<p>Sounds like an awful situation, particularly for the woman, who gets much more work.</p>
<p>"Life is hard here. The village is precariously perched on the side of a very steep hill about 6,000ft up. Most of the villagers survive off tiny plots of cropland.</p>
<p>In this difficult terrain there isn’t enough land to go around. So, instead of finding separate wives and splitting up their inherited property, the brothers marry the same woman and keep their land together…</p>
<p>To outsiders their arrangement may seem odd, but in the village of about 200 it is the norm.</p>
<p>Typically the marriages are arranged and women have two husbands. But some wives have three or four depending on how many brothers there are in a family.</p>
<p>Interesting. I wonder why there aren’t excess unmarried women under this system? </p>
<p>My college friend and I have joked about really needing 2 or 3 husbands…one to go out and make a living, one to do chores around the house, and one to just play with. :D</p>
<p>Momusic, excellent question, and one that an insightful reporter would have provided the answer to. I believe this answers your question.</p>
<p>“in rural India, the centuries-old practice of female infanticide can still be considered a wise course of action.” (Dahlburg, “Where killing baby girls ‘is no big sin’,” The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.]) According to census statistics, “From 972 females for every 1,000 males in 1901 … the gender imbalance has tilted to 929 females per 1,000 males. … In the nearly 300 poor hamlets of the Usilampatti area of Tamil Nadu [state], as many as 196 girls died under suspicious circumstances [in 1993] … Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death.”
[Gendercide</a> Watch: Female Infanticide](<a href=“http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html]Gendercide”>Female infanticide in India and China - Gendercide)</p>
<p>I have to wonder, does this practice of having two husbands make the wife more influential, less influential, or neither? I wonder how they know who the father is of the wife’s children.</p>
<p>According to the article, they don’t worry about whom the father of the children is.</p>
<p>Considering the low status of women in India, particularly among the poor, I suspect that having 2 husbands simply means the woman has more work to do, and has more family members to misuse her.</p>
<p>Among the interesting points of the article is that things like satellite TV have come to that village, so the people are familiar with modern customs. Despite that, they are clinging to their village and traditions. Perhaps, though, due to their poverty, it would be difficult to leave where they live.</p>
<p>Odd facts I picked up from my college friend the Anthropology major:
Polyandry is less common than polygyny (the technical word for having more than one wife) in human societies.
and
It is encountered in extreme environments where the effort of more than one man is required to support a woman and her children.</p>
<p>This sounds like a little corner of hell on earth.</p>
<p>I might want a wife, though. In addition to the husband. Someone to take care of things, make lists and plans, go shopping, communicate effectively. But definitely not two husbands.</p>
<p>DH just got back from teaching in a region of Utah where polygamy was still practiced, so it was the topic of our conversation the other day. I pointed out that when you have a few women living together, their cycles tend to sync up, and could he even start to imagine living with three or four premenstrual women all at the same time? He blanched.</p>
<p>We concluded that one person to be beholden to is plenty, no matter what gender you’re talking about…</p>
:D</p>