to be only the partial truth. I will give only one instance to illustrate how a belief in the dependence of the terminology of relationship on forms of marriage might act as a stimulus to research.
In a system from the United Provinces recorded by Mr. E. A. H. Blunt in the Report of the last Indian Census, one term, bahu, is used for the son's wife, for the wife, and for the mother.[1] Mr. Blunt puts on one side without hesitation the possibility that such common nomenclature can have been the result of any form of marriage, and ascribes it to the custom whereby a man and his wife live with the husband's parents, in consequence of which the son's wife, who is called bahu by her husband, is also called bahu by everyone else in the house. The causation of the common nomenclature which is thus put forward is a possible, perhaps even a probable, explanation. In such a case we should have a social chain of causation in which the son's wife is called bahu because she is one of a social group bound together by the ties of a common habitation. It can do no harm, however, to bear in mind as an alternative the possibility that the terminology may have arisen out of a form of marriage. It is evident that the use of a common term for the wife and the son's wife would follow from a form of polyandry in which a man and his son have a wife in common. A further result of this form of marriage would be that the wife of the son, being also the wife of
- ↑ Census of India, 1911, vol. xv., p. 234.
