It may sound strange and will be hard to believe, but here a girl sleeps with her father as per tradition in this tribe in Bangladesh. It’s not that the girls like it but they have no other way out. It is a tradition that has been followed for ages together in the Mandi tribe mostly found in Bangladesh.
The incident came to the fore after the story of a girl identified as Orola Dalbot (30) first came out in social media and other online platforms.
Orola Dalbot, 30, was forced to marry her father after she turned 15. Now, she has three children from her father. This is the fate of all girls of her age in the village.
According to Orola, her father had died when she was small, and her mother had remarried to her stepfather Noten.
Soon enough Orola turned 15, she was forced to marry her step father. She was shocked to learn that her wedding had occurred when she was 3 years old, in a joint ceremony with her mother. Following tradition in the matrilineal Mandi tribe, mother and daughter had married the same man.
“I wanted to run away when I found out,” says Orola. However, her mother, Mittamoni, now 51, told her she must accept it.
Among the Mandi, a remote hill tribe in Bangladesh and India, widows who wish to remarry must choose a man from the same clan as their dead husband. So the custom evolved that a widow would offer one of her daughters as a second bride to take over her duties—including sex—when the daughter came of age.
“My mother was only 25 when my father died. She wasn’t ready to be single,” says Orola, swathed in a vibrant blue pashmina. The tribe offered Noten, then 17, as Mittamoni’s new husband, on the condition that he marry Orola, too.
“I was too small to remember the wedding—I had no idea it had taken place,” Orola says. Devastated to discover that she was expected to share her own mother’s husband, she says, “My mother already had two children with him. I wanted a husband of my own.”
In recent years, many observers assumed the mother-daughter marriage custom had died out. Catholic missionaries have converted 90 percent of the tribe’s 25,000 Bangladeshi members, and many once-accepted Mandi practices are now taboo. These include the rare custom of “groom kidnapping,” in which Mandi women abduct potential husbands. Yet, while there are no official figures, one local leader claims there are “numerous” families who still follow the mother-daughter custom. “People stay quiet about it because having more than one wife is frowned on by the church,” says Shulekha Mrong, head of Achik Michik, a powerful women’s group run by Mandi female elders.
Agencies
