Customary 
marriage not 
essentially a 
contract  be- 
tween indivi- 
duals. 
Nor an alli- 
ance between 
tribes. 
Reasons for 
rejection of 
this second 
hypothesis. 
94 REMBAU HISTORY, ETC. 
Mohamedan marriage law—is a survival of the purchase price 
of a bride in savage society, the nature of the fee has been 
wholly transformed by its retention in the customs of the 
matriarchal state of Rembau. 
Regarded from the standpoint of the payer—the man 
who fills the customary debt, (mengisi adat), the marriage fee, 
us being a debt-of-inheritance, and a valid charge on the 
ancestral property of his family, is a trzbal payment. The 
spread of Mohamedan ideas has taught the woman to account 
the fee her perquisite. Strict custom did not regard it in that 
light. The allocation of a portion of the fee payable for an 
irregular marriage, to the tribal chief and officers can only 
mean that the fee was also a tribal receipt. Thus the 
marriage fee—the most essential item in customary marriage 
practice—is neither given nor accepted by an individual, but 
by a tribe. 
To custom then, marriage did not mean a _ contract 
between individuals, but was an institution affecting primarily 
the tribe. 
Is marriage under Rembau custom then, to be regarded 
as essentially a contract or alliance between two exogamic 
units ? : | 
This hypothesis will see in the ancestral property of the 
wife, and in the property brought with him by the husband, 
the contributions of either tribe, to be held in trust during the 
continuance of the alliance. It will class as the chief terms 
of the alliance, the common right of both parties to a marriage 
to the use of this property, the division of acquired property — 
the profits of the alliance; and the withdrawal by either 
party of the original contributions, on the dissolution of the 
alliance by divorce or death. 
Yet, formally plausible as is this hypothesis, it gives only 
a partial explanation of Rembau marriage practice, and it 
ignores one essential condition of married life under the Adat. 
In the normal event of issue by the marriage, the husband’s 
tribe does not share-in the “ profits of the alliance,’ while the 
fruit of the union belongs to the woman’s tribe. The most 
Jour, Straits Branch 
