Abstract
BENGALI MARRIAGE AND COGNATE CUSTOMS.—Mr. M. M. Chatterji has published a number of notes on Bengali customs in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 22, N.S., Pt. 6, which for the most part deal with rites and ceremonies connected with marriage. Prostitutes are devoted to their profession by a ceremonial or ‘mock’ marriage which is intended to preserve the religious purity of the system by an implied consent of the human or inanimate husband. The prostitute bears the mark of vermilion powder on her hair and the iron bangle on her left wrist which distinguish the married woman. The marriage may be with a degraded or pretended Brahman, with an idol, public or private, or with a long-lived shrub such as the tube-rose, of which the preservation becomes an anxious care. Should an idol which has been married be destroyed, as sometimes happens in the case of the private effigy, the surviving wife has to abandon all signs of wifehood. In the initiation into wifehood, on the appearance of the signs of puberty, the woman is segregated, not being allowed to see the sun or a male, in a cell or narrow room formed by a barricade in the corner of a room of two lines of bamboo branches on mud pedestals. She is under the supervision of a board of five women, of whom the chief must be a woman all of whose children are alive or, failing that, whose first-born child is alive. The girl's diet is carefully regulated, consisting mostly of uncooked vegetables and milk and its preparations. An important part of the observance is a bath on the fifth day in the unexcavated tank, which is not a tank but a platform of mud, which also appears in the ante-nuptial bath taken by both bride and bridegroom before marriage, when water is poured over the bathers. In the puberty custom, the girl's companions pelt one another with mud while the -girl picks up clams which have been spread out on the bath and water poured over them. This may be regarded as indicating that originally this bath must have taken place in a stream or river.
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Research Items. Nature 121, 998–1000 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/121998a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/121998a0