Polyandry.
The Tibetans seem to be enthusiastic Malthusians, with all the courage of their convictions. Religious celibacy among them is only an adjunct to another equally effective social device for restricting population. This is the institution of polyandry, which crops out in widely distributed mountain regions of limited resources, just as it appears not infrequently in primitive island societies. Its sporadic occurrence in extensive lowlands, as among the Warraus of Guiana and certain tribes of the Orinoco, is extremely rare, as also its occasional appearance among pastoral steppe-dwellers, like the Hottentots and Damaras.[1349] It is often associated with polygamy where wealth exists, and is never the exclusive form of marriage, yet its frequency among mountain peoples is striking. Strabo describes fraternal polyandry as it existed in mountainous Yemen. There among a Semitic people, as to-day in Mongolian Tibet and among the aboriginal Todas of the Nilgiri Hills in peninsular India, the staff of one husband left at the door of the house excluded the others.[1350] In modern times the institution is found throughout Tibet, and in the Himalayan and sub-Himalayan districts adjoining it, as in Ladak, Kunawar, Kumaon, Garhwal, Spiti, Sirmur, among the Miris, Daphlas, Abors and Bhutias occupying the southern slope of the Himalayans eastward from Sikkim, and the Murmese tribes of the Khasia Hills just to the south. The same practice occurs among the Coorgs of the Western Ghats, among the Nairs at the coastal piedmont of this range, among the Todas of the mountain stronghold known as the Nilgiri Hills (peaks 8000 feet or 2630 meters), and it crops out sporadically among certain mountain Bantu tribes of South Africa.[1351]
Female infanticide.
There seems little doubt that polyandry, as Herbert Spencer maintains, has been adopted as an obvious and easy check upon increase of population in rugged countries.[1352] It is generally coupled with other preventive checks. In the Nilgiri Hills, as we found also to be the case on many Polynesian islands, it is closely associated with female infanticide.[1353] The Todas in 1867 showed a proportion of two men to one woman, but later, with the decline of infanticide under British rule, a proportion of 100 men to 75 women, and a resulting modification of the institution of polyandry.[1354] It may well be that the paucity of women suggested this form of marriage, whose expediency as an ally to infanticide in checking population later became apparent. The Todas are a very primitive folk of herdsmen, living on the produce of their buffaloes, averse to agriculture, though not inhibited from it by the nature of their country, therefore prone to seek any escape from that uncongenial employment,[1355] and relying on the protected isolation of their habitat to compensate for the weakness inherent in the small number of the tribe.
Throughout Tibet and Ladak polyandry works hand in hand with the lamaseries in limiting population. The conspicuous fact in Tibetan polyandry is its restriction to the agricultural portion of the population. The pastoral nomads of the country, depending on their yaks, sheep and goats, wandering at will over a very wide, if desolate territory, practice monogamy and polygamy.[1356] The sedentary population, on the other hand, is restricted to tillable lands so small that each farm produces only enough for one family. Subdivision under a divided inheritance would be disastrous to these dwarf estates, especially owing to possible complications growing out of irrigating rights.[1357] Polyandry leaves the estate and the family undivided, and by permitting only one wife to several fraternal husbands restricts the number of children. It does this also in another way by diminishing the fertility of the mothers; for all travelers comment upon the paucity of children in polyandrous families.
Westermarck lays stress upon the fact that polyandry prevails chiefly in sterile countries. He regards it less as a conscious device to check increase of population than a result of the disproportion of males to females in polyandrous communities. The preponderance of male births he attributes to the excessive endogamy bordering on inbreeding which tends to prevail in all isolated mountain valleys; and also, as a possibility, to the undernourished condition of the parents caused by scanty food supplies, which Düsing found to be productive of a high percentage of male births in proportion to female.[1358] The motive of restricting population seems entitled to more weight than Westermarck concedes to it; for he slurs over the fact that in Tibet polyandry gives rise to a large number of superfluous women who fill the nunneries,[1359] while in the Nilgiri Hills redundant females were eliminated by infanticide. The fact seems to be that in the institution of polyandry we have a social and psychological effect of environment, reinforced by a physiological effect.
Effects of polyandry and polygamy.
A comparison of social conditions in the adjoining provinces of Baltistan and Ladak, which together comprise the Himalayan valley of the Indus, reveals the character of polyandry as a response to geographic environment. Both provinces are inhabited by a Mongolian stock, but the Ladaki living on the uppermost stretch of the basin near Tibet are Buddhists and polyandrists, while the Baltis farther down the valley are Mussulmen and polygamists. The Baltis, with their plurality of wives and numerous children, are wretchedly poor and live in squalor on the verge of starvation; but as the elevation of their valley ranges only from 4000 to 8500 feet, they are inured to heat, and therefore emigrate in large numbers to the neighboring Mohammedan province of the Punjab, where they work as coolies and navvies. The Ladakis, on the other hand, living 9000 to 13,000 feet above the sea, die of bilious fever when they reach the lowlands. Cut off from emigration, they curtail population by means of polyandry and lamaseries. Consequently they show signs of prosperity, are well fed, well clothed and comfortably housed.[1360] Baltistan's social condition illustrates in a striking way the power of an idea like an alien creed, assimilated as the result of close vicinal location, to counteract for a time the influences of local geographic conditions.