Word: jaunswar
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Rantys & Dhyantys. Jaunswar women who live with their several husbands are called rantys. Custom obliges them to treat each husband with equal favor, but it often happens that a ranty will prefer one brother to all the others. It also happens that a ranty will reject the whole pack of brothers for an outsider. After trial by the entire village, an adulterous ranty is fined the cost of a community dinner (paid for by her parents), after which her husbands may have her back, readily forgiving and forgetting because women are so scarce...
...reduce the 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...
...graduate 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...
...last week Jaunswar women seemed to be doing pretty well on their own account. Against a backdrop of Himalayan mountains, a pretty, 16-year-old girl was busily spinning wool while her five husbands and the village headman pleaded with her not to become a dhyanty. Said she: "I married only Gulab Singh. I will have nothing to do with his four brothers." Said the headman: "My child, you know that by our custom, when you marry one man, you marry his brothers also." Retorted the 16-year-old: "Gulab Singh or none. If I cannot have only one husband...