emains are buried inside
the house as sacred food. Dr. Howitt states of the Kurnai tribe: "By
and by, when the bruises and perhaps wounds received in these fights
(between the young men and women) had healed, a young man and a young
woman might meet, and he, looking at her, would say, for instance,
'Djiitgun! [170] What does the Djiitgun eat?' The reply would be
'She eats kangaroo, opossum,' or some other game. This constituted a
formal offer and acceptance, and would be followed by the elopement of
the couple as described in the chapter on Marriage." [171] There is
no statement that the question about eating refers to the totem, but
this must apparently have been the original bearing of the question,
which otherwise would be meaningless. Since this proposal of marriage
followed on a fight between the boys and girls arising from the fact
that one party had injured the other party's sex-totem, the fight
may perhaps really have been a preliminary to the proposal and have
represented a symbolic substitute for or survival of marriage by
capture. Among the Santals, Colonel Dalton says, "the social meal
that the boy and girl eat together is the most important part of the
ceremony, as by the act the girl ceases to belong to her father's tribe
and becomes a member of the husband's family." Since the terms tribe
and family are obviously used loosely in the above statement, we may
perhaps substitute clan in both cases. Many other instances of the rite
of eating together at a wedding are given by Dr. Westermarck. [172]
If, therefore, it be supposed that the wedding ceremony consisted
originally of the formal transfer of the bride to the bridegroom's
clan, and further that the original tie which united the totem-clan
was the common eating of the totem animal, then the practice of the
bride and bridegroom eating together as a symbol of marriage can be
fully understood. When the totem animal had ceased to be the principal
means of subsistence, bread, which to a people in the agricultural
stage had become the staff or chief support of life, was substituted
for it, as argued by Professor Robertson Smith in _The Religion of the
Semites_. If the institution of marriage was thus originally based on
the forcible transfer of a woman from her own to her husband's clan,
certain Indian customs become easily explicable in the light of this
view. We can understand why a Brahman or Rajput thought it essential to
marry his daughter into a clan or f