Near & Dear

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It is well known that Nature and Khap Panchayats frown on inbreeding and go to great lengths to discourage it.

First Nature:

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"Plants adapted to cross-pollinate often have taller stamens than carpels or use other mechanisms to better ensure the spread of pollen to other plants' flowers." ....................................from Botany site.

Take for instance the ubiquitous Jawa Phool (hibiscus flower). With its blood-red petals it is the favored Puja kusum of our dark Kalimai. Its long stamen protrudes much above the level of its carpels with their pollen, so that any chance of the pollen rising above themselves to the level of the stamen is negligible. Bees or wind or some other mechanism carries the pollen of one flower to the stamen of the other to ensure that self-pollination is avoided.

Bordering the Lawn of our Faculty Hostel at IIT KGP was one type of delicate blue flower in which this safeguard mechanism is carried to its limits: Its stamen lies not within but outside its petals, jutting sidewards from the stem of the flower!

So, it is true that inbreeding is really discouraged in floriculture at least.

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Let us now come to the humankind: In our South Indian Brahmin families, there are largely three religious sects: Smarta (Advaita), Madhva (Dvaita), and Vaishnava (Visishtadvaita), whose customs and rituals are quite different from one another. So, intermarriages across the sects were discouraged. In each sect there are several subsects. In the good old days, say, a couple of generations back, marriages were within the subsects of the same sect.

But a strange custom permitted one to marry one's maternal cousin or even maternal niece, but not paternal! However, marriages within the same Gotra (after the paternal rishi lineage) are strictly forbidden (even now). How far this amounts to avoiding inbreeding is a moot question. Genetics discourages intermarriages within near and dear as consanguine and prone to lead to birth defects.

So, in our generation, for reasons like non-availability of suitably educated partners as well, I and my six siblings married out of our subsect and even out of our sect (e.g. I belong to the Smarta and my wife Madhva sect with quite different acharyas and rituals).

Still, I was surprised to find after our marriage that myself and my wife were related before our marriage by a twice-removed inter-sect marriage that had already taken place. Indeed, strictly speaking, my wife bears a super-lateral relation that makes her equivalent to my daughter! (Her twice-removed paternal aunt married a guy whose brother married my maternal cousin).

Nonetheless we were blessed with a wonderful son, better in every respect than either of his parents (Proof: He frowns on his mother's addiction to soupy soaps and his father's to dopey blogs).

So, ultimately, it looks that in the larger context, some sort of incest somewhere has to be admitted.

Here is a revealing passage to support this contention:

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"If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did--possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond--you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn't be here either. And if their parents hadn't done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn't be here.

Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations to about the time that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born (they share the same date and year of birth), and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare and the Mayflower pilgrims, and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors earnestly exchanging genetic material in a way that would, eventually and miraculously, result in you.

At 20 generations ago, the number of people procreating on your behalf has risen to 1,048,576. Five generations before that, and there are no fewer than 33,554,432 men and women on whose devoted couplings your existence depends. By thirty generations ago, your total number of forebears,--remember these aren't cousins and aunts and other incidental relatives, but only parents and parents of parents in a line ineluctably to you--is over one billion (1,073,741,824 to be precise). If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.

Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that you are not pure. You couldn't be here without a little incest--actually quite a lot of incest--albeit at a genetically discreet remove. With so many millions of ancestors in your background, there will have been many occasions when a relative from your mother's side of the family procreated with some distant side of your father's ledger. In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related. Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or cafe or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conqueror or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: "Me too!".

In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family."

[from Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", Anchor Canada, 2004]

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"Vasudhaiva Kutumbikam" ("The Whole World is one Family") say our Scriptures...............

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[Last Laugh: In an after-dinner bhat in our Faculty Hostel, our Rajasthani HNA was going great guns the umpteenth time ridiculing the South Indian custom of marrying their maternal nieces:

HNA: "How can I marry my sister's daughter; she is MY daughter!"

To which the acerbic Keralite VR replied with the taunt:

VR: "I didn't know that incest is that rampant in Rajasthan!"]

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