Sexual Morality
From the foregoing account it appears that a woman may have one or more recognised lovers as well as several husbands. From the account given of the dairy ritual, it appears that she may also have sexual relations with dairymen of various grades—that, for instance, the wursol, on the nights when he sleeps in the hut, may be the lover of any Tarthar girl. Further, there seems to be no doubt that there is little restriction of any kind on sexual intercourse. I was assured by several Todas not only that adultery was no motive for divorce, but that it was in no way regarded as wrong. It seemed clear that there is no word for adultery in the Toda language. My interpreter, Samuel, had translated the Commandments shortly before my visit, and only discovered while working with me that the expression he had used in translating the seventh Commandment really bore a very different meaning.
When a word for a concept is absent in any language it by no means follows that the concept has not been developed, but in this case I have little doubt that there is no definite idea in the mind of the Toda corresponding to that denoted by our word ‘adultery.’ Instead of adultery being regarded as [[530]]immoral, I rather suspected,[14] though I could not satisfy myself on the point, that, according to the Toda idea, immorality attaches rather to the man who grudges his wife to another. One group of those who experience difficulty in getting to the next world after death are the kashtvainol, or grudging people, and I believe this term includes those who would in a more civilised community be plaintiffs in the divorce court.
In nearly every known community, whether savage, barbarous or civilised, there is found to exist a deeply rooted antipathy to sexual intercourse between brother and sister. In savage communities where kinship is of the classificatory kind, this antipathy extends not only to the children of one mother, but to all those who are regarded as brothers and sisters because they are members of the same clan or other social unit. In some communities, such as those of Torres Straits, this antipathy may extend to relatives as remote as those we call second and third cousins, so long as descent through the male line from a common ancestor and membership of the same clan lead people to regard one another as brother and sister.
It is very doubtful whether this widespread, almost universal abhorrence is shared by the Todas. I was told that members of the same clan might have intercourse with one another, and in the preliminary ceremony for the office of palol, a special part was taken by a woman who possessed the qualification that she had never had intercourse with a man of her own clan, and it was said it was far from easy to find such a woman. When I collected this information, it seemed clear that this meant that a woman who, before marriage had belonged to a given clan, had never had intercourse with a man of that clan. But since a woman joins the clan of her husband, and since, marriage taking place at an early age, the woman belongs to her husband’s clan from this early age, it has since occurred to me that an alternative explanation of the restriction is possible, though it does not seem to me to be likely. It is possible that what is meant is that the woman [[531]]should never have had intercourse with any of her husband’s clan except those who are properly her husbands. If this explanation were the correct one, the prohibition would seem to be directed against practices resembling communal marriage, and would be interesting evidence in favour of the existence of this type of marriage, since there are no prohibitions against what does not exist nor has ever existed. As I have said, however, I think it very unlikely that the prohibition is to be interpreted in this way, but I regret very greatly that it did not occur to me to inquire carefully into this point on the spot.
So far as I could tell, the laxity in sexual matters is equally great before and after marriage. If a girl who has been married in infancy, but has not yet joined her husband, should become pregnant, the husband would be called upon to give the bow and arrow at the pursütpimi ceremony and would be the father of the child, even if he were still a young boy, or if it were known that he was not the father of the child. I only heard of one case in recent times in which an unmarried girl had become pregnant. In this case a man who was a matchuni of the woman was called in to give the bow and arrow, but he did not regard himself as married to the woman and did not live with her. That some stigma was attached to the occurrence may possibly be shown by the fact that this woman remained unmarried for some years, and then only married a man who was certainly below the general standard of the Todas in intelligence. The child, a daughter, of the woman died soon after birth, so that I had no chance of ascertaining whether the irregularity of her birth would have had any influence on her position in Toda society. If, however, a child is born without the pursütpimi ceremony having been performed, it is called padmokh and an indelible disgrace attaches to it throughout life.
From any point of view, and certainly from the point of view of the savage, the sexual morality of the Todas among themselves is very low. It is an interesting subject of speculation how far this laxity is the result of the practice of polyandry, for since low sexual morality brings in its train various factors which tend to sterility, we may have here, as [[532]]Mr. Punnett has suggested elsewhere,[15] a reason why polyandry is so rare a form of marriage. The practice of polyandry must almost inevitably weaken the sentiment of possession on the part of the man which does so much to maintain the more ordinary forms of marriage.
The low sexual morality of the Todas is not, however, limited in its scope to the relations within the Toda community. Conflicting views are held by those who know the Nilgiri Hills as to the relations of the Todas with the other inhabitants, and especially with the train of natives which the European immigration to the hills has brought in its wake. The general opinion on the hills is that in this respect the morality of the Todas is as low as it well could be, but it is a question whether this opinion is not too much based on the behaviour of the inhabitants of one or two villages near the European settlements, and I think it is probable that the larger part of the Todas remain more uncontaminated than is generally supposed.
That the Todas are perhaps not so black as they are painted is suggested by two considerations. There is little evidence of the existence of many half-breeds. I examined in one way or another over 500 Todas and must have seen nearly the whole of the 800 people who form the Toda population. I saw few who suggested Tamil or Badaga intermixture and only one boy whose appearance suggested European parentage. A more careful examination than I gave might, however, have revealed other suspicious cases, and perhaps in a race which practices infanticide the absence or paucity of half-breeds may not carry much weight.