158 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



the girl as a second wife." Divorce at the wish of 

 either husband or wife is merely a question of terms. 

 It "is effected in the presence of the assembled 

 villagers by the husband tearing asunder three sal- 

 leaves in token of separation and upsetting a brass 

 pot full of water." 1 



That curious and interesting people the Todas, 

 inhabiting the Nilgiri Hills in Southern India, have 

 long been known to practise fraternal polyandry. A 

 woman married to a man becomes at the same time 

 the wife of all his brothers, and even of brothers who 

 may be born subsequently to the marriage. So far as 

 the statistics collected by Dr. Rivers go the husbands 

 are usually brothers in our sense of the word. But 

 they are sometimes clan-brothers only, that is to say, 

 men belonging to the same clan and the same genera- 

 tion. More rarely it seems men of different clans may 

 have the same wife. When the wife becomes pregnant 

 the eldest brother performs a ceremony the central 

 rite of which is the giving to the wife of a miniature 

 bow and arrow. This constitutes him for all social 

 purposes the father of the child about to be born and 

 of all future children until another of the husbands 

 perform a similar ceremony. So strict is this rule that 

 he will be regarded as the father of a child born long 

 after his death if no other man have performed the 

 ceremony in the meantime. But a woman is by no 

 means limited to sexual intercourse with her formal 

 husbands, nor are they limited to intercourse with 

 their joint wife. Wives are often transferred from one 

 husband, or one group of husbands, to another in 

 exchange for a number of buffaloes. Moreover there 

 1 Risley, i. 228, 229, 231. 



