71. Marriage by capture.
The view seems to have been long held that this transfer could only be effected by violence or capture, the manner in which presumably it was first practised. Marriage by capture is very widely prevalent among savage races, as shown by Mr. M’Lennan in Primitive Marriage, and by Dr. Westermarck in The History of Human Marriage. Where the custom has given place to more peaceable methods of procuring a wife, survivals commonly occur. In Bastar the regular capture of the girl is still sometimes carried out, though the business is usually arranged by the couple beforehand, and the same is the case among the Kolāms of Wardha. A regular part of the marriage procedure among the Gonds and other tribes is that the bride should weep formally for some hours, or a day before the wedding, and she is sometimes taught to cry in the proper note. At the wedding the bride hides somewhere and has to be found or carried off by the bridegroom or his brother. This ritualistic display of grief and coyness appears to be of considerable interest. It cannot be explained by the girl’s reluctance to marriage as involving the loss of her virginity, inasmuch as she is still frequently not a virgin at her wedding, and to judge from the analogy of other tribes, could seldom or never have been one a few generations back. Nor is affection for her family or grief at the approaching separation from them a satisfactory motive. This would not account for the hiding at all, and not properly for the weeping, since she will after all only live a few miles away and will often return home; and sometimes she does not only weep at her own house but at all the houses of the village. The suggestion may be made that the procedure really indicates the girl’s reluctance to be severed from her own clan and transferred to another; and that the sentiment is a survival of the resistance to marriage by capture which was at first imposed on the women by the men from loyalty to the clan totem and its common life, and had nothing to do with the conjugal relationship of marriage. But out of this feeling the sexual modesty of women, which had been non-existent in the matriarchal condition of society, was perhaps gradually developed. The Chamārs of Bilāspur have sham fights on the approach of the wedding party, and in most Hindu castes the bridegroom on his arrival performs some militant action, such as striking the marriage-shed or breaking one of its festoons. After the marriage the bride is nearly always sent home with the bridegroom’s party for a few days, even though she may be a child and the consummation of the marriage impossible. This may be in memory of her having formerly been carried off, and some analogous significance may attach to our honeymoon. When the custom of capture had died down it was succeeded by the milder form of elopement, or the bride was sold or exchanged against a girl from the bridegroom’s family or clan, but there is usually a relic of a formal transfer, such as the Hindu Kanyadān or gift of the virgin, the Roman Traditio in manum or her transfer from her father’s to her husband’s power, and the giving away of the bride.