Re: Arranged Marriage
from wikipedia: [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage[/url]
India
Attitudes in India on cousin marriage vary sharply by region and culture. For Muslims it is acceptable and legal to marry a first cousin. But for Hindus it may be illegal under the 1955 Hindu Marriage Act, though the specific situation is more complex. The Hindu Marriage Act makes cousin marriage illegal for Hindus with the exception of marriages permitted by regional custom.[91] Practices of the small Christian minority are also location dependent: their cousin marriage rates are higher in southern states like Karnataka with high overall rates.[92]
Cousin marriage is proscribed and seen as incest for Hindus in north India. In fact it may even be unacceptable to marry within one's village or for two siblings to marry partners from the same village.[93] The northern kinship model prevails in the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Punjab. But in south India it is common for Hindu cross cousins to marry, with matrilateral cross-cousin (mother's brother's daughter) marriages being especially favored.[94] The southern kinship model prevails in the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. South Indian women have been described as having more personal autonomy than North Indian women[95] and a kinship system leaving women closer to their families of origin and not based on patrilineal descent may explain both this and somewhat lower South Indian birth rates. In the exogamous north, a woman will not usually be in a position to help her family after marriage, since the house of her husband is likely to be far away. Female children are consequently less valued. In the South Indian system males are also likely to enter into arrangements that include males related by marriage, whereas in the north such relationships are more defined by blood ties.[96] But the higher the caste in south India, in general the closer the position of females is to that under the northern system.[97]
Practices in central India overall are closer to the northern model than the southern,[98] but differences exist from each. For example, in Mumbai, studies done in 1956 showed 7.7% of Hindus married to a second cousin or closer. By contrast, in the northern city of New Delhi only 0.1% of Hindus were married to a first cousin during the 1980s. At the other extreme, studies done in the South Indian province of Karnataka, which contains Bangalore, during that period show fully one third of Hindus married to a second cousin or closer.[99] Pre-2000 Madhya Pradesh, from which Chhattisgarh has now split, and Maharashtra, which contains Mumbai, are provinces that are intermediate in their kinship practices.
India's Muslim minority represents about 12% of its population (excluding Jammu and Kashmir) and has an overall rate of cousin marriage of 22% according to a 2000 report. Most Muslim cousin marriages were between first cousins, with the rate of first-cousin marriage being 20%. Muslim consanguinity in north India was typical, but below the overall northern statistic lies a sharply divided picture: Jammu and Kashmir is the only Indian state with a Muslim majority, with a Muslim consanguinity rate of 40%, while at the other extreme Haryana, though its population is 17% Muslim,[100] has a Muslim consanguinity rate of only 1%. This dichotomy may be a legacy of the partition of the sub-continent into India and Pakistan, when there was substantial Muslim migration to Pakistan from the eastern parts of the former unified state of Punjab. In south India by contrast the rates are fairly constant, except for the South Indian Malabar Muslims of Kerala (9%) who claim descent from Arab traders who settled permanently in India in the 8th century. Most Indian Muslims by contrast are the result of Hindu conversions to Islam in the 16th century or later. The lowest rate for a whole Indian region was in East India (15%). Consanguinity rates were generally stable across the four decades for which data exists, though second-cousin marriage appears to have been decreasing in favor of first-cousin marriage.[16]