The Muria and their Ghetul

Abstract

DR. VERHIER ELWIN'S very substantial volume “does not profess to be a study of Murie culture as a whole", but it is, in fact, an exhausture monograph on the Muria Gond tribe of Basts State in east central India, approached, and very advantageously indeed, through the medium of one of their most individual institutions, that of the ghotul. The ghotul is the young people's dormitory ; but its use is not restricted, as in so many tribes (for this institution is very widespread), to males only. Among the Muria, children of both sexes start sleeping in the ghotul at an early age, and they are not segregated there. There seem to be two types of ghotul, one in which each individual has his or her allotted partner to whom fidelity is due during the continuance of life in the ghotul, which lasts until marriage ; in the other type, permanent or semipermanent attachment to an individual is banned, and though some of the officers of the institution may have quasi-permanent partners, the sleeping partners of the rank and file are decided for them and varied systematically every few days. Elwin regards this type as a modern variation from the one in which partnerships are expected to be continuing, but it seems possible to the reviewer that it is more likely to be a partial reversion to the less regulated promiscuity of an older pattern which had been changed gradually into the type with permanent partnerships.

The Muria and their Ghetul

By Verrier Elwin. Pp. xxix + 730 + 151 plates. (London: Oxford University Press, 1947.) 42s. net.