Madras,May 17 :DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi’s daughter Selvi is married to Murasoli Selvam, the brother of the late Murasoli Maran and the son of the octogenarian leader’s sister, Shanmugavadivu.
She played the role of a peacenik, bringing back the Maran brothers into the reckoning after they were banished by Karunanidhi.
Former Andhra Pradesh chief minister N T Rama Rao’s son Nandamuri Balakrishna got his daughter Brahmani married to his sister Bhuvaneshwari’s son, Lokesh Naidu. Bhuvaneshwari is the wife of Telugu Desam Party president N Chandrababu Naidu. “ Such marriages are not legal under the Hindu Marriage Act and hence cannot be registered, unless the couple proves to authorities that it was their family custom,” says Prof Madabushi Sridhar of NALSAR University of Law.
For long, it has been a matter of custom in Andhra Pradesh for maternal uncles and their nieces, as well as maternal cousins to inter- marry, though such marriages fall under the Prohibited Degrees of Relationship under Section 5 of the Hindu Marriage Act. Such marriages have been especially common in coastal Andhra’s Guntur and Krishna districts among cash- rich Kamma and Reddy families. The primary motivation is to ensure that property does not go out of the family. However, such marriages are on the wane now.
“ Young people are highly educated now and want spouses of their own choice. They also do not want to get into alliances that can lead to genetic disorders,” says Prof Sridhar.
The desire to give one’s daughter in marriage to the family of one’s birth is dominant in the psyche of Tamil women. Noted Tamilologist Tho. Paramasivan explains this as the indirect assertion of women over the family property.
When a girl attains puberty, her maternal uncle is expected to erect a temporary palm- leaf hut to house her separately for a few days. This is taken as the right of the man who is going to take her hand in wedlock.
In Karnataka, there are two major Brahmin communities — Smarthas and Madhwas — with several subcastes within the two. In the 1970s, marriages between the two Brahmin communities or subcastes were considered impossible. “ Forget gotras , marriages between subcastes of Brahmin communities were discouraged. Things have changed now. My daughter- in- law belongs to a different Brahmin sub- caste but our gotra is the same. My son is very happy being married to her,” says Prameela Shivaram, a senior citizen.
Anthropologist Thomas R Trautmann, in his seminal work Dravidian Kinship, maintains that cross- cousin weddings remain an important characteristic that differentiate Dravidian kinship from the rest in the sub- continent.