Dear Dr K,
I recently found out that the girl I want to marry belongs to the same gotra as I do. Is this a problem? What should I do about this?— X Ogamy
Dear Ogamy,
I generally refrain from answering questions pertaining to marriage or giving any sort of marital advice but in this case I have decided to make an exception because your life hangs in the balance. Marrying someone of the same gotra could incur the wrath of the members of both your families and result in your excommunication and/or death, depending on which part of the country you’re from. Certain communities in Haryana, for example, have a tradition of family members killing couples who marry within the same gotra in order to preserve the honour of the family and the community. This is because it is obviously more honourable to be the murderer of your relatives than be related to someone who is guilty of ‘sagotra’ marriage (and continues to live).
Your gotra is essentially your stamp of lineage from a sage who lived thousands of years ago. You inherit the gotra of your father and women take on their husbands’ gotras when they get married (the rules regarding the transferral of gotra are, however, unclear in the case of homosexual marriages). Marrying someone of the same gotra is therefore unacceptable because both of you are descendants of that one ancient sage and so getting married would kind of be incestuous.
Incest is bad because it’s yucky, but more importantly because it has the tendency to produce monster offspring thanks to the effects of genetic inbreeding. That’s why the practice of marrying outside one’s gotra is based on sound scientific facts — most important of which is the fact that it’s impossible to inherit genes from your mother. This is important because scientists say that all humans on the planet are descendants of Mitochondrial Eve, a woman who is likely to have lived in East Africa about 200,000 years ago, and who is our most recent common matrilineal ancestor. If we were to trace our lineage from her, most humans on the planet would be guilty of incest. Thank god for patriarchy.
In order to make all of this clear for confused souls such as you, some people are pushing to make it illegal for people of the same gotra to get married. “If we make it illegal, we won’t have to go around killing people who do it,” says Onur K Ling, a supporter of the proposed change in the Hindu Marriage Act. “If they do marry within the same gotra, their marriage will be declared void and they’ll probably have to serve out a prison sentence instead of having to be hacked to bits by their families. It’s in their own interest, really.”
So if you’re interested in not producing defected, deformed monster children and staying alive for as long as you can, I’d advise against marrying this girl of yours. You wouldn’t want your angry clansmen chasing you with sickles, would you? It’s much safer for you to find a nice cousin or niece to marry.
Yours questionably,
Dr K
Kaushik is a student of humanities at an engineering college. He blogs at
www.nonsenseofkaushik.blogspot.com.
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