Vol. X. No. 9. J Marriage Customs of the Cochin Castes. 313 

 [N.S.] 



the appointed hour, and gives her necessary clothes. Rice is 

 sprinked over the newly married couple, who in company with 

 a few. friends partake of sweatmeats. A Tuesday or Sunday is 



generally selected for solemnizing a widow marriage. No cere- 

 monies are performed among the low caste men for the marriage 

 of a widow. Her dress and other expenses are defrayed by the 

 husband, it is only a loose marital connection — a kind of con- 

 cubinage. Among the Kadars widow marriage is unknown, 

 but widows may live in a state of concubinage. Among the 

 Eravalans a widow can mate with a widower only with the 

 consent of her castemen. There is no formal ceremony what- 

 ever for the marriage of widows among the Nayadis. A Parayan 

 widow is never allowed to marry her husband's brother; but 

 a Pulayan widow may form conjugal relations with any mem- 

 ber of the caste except her brother-in-law. A Vettuvan widow 

 may marry her own brother-in law or anybody she likes. 



It is said that the prohibition of widow marriage was un- 

 known in Vedic times. The Mahabharatha furnishes several 

 instances of widow marriage. Ulupi, the widowed daughter of 

 the King of the Naga Tribe, was given in marriage by her father 

 to Arjun. The Padma Puran refers to the marriage of the 

 widowed daughter of the King of Benares who was married 

 twenty times, the reason being her peculiar misfortune to lose 

 her husband immediately after her marriage. 



It is difficult to trace the motives which induced the 

 Brahuians of a later age to prohibit widow marriage, but the 

 causes which favoured the growth of the custom which prevents 

 the widows of the highest castes from marrying again have been 

 thus summarized by Sir Herbert Risley in the last Census 



Report , page 428 : 



" In the first place the anxiety of the early Hindu lawgivers 

 to circumscribe a woman's rights to property would unquestion- 

 ably tend to forbid her to join her lot to a man whose interest 

 would be to assert and extend those rights as against the mem- 

 bers of her husband's family. At the same time the growth of 

 the doctrine of spiritual benefit would require her to devote her 

 life to the annual performance of her husband's sradha. 

 Technical obstacles to her remarriage also arise from the 

 Brahmanical theory of marriage itself. The ceremony being 

 regarded as a sacrament ordained for the purification of women, 

 and its essential portion being the gift of the woman by her 

 father to her husband, the effect of the gift is to transfer her 

 own gotra or exogamous group into that of her husband's." 



* 



" Some influence must also have been exerted in the same 

 direction by the competition for husbands resulting from the 

 action of hypergamy. Widows certainly would be the first to 

 be excluded from the marriage market, for in their case the 



