Caste in India: The Facts and the System c6.s3.4

c6.s3.4

This point being disposed of, it is permissible to summarize in a very comprehensive survey the essentials of the law that caste imposes on marriage. This law has a twofold aspect: it both prescribes and limits. It describes a double circle: the wider one within which marriage must take place, and the narrower one drawn inside the first, within which it is forbidden to marry. Our own prohibited degrees of consanguinity give us an idea, although inadequate, of the second; while the restrictions imposed by the first are, legally at any rate, unknown to us. We may formulate the double rule by saying that one is obliged to marry within the caste and forbidden to marry within the family.