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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.
The practice is in decline now, but its echoes persist around the world.
In the remote Dolpa region of Nepal, Tashi Sangmo recalls marrying a 14-year-old neighbour when she was 17. As tradition dictated, she was marrying her husband’s younger brother as well.
“Things are easier this way because everything we have stays in one family,” she told the news agency AFP in 2013. “Two brothers bring in the money and it is me who decides what to do with it.”
Her husband’s brother, Pasang, joined the marriage without question. They live in a village 4,000m above sea level, where daily life is harsh. Their children call both the men father, with little concern for biology.
“If I felt jealousy, then I would go and marry someone else,” Pema, a Dolpa man who shares a wife with his elder brother, explains matter-of-factly.
For centuries, almost every Dolpa household practised fraternal polyandry to prevent land and livestock from being divided into unsustainable fragments.
Anthropologist Melvyn Goldstein says the purpose of this practice is not to create wealth but to preserve it.
If two brothers inherited 10 acres, their grandchildren would reduce it to plots too small to live on. A single wife would keep the estate whole.
Dutch charity SNV estimated that eight in 10 Dolpa households were polyandrous about a generation ago. Today, the figure is closer to one in five.
Satellite dishes adorn stone rooftops and tourism is introducing new ideals of romance and marriage, but older people still defend the system.
“With many brothers the household is stronger and the children have better chances for the future,” says Choyocap Gurung, 67, who once shared a wife with two brothers.
On the other side of the Himalayas, Goldstein offers two reasons for the perpetuation of fraternal polyandry in some Tibetan communities.
“Tibetans practice female infanticide and, therefore, have to marry polyandrously, owing to a shortage of females,” he explains in a 1987 paper titled When Brothers Share a Wife. “And Tibet, lying at extremely high altitudes, is so barren and bleak that Tibetans would starve without resorting to this mechanism.”
Polyandry is one of the least understood marital systems in the world, breaking many taboos and inviting fascination from other societies.
Far less common than polygyny – the practice of a man marrying multiple women – or monogamy, it appears sporadically across cultures, often in places facing ecological or social strain.
Anthropologist Laura Benedict, through a survey of 43 societies, identifies six distinct forms in her 2017 paper Polyandry Around the World. These are fraternal, associated, polykoity, secondary, walking marriage, and familial.
Irving Goldman documented a Cubeo woman in Colombia’s Amazon who took her husband’s younger brother as an additional partner when he could not find a wife in their isolated community. She “fed both men and was a sexual partner of the junior husband only when her first husband was away”, the anthropologist wrote in 1963.
In some societies, women married multiple men in separate ceremonies, in what the researcher described as associated polyandry. Unlike fraternal unions, the husbands were not always related but sometimes had a clear hierarchy.
Among the Aleuts of Alaska, a woman might take a second husband if the first fell ill or struggled to provide.
In southern India, the Paliyans accepted associated polyandry, and took in other men if the first failed to meet their sexual needs or was ill.
While the first husband resented the second marriage of the wife, he chose to maintain the relationship rather than lose his wife, Peter Gardner noted in a 2009 paper.
The anthropologist also found cases of group marriages involving couples living next to each other.
Often, the wife married a neighbour and had a child with him if the older man acquired an illness that prevented sexual activity. But unlike fraternal polyandry, in such marriages, the second husband did not contribute to the household of the first husband.
However, the society accepted both men as the woman’s spouse, he explained.
Perhaps the most striking form of polyandry is polykoity, which is when a woman is married to one man but has sexual relations with others. This is accompanied by an overlapping belief that a child can have more than one father, also known as partible paternity.
The Barí of Venezuela, the Yanomami of Brazil, and the Ache of Paraguay all shared this conviction once. The communities believed that a child could not possibly be conceived with only one father.
They believed the sperm built a ball inside the woman until it was large enough to create a fetus, which, in turn, blocked the passage of the menstrual blood, Donald Pollock explains in his 2002 book Cultures of Multiple Fathers.
The belief stemmed from a misconception that the woman merely carried a vessel and did not contribute to the making of a foetus.
For women, this spreads the risk in the face of elevated mortality rates. If the father died, others remained. For men, it extended alliances and secured care for children.
Children in such societies enjoyed the resources and protection of multiple fathers, blurring the line between kinship and community.
In parts of Africa and South America, polyandry took the form of lingering attachments after divorce, which researchers called secondary polyandry. The wife divorced the husband and married the friend but wanted to maintain sexual contact with the first husband.
“This instance differs from the associated polyandry,” Benedict says in her paper, “because the woman divorced the first husband, and he did not live with the new couple, nor did he contribute to their household as the junior husband of associated polyandry would do.”
This was particularly noted among Nigeria’s Irigwe where remarried couples continued sexual relations with former partners, with no stigma attached.
Here, polyandry was not about land or scarcity but about flexible, overlapping bonds in societies where exclusivity carried less weight.
“This was an accepted and expected practice in the society,” Benedict writes. “In this community, co-husbands reported no jealousy but avoided each other because of the belief that the one could cause harm or death to the other just by his presence.”
In China, the Mosuo developed one of the most unusual systems: the “walking marriage”.
Men would be invited into women’s homes at night and left before dawn. No marriage ceremony, cohabitation or economic obligation.
Children would be raised in the maternal household, with uncles often acting as father figures.
Though it’s rarely practised now, the walking marriage once gave Mosuo women remarkable autonomy: the ability to choose and end relationships freely, without dependence on men.
In the Mosuo society, women held authority, sexual relationships were pursued freely without stigma, and the responsibility for looking after the children and the elderly lay with the entire extended family.
Similar patterns appeared elsewhere: among southern India’s Nayar, women often had multiple lovers alongside a symbolic marriage. In the Congo’s Lele communities, “wives of the village” enjoyed broad sexual freedoms.
At the other end of the spectrum was familial polyandry wherein access to women was expected rather than chosen.
In Alaska’s Point Hope, men offered wives to travellers as hospitality. Among the Pawnee of Kansas, brothers were expected to share their wives and sisters with their husbands.
Not all women welcomed this. Anthropologist Froelich Rainey notes that Tigara women resented being “used in such a way”.
In other communities, like the Cherokee, women retained more agency in choosing multiple partners.
This variation underscores a key reality: polyandry can be empowering as well as coercive, depending on context.
Today, polyandry is retreating. Migration, modern education and ideals of romantic love lead younger generations in Himachal and beyond to prefer monogamy.
The television now beams the idea of nuclear families into remote valleys, while city jobs loosen ties to ancestral land, a village farmer in northern India’s Uttarakhand laments.
“We urge you to spread this practice of polyandry as it helps inculcate love among the brothers and help keep families together. The love in the society and among family members is reducing by the day,” he says. “Migration is rampant and people are increasingly moving towards cities, leaving their land and people behind. And as people are getting educated and married separately, they no longer have the kind of love that they earlier used to have.”