India's polyandry on the wane
Updated
For centuries it was common practice in the Himalayas for brothers to share one wife between them, but the practice - known as fraternal polyandry - is rapidly dying out.
Presenter: Alana Rosenbaum
Speaker: Rajram Dutt, in a polyandrous marriage; Bhumo Devi, married to three men; Tsering Samphel, member of National Commission for Scheduled Tribes
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ALANA ROSENBAUM: Lakhamandal, a small village in the peaks of the Himalayas, is an important place for Hindus. Its temple floor is marked with a child's footprints, believed to be those of the Goddess Parvati. Lakhamandal is also culturally significant - it's one of India's last bastions of polyandry, a practice in which a woman marries several men.
Overlooking the temple is small wooden house where Bhumo Devi lives with her two husbands. The men are brothers. As a young woman, Bhumo Devi gave birth to four children, but she says she doesn't know which of her husband fathered them.
Rajram, the youngest of the brothers, says this doesn't bother him.
RAJRAM: I love the children equally, since they are children of a single mother, all of them are my children. We have four children; two sons and two daughters and none of us have ever favoured any of them.
ALANA ROSENBAUM: Rajram is in his 60s and has been a farmer for most of his life. Some of his teeth are missing, and he wears a boat-shaped cap. He says his father didn't want the brothers to marry different women, because he was concerned the family's five-acre farm would be sub-divided.
RAJRAM: It was so that the brothers don't get separated and would live in harmony with each other. That's why we were married like this.
ALANA ROSENBAUM: He says family life is usually harmonious, and most of the arguments are over chores.
RAJRAM: There's no jealously, if there was I would have married a different woman. These types of tensions never came up.
ALANA ROSENBAUM: Decades ago, the Dutt family had an even more complicated domestic arrangement. In all, there are three brothers, and when they were young men, they had two wives between them. But about 25 years ago, the eldest brother and his first wife left the rest of the family to live separately.
Since then, Bhumo Devi has shared the house with only two of her spouses, but she still refers to her three husbands.
DEVI: I treat all three of them equally, I love all three equally.
ALANA ROSENBAUM: Bhumo Devi's face is heavily lined and framed by a headscarf. She was at first reluctant to speak, concerned that her household would appear strange to outsiders. She says that growing up, her own family was polyandrous and there were five men in her life she referred to as her father.
Bhumo Devi's children are the first generation to break with tradition. When the time came to arrange their marriages, the family decided that they should have only one spouse each. Many families in the villages surrounding Lakhamandal have made the same choice. But 50 years ago, polyandry was widely practiced in many Himalayan communities.
SAMPHEL: We were not exposed to the outer world, so we were of he consideration that it happens everywhere; polyandry was never considered a bad thing.
ALANA ROSENBAUM: Tsering Samphel grew up in Leh, the capital of the Himalayan state Ladakh in the 1950s and 60s. He had just two parents, but most of his classmates were from polyandrous homes.
SAMPHEL: I remember how the brothers shared a single wife, if one brother is sleeping with his wife inside the room, his shoe used to be outside the doors the other brothers used not to come there.
ALANA ROSENBAUM: He says polyandry began its demise when Ladakh, a once isolated state, started to open up and modernise. Today, there are no figures on the practice, because the Indian government doesn't recognise polyandrous marriages. And the people who continue the old traditions often do so only in private.
