explained on the same ground.

73. The exogamous clan with male descent and the village.

It has been seen that the exogamous clan with female descent contained
no married couples, and therefore it was necessary either that outside
men should live with it, or that the clans should continually meet each
other, or that two or more should live in the same village. With the
change to male descent and the transfer of women to their husbands'
clans, this unstable characteristic was removed. Henceforth the clan
was self-contained, having its married couples, both members of it,
whose children would also be born in and belong to it. Since the
clan was originally a body of persons who wandered about and hunted
together, its character would be maintained by living together, and
there is reason to suppose that the Indian exogamous clan with male
descent took its special character because its members usually lived
in one or more villages. This fact would account for the large number
and multiplication of clans in India as compared with other places. As
already seen one of the names of a clan is _khera_, which also means
a village, and a large number of the clan names are derived from, or
the same, as those of villages. Among the Khonds all the members of
one clan live in the same locality about some central village. Thus
the Tupa clan are collected about the village of Teplagarh in Patna
State, the Loa clan round Sindhekala, the Borga clan round Bangomunda
and so on. The Nunias of Mirzapur, Mr. Crooke remarks, [174] have
a system of local subdivisions called _dih_, each subdivision being
named after the village which is supposed to be its home. The word
_dih_ itself means a site or village. Those who have the same _dih_
do not intermarry. In the villages first settled by the Oraons, Father
Dehon states, [175] the population is divided into three _khunts_
or branches, the founders of the three branches being held to have
been sons of the first settler. Members of each branch belong to
the same clan or _got_. Each _khunt_ or branch has a share of the
village lands. The Mochis or cobblers have forty exogamous sections
or _gotras_, mostly named after Rajput clans, and they also have an
equal number of _kheras_ or groups named after villages. The limits of
the two groups seem to be identical; and members of each group have an
ancestral village from which they are supposed to have come. Marriage
is now regulated by the Rajput sep