RISE OF FATHERRIGHT 41 



the marriage custom of the Tipperah of Bengal* 

 Residence by the husband and service in the father-in- 

 law's house is also one of the forms of marriage 

 practised by the Santals. It is resorted to when a girl 

 is ugly or deformed and there is no prospect of her 

 marrying in any other way. The husband is expected 

 to serve for five years. " At the end of that time he 

 gets a pair of bullocks, some rice and some agricultural 

 implements, and is allowed," we are told, "to go about 

 his business : " by which we are presumably to under- 

 stand that the marriage is at an end. 1 Among the 

 Badagas of the Nilgiri Hills "it is said to be common 

 for one who is in want of labourers to promise his 

 daughter in marriage to the son or other relative of a 

 neighbour not in circumstances so flourishing as 

 himself ; and these engagements being entered into, 

 the intended bridegroom serves the father of his 



Santal youth by surreptitiously marking a girl on the foreHead with 

 vermilion or indeed any common earth makes her his wife (Risley, 

 Tribes and Castes, ii. 230). Cf. the Ntlakapamux custom cited 

 below p. 90. 



1 Risley, Tribes, ii. 230. What is called beena marriage is in fact 

 not very uncommon in India. For examples, see Crooke, Tribes 

 and Castes, i. 281 ; ii. 109, 218, 434. It is possible that the 

 custom of Illatom followed by some of the castes, including the 

 Nambudri Brahmans of the south of India, may be ultimately 

 derived from the custom by which a husband goes to reside in his 

 wife's family. By the custom of Illatom a father who has no sons 

 adopts for certain purposes a daughter's husband, but without the 

 religious ceremonies necessary to full and complete adoption. It is 

 probably immediately derivable from, or at least has been influenced 

 by, the old Hindu custom by which a father without sons appointed 

 a daughter to bear him issue who could perform the sraddha. But 

 it is now overlaid by so many legal decisions that the relation of an 

 illatom son-in-law to his wife's family has become highly artificial. 

 See Ramachendrier, Collection of Decisions on the Law of Succession, 

 &c. (Madras, 1892) 39 sqq, 



