In India caste and marriage are almost inseparable among the Hindu majority and except the indigenous populations, caste is found even among Muslims and Christians in India. Caste does not aptly describe the Indian social organisation based on two levels of differentiation, one at the abstract level of Varna, where all beings are divided into four broad and ranked categories, Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudra; plus a category that lies outside the varna system the untouchables (asprcya or achuyt). At the actual level of social interaction including marriage and kinship it is the ‘jati’ an endogamous and geographically localised group that is the effective social unit. Thus jati is an extended kin group as for any person all relationships of blood and marriage will lie inside one’s own jati. However rules of exogamy were operative within the jati in the form of gotra exogamy and sapinda exogamy.
Gotra is a group based on socially constructed mythical ancestry, where some mythical divine being in the form of an ancient sage is considered the common ancestor of the group. Since only Brahmins could be the descendants of the rishis (ancient sages), all other varna had probably taken on the gotra of their presiding family priests. While gotra exogamy is found among all Hindus, the Sa-pinda (Sa=together, pinda= a ball of rice) rules are applicable mostly in North India. These include all those who have right to offer panda (ritual offering to a dead person) to a man. All those who share the same body, metaphorically the same flesh, belong to the sapinda category. It includes those who are putatively related by blood and excludes those who are related by marriage, thus a son and brother’s son is sapinda but not a son-in-law.
Depending upon the community, the rule of sapinda exogamy was extended to all persons descended from certain generations from the father’s and mother’s side. The most common expression of this rule was that a person must not marry someone who may have a direct male ancestor in the direct male (father’s) line up to seventh ascending generation and up to fifth ascending generation in the mother’s line. This obviously excluded all collateral kin through the blood line. In south Indian kinship the rule of Gotra exogamy is prevalent but not that of SaPinda exogamy as certain persons in collateral lines are eligible for marriage.
Thus in real terms it means that women of lower castes are accessible to men of higher castes and women of upper castes are kept out of bounds for all except men of their own caste and higher. Thus Brahmin women are the most secluded and shudra women the most accessible. However for a regular marriage, it is always preferred that the wife should not be of lower caste. But according to the laws of Manu an upper caste man can take as his secondary wives women of lower castes.
Hypergamy can take different forms in North and South India. Thus among the Rajputs of N-W India, the Patidars of Gujarat and the Rarhi Brahmins of Bengal the hypergamy means marriage between ranked groups of the same caste. Here the child gets the same rank as the father. In South India the hypergamous marriages take place between castes and the children are given the rank of the mother. A famous example is that of the Namboodri brahmins and the Nayar women. Only the eldest Namboodri son was allowed to marry a Namboodri woman and have children of his own rank, but the younger sons were compelled to go to the Nayar women as visiting husbands and their children were only identified as the children of Nayar matriclans. Although they both follow gotra exogamy and jati endogamy, there are some substantive differences between North Indian and South Indian or what is more popularly known in anthropological literature as Dravidian kinship system.