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Updated: May 5, 2025
Let us briefly enumerate those elements which enter into caste. The first and the most important is intermarriage within the caste. None except members of totemistic castes can, with impunity, look beyond the sacred borders of their own caste for conjugal bliss. So long as castes remain endogamous they will preserve their integrity, and their foundations will never be removed.
If the traditions of one tribe were endogamous, all the men dutifully married within it; but if the customs of another decreed that wives must be secured by capture or purchase, all the men of that tribe fared forth in order to secure their mates.
One way of seizing its nature is to think of it as the social union within which exogamy takes place. The intermarrying groups naturally hang together, and are thus in their entirety endogamous, in the sense that marriage with pure outsiders is disallowed by custom.
Suppose there were a village composed entirely of McIntyres and McIntoshes, and suppose that fashion compelled every McIntyre to marry a McIntosh, and every McIntosh a McIntyre, whilst to marry an outsider, say a McBean, was bad form for McIntyres and McIntoshes alike; then the two clans would be exogamous in respect to each other, whereas the village as a whole would be endogamous.
The above tribes and sub-tribes are not strictly endogamous, nor are they strictly exogamous, but they are more endogamous than exogamous; for instance, Syntengs more often marry Syntengs than Khasis, and vice versâ, and it would be usually considered derogatory for a Khasi of the Uplands to marry a Bhoi or Wár woman, and a disgrace to marry a Lynngam.
The choice of a wife is not restricted by the existence of any law or custom prescribing marriage without or within any defined group; that is to say, exogamous and endogamous groups do not exist. Incest is regarded very seriously, and the forbidden degrees of kinship are clearly defined. They are very similar to those recognised among ourselves.
This somewhat paradoxical state of affairs is explained by the fact that the children of the mother's brother belong to a different clan to that of the mother, i.e. to the mother's brother's wife's clan. The Khasi, Synteng, Wár, and Lynngam divisions are not strictly endogamous groups, and there is nothing to prevent intermarriage between them.
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