Communities where women marry multiple men exist all over the world. They often have one thing in common
High in the misty hills of Himachal Pradesh this summer, a wedding drew hundreds of villagers – not for its pomp, but for its rarity. Sunita Chauhan stood at the altar flanked by two grooms, brothers Pradeep and Kapil Negi, as she entered into a kind of a union that held families together in this Himalayan region for centuries.
In this part of northern India, polyandry – the practice of a woman marrying multiple men – is known variously as Jodidara or Pandav Pratha, invoking the legend from the Hindu epic Mahabharata of Draupadi, the daughter of the king of Panchala, marrying the five Pandava brothers.
Though polyandry isn’t uncommon, particularly in the north, the Negi wedding in the hamlet of Shillai made global headlines, a cultural curiosity in a country better known for arranged marriages and elaborate wedding rituals.
But, for the Hatti community, to which the bride and grooms belong, it is less about spectacle and more about survival. “If brothers marry the same woman, there is no question of splitting farmland. The family stays united, the land stays intact,” explains Raghuvir Tomar, who grew up with two fathers in Shillai.
For Sunita, the choice was personal. “I was aware of the tradition and made my decision without any pressure.”
One of her husbands, Kapil, says: “We’re ensuring support, stability and love for our wife as a united family.”
While the marriage fascinated outsiders, it was just one example of how societies in remote corners of Asia built family systems defying conventional norms.
Across the border, on the Himalayan fringes of southwest China, lives a community with an even more radical departure from the familiar script.
In Yunnan’s fertile valleys, the Mosuo, an ethnic minority of Tibetan Buddhist heritage, practise what anthropologists call the walking marriage.
Here, the families live in a world without fathers, without marriage and without the nuclear family. At the centre of each household is the grandmother, surrounded by her daughters and their children, with lineage traced solely through women. Men’s roles are limited largely to procreation, often with little expectation of raising the children they father.
Some hail this as a rare matriarchal society, an arrangement that seems almost utopian in its egalitarianism. Others argue it is merely the mirror image of patriarchy.
Either way, from Himachal Pradesh to Yunnan, communities like the Hatti and the Mosuo challenge the idea that marriage, parenthood and family are fixed universals, highlighting that even the most intimate human bonds are moulded by geography, history, and necessity.
The logic behind the Negi union, which anthropologists refer to as fraternal polyandry, is echoed across distant parts of the world, from Himalayan peasants treasuring scarce farmland to Amazonian tribes that believe children can have multiple fathers.
More broadly, polyandry underscores how communities adapt to harsh conditions of their particular environments, and find quite pragmatic solutions to enduring human problems: scarcity, survival and solidarity.
