Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/342

 304 evidence of an organised appreciation of the importance of this stage in the growth of the individual tribesman, so that social and physical maturity are here not far apart.

A distinction is made in Nāga ethics between the married and the unmarried, as if they regarded marriage as not only in its social aspect a mark of full tribesmanship, but from another and more intimate point of view as in itself a liberal education. Theft, we learn, is more severely punished when the offender is a married man than when he is a callow youth. The subtleties of the lav/ are thus not unknown in the rarefied atmosphere of these hills. In mortuary ritual, too, a marked difference is made between the married and the unmarried, and their respective duties are strictly defined. The relations of the sexes before marriage are lax in the extreme, while after marriage the strictest chastity and connubial virtue are exacted. Davis, a most competent observer, declares that the prenuptial "lover would, as a rule, belong to the girl's own khel and would be a man whom it would be impossible for her to marry in any case." For the moment I only wish to emphasise the fact that a change in status is effected by marriage and brings with it an absolute and unconditional liability to the fundamental laws of this form of society. No village would tolerate in its midst a couple who sought to live together as a married couple when they were forbidden to do so by the law of exogamy. Indeed I have often asked directly what would happen if a couple did thus break the law and live together. I was assured that such a thing was impossible, that, if it did happen, they would be driven from the village and be outlawed, outcast, at the mercy of anyone who might choose to kill them, and that, were such marriages permitted, some dire mysterious misfortune would surely happen to the village. If a young