Then Gain mentioned the mother-daughter joint marriages.
Gain, 50, a professorial man in a suit jacket and tie who runs the Dhaka-based activist organisation Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD), told me how they shared power with men and had far more independence than women in the majority Bengali population. As we drove through the khaki- coloured hills, we talked generally about how Mandi women were the property-owning heads of their households. My travelling companion was an eminent Bangladeshi environmentalist called Philip Gain, who had been studying the area for more than 20 years. I was visiting the remote Modhupur region to report a story about Mandi women fighting deforestation. "I was shaking with disbelief."ĭisbelief was more or less my reaction a few days earlier when, by chance, I'd first heard about this marriage custom. "I wanted to escape when I found out," says Orola. Following tradition in the matrilineal Mandi tribe, an ethnic group of about two million people spread across hill regions of Bangladesh and India, mother and daughter had married the same man. Her wedding had taken place when she was three years old in a joint ceremony with her mother. "I hoped I'd find a husband like him one day." When she reached puberty, however, Orola learned the truth she least expected: she was already Noten's wife.
"I thought my mother was lucky," Orola says when we meet in the dusty, sun-baked courtyard of her family home in the central forest region of Modhupur. Noten was handsome and energetic, with curly dark hair and a broad smile. Her father died when she was small, and her mother remarried soon after. A s a child in rural Bangladesh, Orola Dalbot, 30, enjoyed growing up around her stepfather, Noten.
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