Word: bawar
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...Panchala, by shooting five swift arrows through a ring hung in midair. But Arjuna's mother Kunti told him, "All things must be shared." So the five Pandu brothers all wed Draupadi and went to live in a grand palace with crystal floors. Last week in Jaunswar Bawar, a region in the northern tip of India, the legend of Arjuna the Bowman and the whole practice of polyandry were being put to test...
...number of children in each generation, and keep each property permanently within the family, but it has some other curious results. Polyandry, for some reason not wholly accounted for by anthropologists, reduces the fertility of wives, and produces an abnormal ratio of male to female births. In Jaunswar Bawar, where men outnumber women four to one and more than 60,000 people practice polyandry, only one birth was reported last year...
Despite the freedom they enjoy, Jaunswar women are in revolt against polyandry. More and more are preferring a plethora of lovers to a profusion of husbands, and the number of dhyantys is increasing. A certain sophistication has been brought to Jaunswar Bawar by the invasion of immigrant laborers, mostly tree cutters from the plains, who have a knowing way of asking a girl whether she is a ranty or a dhyanty. But, although some dhyantys in some villages have become little better than prostitutes, the real basis of the revolt is an embarrassment many Jaunswar women have recently discovered...
...named Surat Singh. Although his movement is enthusiastically supported by the women, the menfolk are threatening to drive Surat Singh and all his followers into the plains. Now the Indian government has a new idea. Provincial Social Welfare Minister Acharya Jugal proposes to halt immigrant labor, seal off Jaunswar Bawar from outside influences, and to send in a new group of social workers, who, this time, will all be women...
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