        

“Whatever my mother said was the final word,” he said.

 Life in the Lahaul Valley has changed in ways people born in Raj-era  India would never imagine. Roads carved into steep mountain slopes  brought the outside world closer. Children started going to school. Men  ranged farther for work, earning salaries for the first time. Suddenly,  the necessity for brothers to share a wife disappeared.        

    One of the elder Bhagsen brothers, Bhimi Ram, was an early indication of  this change. He got a job as a mason in Kulu, a town on the other side  of the mountain pass connecting the valley to the rest of India. He  bought a piece of land there, and eventually he decided to leave the  marriage. 

His brothers bought out his share of the family property. A daughter  produced in the polyandrous marriage remained behind in their village,  and Bhimi Ram went off to start a new life. Years later he attended his  daughter’s marriage as an ordinary guest, not as father of the bride. 

“He got some money and wanted to move on,” Sukh Dayal Bhagsen said.    

 The changes have only accelerated in the last two decades, as waves of  technological innovation and economic reform have sent eddies even to  these distant valleys. Cheap passenger cars made it easier to connect  physically to the outside world. Telephones, and now cellphones and  broadband Internet, made virtual connections possible. A liberalizing  economy brought new jobs. Everyone became a little richer. Everyone had  more options. 

 Among Neelchand Bhagsen’s generation there was no question: They would  all have their own marriages and lives. Unlike those in his father’s  generation, who had no schooling at all, Mr. Bhagsen not only completed  high school, but also got a bachelor’s degree and became a teacher. 

 He saved up enough money to buy a plot of land on the Beas River in the  Kulu Valley, near the city of Manali. He built a sturdy brick house  there to share with his wife and son, and planted a vegetable garden  with radishes, beans and okra. He has prospered. This year he is adding a  second floor to the house, to accommodate the many relatives who come  to stay with him during the harsh valley winters. 

 His could be any suburban nuclear family, anywhere in the world. His  life could not be further removed from the unusual family in which he  grew up. No one, it seems, mourns polyandry’s passing. 

 “That system had utility for a time,” Mr. Bhagsen said. “But in the  present context it has outlived its usefulness. The world has changed.”         

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/world/asia/17polyandry.html?_r=3&hp


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