Vol. X, No. 9.] Marriage Customs of the Cochin Castes. 301 

 [N.S.] 



they might themselves arrange a marriage with a suitable 

 young man. The whole question, however, is one of conjecture. 



It is said that during later times, an influential sect had 

 grown up who approved of early marriage. The view that the 

 girls should be married before puberty developed partly from 

 the fear of their defilement, and paitly because of the belief 

 that the neglect of parents to provide husbands for their 

 daughters who were fit to conceive, and who, being eligible for 

 marriage, was tantamount to an embryo murder at each ritu 

 Considerations such as these began to assert themselves, and 

 were laid hold of by the later Smrithi writers, who began to 

 lay down elaborate rules regarding matrimonial alliances 

 before puberty, and the idea of the embryo murder, already 

 referred to, was much exaggerated. The custom of post-nubile 

 marriage was not yet condemned wholesale, but gradually 

 owing to the altered conditions in the later periods the view 

 that marriage should take place before puberty became gener- 

 ally held. Yama, Parasara, Samvartha and other writers pro- 

 hibit the custom of post-nubile marriage, showering curses 

 upon the delinquent parents for their negligence and proclaim- 

 ing all of them to be out -castes. They also mentioned the 

 rewards that went to parents who gave their daughters in mar- 

 riage before they reached puberty and emphasized the gifts of 

 them before puberty as producing great merits, the principal 

 motive being not their conjugal happiness, but the father's 

 spiritual gain. The religious idea of the time, such as the im- 

 portance of the purity of birth, and the chastity of the mother, 

 grandmother, great-grandmother, whose names a Brahman 

 has to pronounce on the Sradha day, favoured this change. 

 Thus, the gradual lowering of the position of women from 

 the standard of the vedic times, and the distrust of their vir- 

 tue induced by the example of prematrimonial license set by 

 the Dravidian races, must have had its effects. These facts 

 are not obscurely hinted at in the literature of the subject, and 

 girls were, as at present, married before puberty in order to 

 avoid the possibility of causing scandal later on. 1 When once 

 the custom of infant marriage had been started under pressure 

 of social necessity by the families of the highest groups, a 

 fashion was set which was blindly followed by other groups. 



The practice of infant marriage has spread much further, 

 and had more deeply taken root among the lower castes than 

 the prohibition of widow marriage. Both customs appear to 

 have been borrowed from the higher castes, and are now 

 regarded as steps leading to social distinction. To marry a girl 

 sufficiently early causes her parents no particular inconven- 

 ience, and confers on them some consideration which may 

 attach to religious orthodoxy and social propriety. Among the 



l Marriage after Puberty, pages 75-89 



