In a recent video, Keerthika Govindhasamy or Keerthi History, a YouTuber with millions of followers, attempts to establish that there is nothing weird in marrying your first cousin or uncle, as long as you follow the traditional rules. Making a claim that south Indian family structures would collapse without cousin marriages, she proceeds to draw subtle religious references bordering on Islamophobia.
Keerthika, a history graduate from Tamil Nadu, has been garnering tens of thousands of views on her videos, though quite a few of them have also drawn criticism and controversy. Her popularity rose further in 2024 when she won the Best Storyteller Award from the hands of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and called it an award coming from the ‘World’s most powerful leader’.
Keerthika begins her video on cousins with a filmstar reference – a sure-shot gimmick to ensure audience attention. She names Hindi actors like Ranbir Kapoor and the Bachchans and the cousins they could marry if they were in the south, establishing the north-south divide her content hinges on.
“Imagine Aishwarya and Abhishek’s daughter marrying Shweta Bachchan’s son Agastya. The only condition is that they’d have to be south Indians — because in north India, cousin marriage is a taboo,” she says.
She says that while the idea may seem “disgusting” to people in the north, it has been an accepted norm for those in the south. She clubs all the five states in the south in most of her references, whereas statistics give a different picture.
The National Family Health Survey-5 (2019 - 21) found that 11% of women aged between 15 and 49 in India are married to a blood relative. As many as 18 to 28% of people were found to be in consanguineous marriages – marriage between close blood relatives – in the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Puducherry, and Telangana. In Kerala however, it is relatively much less at 1.7%.
Keerthika also asserts, “In south India, cousin marriage isn’t just a practice – the entire family system is built around it. If you remove this one aspect, the south Indian family structure would no longer exist.”
What she says is partly true, in the sense that consanguineous marriages are mainly concentrated in the southern states, particularly Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh (including Telangana), and parts of Maharashtra, according to KS James, former head of the International Institute for Population Sciences. IIPS conducts the National Family Health Survey.
“There are two things to keep in mind here. First, consanguineous marriages are a part of south Indian culture, but they are not common in many other cultures. In no place has the absence of cross-cousin marriages led to the collapse of family structures. It is also important to note that, according to medical understanding, cross-cousin marriages are generally not advisable. Therefore, there is little reason to valorise this practice simply because it exists within a culture,” says James.
Cross and parallel marriages
Keerthika, in her ‘explainer’, juxtaposes cross-cousin marriages and parallel cousin marriages.
Cross-cousin marriages – marriage with the child of a parent’s opposite-sex sibling – she says is acceptable, and that the removal of such a system would lead to the collapse of entire families.
She adds that in some places the practice of a man marrying his sister’s daughter is also acceptable. However, she asserts, parallel marriages – in which the children of two sisters or two brothers marry – are not allowed among Hindus, since they should be treated as siblings.
“We divide cousins into two types – and this difference means everything. One type is parallel cousins – your father’s brother’s children or your mother’s sister’s children. For us, they are the same as real brothers and sisters. Marrying them is unthinkable – it’s literally considered incest,” Keerthika says in the video.
After terming it incest, Keerthika later adds that there is a practice of marrying parallel cousins in certain Islamic cultures.
The notion that parallel marriages are not practised among Hindus in south India is however wrong. A study in 2010 by A Ramesh, CR Srikumari, and S Sukumar says that the frequency of parallel first cousin (PFC) marriages among some Hindu communities in Tamil Nadu has been found to be as high as 27%.
“While consanguineous marriages continue, seeming to indicate that tradition is overriding education and urbanisation, perhaps the frequency of PFC marriages indicates that urbanisation is resulting in a relaxation of the regulations of Dravidian kinship,” says the study.
The study found that of the two types of PFC marriages, Muslims preferred father’s brother’s daughter (FBD), while Hindu and Christians preferred mother’s sister’s daughter (MSD).
NP Ashley, Assistant Professor of English at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, who has done research in cultural studies, says that there are many Islams, not one.
“Cousin marriages are usually for maintaining wealth within the family and a more condensed version of endogamy. There are Arab practices, Persian practices, and Indian practices… all are different. Different schools of thought (Shafi, Hanafi, Hambali, and Maliki) can have different takes on this,” Ashley explains.
“If you are going with religious dictates, you have to consider five elements: Scripture (The Quran), the model shown by the Prophet (Sunna), the legal system (Sharia’ah – meaning “the route” – this should be interpreted as the law of the land, and not as 7th century Arabian practices), the opinion of the scholar (Fatwa), and research on all four of these as per the new requirements (Ijthihaad),” he elaborates.
He adds that you can’t say something is Islamic or un-Islamic based on some practices. “It is a complicated thing. The tone in the [Keerthika’s] video is problematic and the fears sound moralistic. Incest is too harsh a word for cousin marriages, I feel. The speaker doesn’t seem to have the sensitivity and care that is required for such a topic, which can easily slip into demonisation of the Other.”
Health concerns in consanguineous marriages
Another factor that Keerthika pays little attention to is the health issues associated with marriage between blood relatives. While she acknowledges the slightly higher chances of children from consanguineous marriages showing genetic defects, she brushes it off as nothing worrisome.
There may be cons and pros from a cultural perspective, but it is a fact that the risk of genetic diseases is higher for the children of couples who are blood relatives, says Dr KP Aravindan, a renowned pathologist from Kozhikode.
“The most common genetic disease is autosomal recessive disorder. If, for the general population, the risk of a genetic disease is 3%, it will be 5 to 6% for the child of a couple who are first cousins. First cousins share about one eighth of the genes. It will be even higher for an uncle-niece relationship, in which 25% of the genes are shared,” Dr Aravindan says.
In the larger picture, genetic disorders are high in places where endogamy is high. India is among the countries where endogamy is the highest.
“It is mainly because of our caste system and the strict practice of marrying within a caste or community. If a new mutation that causes disease occurs in a gene, it tends to disappear when unions happen within a large group – that is, when people marry outside caste, community, race, etc. Or in other words, through outbreeding. But within closed communities, the mutation tends to be retained and may even be propagated,” Dr Aravindan says.
He quotes the example of eugenics doctrines adopted in Nazi Germany – a scientifically inaccurate theory promoting inbreeding for better genetics. It would have the opposite effect, Aravindan says. Another example is of the Amish people, a traditionalist Christian group in the US that rejects modern technology and marries within the community. A common disorder found among the Amish people is polydactyly or having extra fingers. Polydactyly is a symptom of the Ellis-van Creveld syndrome, found among the Old Order Amish of Pennsylvania, according to the PBS library. It is brought on by the Founder Effect – which occurs when a small group of people establish a new population and marry among themselves, resulting in a loss of genetic variation. This is again autosomal recessive disorder.
But there can be two types of inheritance patterns, says Dr Mohandas, head of pediatrics at the Kozhikode Medical College. One type, he says, is autosomal recessive, and the other type is dominant inheritance.
“There are about 20,000 pairs of genes among the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a human body. If one in a pair of genes is mutant or faulty and the disease manifests in you, it is called dominant inheritance. If both the genes in a pair are faulty, then it is autosomal recessive. There can also be cases in which one in a pair of genes is faulty but it does not manifest as a disease – they are called carriers. Everyone can have at least 8 to 10 faulty genes but these need not manifest as diseases. However, when two people who are related to each other and carry the same set of faulty genes marry, then there is a 25% possibility that their child may be born with autosomal recessive disorder – when both the genes in a pair are faulty.”
However, Dr Mohandas says that not all genetic disease can be traced to consanguineous marriages. Common misconceptions are that conditions like Down Syndrome (where a person is born with an extra copy of chromosome 21, which means that they have a total of 47 chromosomes instead of 46) manifest in children of first cousins.
The autosomal recessive disorders that do manifest are spinal muscular atrophy, which costs crores of rupees to be treated, sickle cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis, among others.
Both the doctors, however, said that it does not make much of a difference if the marriage is between cross or parallel cousins.
In the city of Bradford in the United Kingdom, a research conducted for 18 years studying 13,000 babies from childhood to early adulthood revealed that first-cousin parentage may have bigger consequences than previously thought. A BBC report says that apart from the obvious health risks, the researchers found that children of consanguineous marriages have a higher probability of developing speech and language problems, and a lesser chance of reaching a good stage of development than children of parents who are not related.
Cousin marriages the world over
Consanguineous marriages are not an Indian phenomenon, but are practised in many cultures across the globe. In India, social, cultural, and religious factors are believed to have led to the practice. But there is also the more practical reason stemming from wanting to keep the wealth within the family. There have also been other theories, such as the one proposed by the late historian Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai, that such marriages could have evolved when men went to war in primitive societies and found it difficult to get alliances from outside the immediate family. There is also a theory that the many wars of the princely states, before the formation of the Indian Union, kept them from marrying into families outside their own state.
Legally, cousin marriage is prohibited in countries like China, North Korea, South Korea, the Philippines, and most recently, Norway. It is criminalised in eight states of the United States. Sweden is expected to enforce a ban next year.
In Denmark, the Parliament introduced the ‘rule of supposition of forced marriage’ in 2003, to counter the risk of forced consanguineous marriages among migrant populations. A study by Anika Liversage and Mikkel Rytter says that this rule has most likely reduced the number of marriages between members of the extended family among Turkish and Pakistani immigrants in Denmark.
