PRAVARA AND EXOGAMY

The Principle of Exogamy, in virtue of which a man must marry outside his own hereditary group or clan, has come to be recognised as a factor of prime importance in the organisation of many widely divergent types of human society, and its operation among primitive tribes has been closely studied by anthropologists. Up to the present, however, the exogamous system of the ancient Brahmanical families has been largely neglected, and in fact there is no detailed and reliable account in English to which the anthropologist can turn for information. The small interest shown by orientalists in this particular aspect of the social organisation of early India is doubtless due in part to the almost unbelievably corrupt state of the textual transmission of the documents, which is indeed so bad that it is doubtful whether it will ever be possible to reconstitute the text of the long lists of family names with any certainty. In spite of this, however, the main outlines of the system stand out quite clearly; and the present study has, therefore, been undertaken in order to make good this neglect, and to present an account of the organisation of the system at the end of the Sutraperiod (c. fourth century B.C.), as it is described in the so-called pravarādhyāyas, which are appendices to the ritual Sūtras. For this purpose the Gotra-pravaramañjarī of PuruŞottama-paṇdiṭ a has been chosen as a basis. This work, a medieval treatise on the subject, quotes verbatim the most important Sūtra texts, and comments discursively on them. Before proceeding to the translation of this work, however, it seems desirable to give a general account of the system, and to discuss some of the problems raised. It is hoped that both orientalists and anthropologists will find here material of interest, although naturally the latter will find much that is irrelevant to their purposes in the technicalities of a discussion which has been written primarily from another point of view.