In the high Himalayas, polyandry has the sanction of immemorial legend. According to the Mahabharata, the great epic poem of India, Arjuna the Bowman, third of the five sons of King Pandu, won Draupadi, daughter of the King of Panchala, by shooting five swift arrows through a ring hung in midair. But Arjuna's mother Kunti told him, "All things must be shared." So the five Pandu brothers all wed Draupadi and went to live in a grand palace with crystal floors. Last week in Jaunswar Bawar, a region in the northern tip of India, the legend of Arjuna the Bowman and the whole practice of polyandry were being put to test.
Like many race myths, the legend of Arjuna clothes a simple economic fact: in the upland valleys, existence depends upon a limited number of tiny terraced fields and the careful balancing of population against food reserves. Each family avoids dividing its meager tillage in ever-diminishing lots among its progeny by having the younger sons share the wife of the eldest son. Not only does this practice 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.
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.
But a ranty may also divorce her husbands and return to her parents' house. She is then called a dhyanty and has a good deal of latitude about her choice of lovers. Should she elect to remarry, however, her new set of husbands must pay the first set of husbands a sum which is fixed by the village council. Since an individual suitor is rarely able to afford paying off several husbands, a dhyanty usually has to marry another group of brothers.