‘My mother and I also are hitched to your exact same man’: matrilineal marriage in Bangladesh

All within the household: Orola Dalbot (far right), and her three young ones with Noten (centre). Orola’s mother, Mittamoni (left) also has a son (standing behind her) and child with Noten. Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner when it comes to Observer

All within the grouped family: Orola Dalbot (far right), along with her three young ones with Noten (centre). Orola’s mom, Mittamoni (left) also offers a son (standing behind her) and child with Noten. Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner when it comes to Observer

Last modified on Thu 30 May 2013 14.39 BST

A s a young child in rural Bangladesh, Orola Dalbot, 30, enjoyed growing up around her stepfather, Noten. Her dad died whenever she had been small, and her mom remarried immediately after. Noten was handsome and energetic, with curly dark locks and a broad laugh. “I thought my mother had been lucky,” Orola claims whenever we meet within the dusty, sun-baked courtyard of her house into the central forest area of Modhupur. “we hoped we’d find a husband like him 1 day.” She least expected: she was already Noten’s wife when she reached puberty, however, Orola learned the truth.

Her wedding had happened whenever she ended up being 3 years old in a ceremony that is joint her mother. After tradition in the matrilineal Mandi tribe, an ethnic number of about two million individuals spread across hill areas of Bangladesh and Asia, mother and child had hitched the exact same guy. “we wished to escape when I found out,” says Orola. “I was shaking with disbelief.”

Disbelief was pretty much my reaction a days that are few when, by chance, I’d first heard of this marriage custom. I happened to be visiting the remote Modhupur area to report an account about Mandi ladies fighting deforestation. My travelling companion had been an eminent Bangladeshi environmentalist called Philip Gain, who was simply learning the location for more than twenty years. Once we drove through the khaki- colored hills, we chatted generally about how Mandi women were the property-owning minds of the households. Gain, 50, a professorial guy in a suit jacket and tie whom runs the Dhaka-based activist organisation Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD), explained the way they shared energy with guys and had much more self-reliance than ladies in the majority Bengali population.

Then Gain mentioned the mother-daughter joint marriages. He explained that among the Mandi, widows who would like to remarry must choose a person through the same clan as his or her dead husband to preserve the clan alliance. The actual only real available single males, nevertheless, tend to be much younger men inside their late teens. And so the custom evolved: a widow would offer escort girl Pittsburgh one of her daughters as a bride that is second dominate her marital duties – including sex and child-bearing – if the girl came of age. “It’s perhaps not common today,” stated Gain. “But it nevertheless exists among a few Mandi families.”

Bangladesh is a deltaic nation where a lot of the 160 million individuals are Bengali Muslims. It is far better known for the flood plains and typhoon-lashed coasts, but its southeastern and main hills are home to ethnic minorities who mainly practised animism until Catholic missionaries found its way to the late nineteenth century. The Mandi, whom number 25,000 when you look at the Modhupur region, reside a six-hour drive and a world from the frenetic money Dhaka.

Orola is cooking rice and lentils for breakfast on an open fire when we arrive at her hamlet, a cluster of mud houses flanked by scrubby industries. Her family relations are all there: her 51-year-old mother Mittamoni, her stepfather and husband Noten, 42, her maternal grandmother and selection of young ones which range from children to teens, fathered by Noten with both his spouses. Most people are doing home chores into the poor early morning sunlight.

The household’s marital arrangement is an secret that is open this tiny Modhupur community, but no body, Orola states, ever mentions it. “for a long time i desired to keep in touch with someone about this because I was lonely. But people think it’s un-Christian, so they really ignore it.” Missionaries have actually transformed the majority of the tribe’s regional population. Traditional rituals, such as for example sacrificing goats to displace a sick person’s wellness, are frowned on by the clergy and also waned. “Bridegroom kidnapping”, another rare custom in which Mandi women abducted possible suitors and held them hostage until their big day, in addition has faded away. A small number of mother-daughter joint marriages have almost certainly survived because, similar to unions worldwide involving multiple spouses, they serve an purpose that is economic.

“My mom could not handle her land and home by herself whenever my dad passed away of temperature,” describes Orola. “She had been still in her own mid-20s, therefore she was eligible to claim a new spouse as a replacement from my dad’s clan.” The clan offered their only bachelor that is available enough time, Noten, who was simply then aged 17, from the condition he marry Orola, too. Since Mandi marriages represent the consolidation of wealth between two clans, the next, younger spouse is a trade so that the delivery of more kids to add to the household’s general wide range and energy.

“I became too young to keep in mind the marriage. I didn’t understand it had happened,” Orola informs me while she stirs her pots. Although such an arrangement isn’t considered incest as well as youngster abuse in Mandi culture, where early marriage is the norm, she had been distraught to learn she ended up being forced to share her mother’s husband. “the thing that is last desired was to be hitched to Noten. A husband was wanted by me of my very own.”