A History of the Mahrattas v2.c55.78

v2.c55.78

¹ [The Jādejas (Jarejah), or ‘children of Jāda,’ were the ruling family in Cutch from the fourteenth century, the Samma tribe of Rājpūts to which they belonged having ousted the Chāvada Rājpūts about A.D. 1320. When the rest of the Samma tribe in lower Sind embraced Islam, the Jādejas adopted as their religion a mixture of Hinduism and Muhammadanism. This fact has avowedly influenced their history. Isolated from the rest of their tribesmen and unable to obtain suitable husbands for their daughters, they were led to practise wholesale female infanticide, and enjoyed an evil reputation for this habit up to quite a recent date. The practice was formerly in vogue also among the Kunbīs of Gujarāt, owing to the ruinous expenses attached to the marriage of girls, while among the Rājpūts it arose from the difficulty of securing bridegrooms from the sections of these castes with whom custom prescribed that intermarriage should take place. In 1812 the Jādeja chiefs entered into engagements to abandon this custom, and under the constant watchfulness of British officers, it is believed to be now practically extinct. Mr. Willoughby, in the years preceding 1849, made great progress in stamping it out in Kāthiāwār. It is possible that the crime still prevails in other parts of India, though the general opinion is that it is now comparatively rare (*Census Report, India, 1911*, p. 217). Dr. Vincent Smith mentions the severely inquisitorial measures adopted in the Agra Province in 1870, which did much to break the custom there, and states that a clear case came before him in the Rai Bareli District in 1889. Sleeman deals with infanticide as practised in Oudh in many passages of his *Journey through the Kingdom of Oudh*. (*Sleeman’s Rambles*, &c., ed. V. A. Smith, 1915, pp. 28, 29 n.) Risley discusses the connexion between female infanticide and the rules of exogamy and hypergamy in *The People of India*, pp. 164–71.]