Family affairs
The matrilineal Mandi tribe of Bangladesh practises a custom in which daughters are married to their stepfathers, often as infants. Abigail Haworth meets the spouse-sharing women of Modhupur. Pictures by Eric Rechsteiner
As a child in rural Bangladesh, Orola Dalbot, 29, enjoyed growing up around her stepfather, Noten. Her father died when she was small and her mother remarried soon after. Noten was handsome and energetic, with curly dark hair and a broad smile.
"I thought my mother was lucky," Orola says, when we meet in the dusty, sunbaked courtyard of her family home in the central forest region of Modhupur. "I hoped I'd find a husband like him one day."
When she reached puberty, however, Orola learned a truth she least expected: she was already Noten's wife.
Her wedding had taken place when she was three years old in a joint ceremony with her mother. Following tradition in the matrilineal Mandi tribe (also known as Garo), an ethnic group of about two million people spread across hill regions of Bangladesh and India, mother and daughter had married the same man.
"I wanted to escape when I found out," says Orola. "I was shaking with disbelief."
Disbelief was more or less my reaction a few days earlier when, by chance, I first heard about this marriage custom. I was visiting the remote Modhupur region to report on Mandi women fighting deforestation. My travelling companion was eminent Bangladeshi environmentalist Philip Gain, who had been studying the area for more than 20 years. As we drove through the khaki-coloured hills, we talked generally about how Mandi women were the property-owning heads of their households. Gain, 50, a professorial man in a suit jacket and tie who runs the Dhaka-based activist organisation Society for Environment and Human Development, told me how they shared power with men and had far more independence than women in the majority Bengali population.
Then he mentioned the mother-daughter joint marriages. Gain explained that among the Mandi, widows who wish to remarry must choose a man from the same clan as their dead husband, to preserve the clan alliance. The only available single men, however, are often in their late teens. So the custom evolved: a widow would offer one of her daughters as a second bride to take over her marital duties - including sex and child-bearing - when the girl came of age.