“As there is no restriction on innocent intercourse, the boys and girls freely mixing together in the labors of the field and other pursuits, an amorous young lady has ample opportunity of declaring her partiality, and it is her privileged duty to speak first....  The maiden coyly tells the youth to whom she is about to surrender herself that she has prepared a spot in some quiet and secluded valley to which she invites him....  In two or three days they return to the village and their union is then publicly proclaimed and solemnized.  Any infringement of the rule which declares that the initiative shall in such cases rest with the girl is summarily and severely punished.”

For a man to make the advances would be an insult not only to the girl but to the whole tribe, resulting in fines.  But let us hear the rest of the topsy-turvy story.

“The marriage ceremony chiefly consists of dancing, singing, and feasting.  The bride is taken down to the nearest stream and bathed, and the party next proceeds to the house of the bridegroom, who pretends to be unwilling and runs away, but is caught and subjected to a similar ablution, and then taken, in spite of the resistance and the counterfeited grief and lamentation of his parents, to the bride’s house.”

It is true that this inversion of the usual process of proposing and acting a comedy of sham coyness occurs only in the case of the poor girls, the wealthy ones being betrothed by their parents in infancy; but it would be interesting to learn the origin of this quaint custom from someone who has had a chance to study this tribe.  Probably the girl’s poverty furnishes the key.  The whole thing seems like a practical joke raised to the dignity of an institution.  The perversion of all ordinary rules is consistently carried out in this, too, that “if the old people refuse they can be beaten into compliance!” That the loss of female coyness is not a gain to the cause of love or of virtue is self-evident.

PAHARIA LADS AND LASSES

Thus, once more, we are baffled in our attempts to find genuine romantic love.  Of its fourteen ingredients the altruistic ones are missing entirely.  What Dalton writes (248) regarding the Oraons,

“Dhumkuria lads are no doubt great flirts, but each has a special favorite among the young girls of his acquaintance, and the girls well know to whose touch and pressure in the dance each maiden’s heart is especially responsive,” will not mislead any reader of this book, who will know that it indicates merely individual preference, which goes with all sorts of love, and is moreover, characteristically shallow here; for, as Dalton has told us, these village flirtations “seldom end in marriage.”

The other ingredients that primitive love shares with romantic love—­monopoly, jealousy, coyness, etc., are also, as we saw, weak among the wild