amily of higher status than his own;
because the disgrace of having his daughter taken from him by what
had been originally an act of force, was atoned for by the superior
rank of the captor or abductor. And similarly the terms father-in-law
and brother-in-law would be regarded as opprobrious because they
originally implied not merely that the speaker had married the sister
or daughter of the person addressed, but had married her forcibly,
thereby placing him in a position of inferiority. A Rajput formerly
felt it derogatory that any man should address him either as father-or
brother-in-law. And the analogous custom of a man refusing to take food
in the house of his son-in-law's family and sometimes even refusing
to drink water in their village would be explicable on precisely the
same grounds. This view of marriage would also account for the wide
prevalence of female infanticide. Because in the primitive condition
of exogamy with male descent, girls could not be married in their
own clan, as this would transgress the binding law of exogamy, and
they could not be transferred from their own totem-clan and married
in another except by force and rape. Hence it was thought better to
kill girl children than to suffer the ignominy of their being forcibly
carried off. Both kinds of female infanticide as distinguished by Sir
H. Risley [173] would thus originally be due to the same belief. The
Khond killed his daughter because she could not be married otherwise
than by forcible abduction; not necessarily because he was unable to
protect her, but because he could not conceive of her being transferred
from one totem-clan to another by any other means; and he was bound to
resist the transfer because by acquiescing in it, he would have been
guilty of disloyalty to his own totem, whose common life was injured
by the loss of the girl. The Rajput killed his daughter because it
was a disgrace to him to get her married at all outside his clan,
and she could not be married within it. Afterwards the disgrace was
removed by marrying her into a higher clan than his own and by lavish
expenditure on the wedding; and the practice of female infanticide
was continued to avoid the ruinous outlay which this primitive view of
marriage had originally entailed. The Hindu custom of the Swayamvara
or armed contest for the hand of a Rajput princess, and the curious
recognition by the Hindu law-books of simple rape as a legitimate
form of marriage would be