marry a son of the house of which his wife is daughter, his son may marry a daughter of that sister, and his daughter may marry his sister's son who, in such case, comes to reside with his father-in-law and succeeds to the property in right of his wife and her mother. Inherent in males there is no right to succeed to property of any description, and this is all to secure a transmission of pure blood; but though a son cannot inherit his father's property, his mother cannot be ejected from the position she enjoyed conjointly with her husband. The successor must recognize in her the mistress of the house not only as his mother-in-law, should she stand in that relation to him, but also as his wife, though the marital rights be shared with her own daughter. It is consequently not uncommon to see a young Garo introducing as his wife a woman who, as regards age, might be his mother, and in fact is his mother-in-law and his aunt."[1]
In this passage the words which I have printed in italics ("who, in such case, comes to reside with his father-in-law and succeeds to the property in right of his wife and her mother") clearly imply that a man marries his cousin, the daughter of his mother's brother, and comes to reside with his wife in the house of his father-in-law (his mother's brother) during the life-time of his father-in-law: it is not until after his father-in-law's death that the son-in-law succeeds to his father-in-law's widow, who, in the case contemplated by Colonel Dalton, is both his mother-in-law and his aunt (his father's sister). Thus a man's marriage with his cross-cousin (the daughter of his mother's brother) necessarily precedes his marriage with his widowed mother-in-law; he marries his mother-in-law because he had first married her daughter; the marriage with the mother-in-law is a consequence and effect of a previous marriage with her daughter.
- ↑ Colonel E. T. Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (Calcutta, 1872), p. 63.
