Bride dies during wedding - so groom marries bride's sister same ceremony

it's rural India, and no doubt the story will have been received fifth hand (at best) by the DM

Even a cursory reading of the story informs you that it's taken from IANS, which is India's largest news agency.

It doesn't mean the story's true, of course. It just means that it's not fifth hand, and it's not an example of DM's crap reporting. It just means that it's a story lifted from a news agency, and any errors in it will have been in the news agency's original copy.

samG76. I’m no expert either but understood the law as one that encouraged the brother of a man who dies to marry his widow especially if the woman had not had children . Could be wrong though.

My experience of the marriage ceremony and the weeks beforehand with the rabbi insisting on a Mikvah, talks with his wife about fulfilling the role of a good Jewish wife and mother along with the lifting of the veil to make sure I’d not been swapped for someone else and having to go in front of a panel of men to receive a get when I divorced all made me feel commoditised and inferior and aware that men make the rules that I was expected to live by. To me it did feel vile. Certainly nothing felt quaint about them.

@Ozanj that’s exactly what I thought too

In Hinduism brothers can marry each others’ widowed wives under certain situations. Men are also encouraged to see their wives sisters (especially younger ones) as ‘half-wives’ - due to in part to old traditions where men were often married to all the daughters in a family at the same time, and also because a mausi (mother’s sister) is considered the best stepmother for a child.

Even in India young women don’t drop dead like this. She clearly killed herself (in India cause of death isn’t searched for in all places; so a 19 year old who has drunk poison dies of a ‘heart attack’ not suicide)

Plus you have to remember this is Bihar where girls often get forced into marriages and in this situation it would have been up to the groom’s family to offer to marry a younger sister, not the bride’s. Deaths during marriage (especially on the bride’s side) are considered a hugely negative omen and so the groom’s family must have deeply respected the bride’s family for this to even be on the table.

There is clearly more to the story.

Basecamp - I'm not an expert in Yevamot by any means, but I thought the brother was expected to offer to marry the childless widow, but she could turn him down. Without a welfare state and with limited female participation in the jobs market in Judea around 500BC, this was intended to save her from starvation.

Some of the Jewish marriage rituals are a bit quaint - I don't find them vile - that would be sacrificing the widow or forcing her into exile. Non-Jewish brides wear veils as well, and brides were being duped in the UK until relatively recently. The reason Hardwicke's Marriage Act didn't apply to Quakers and Jews was that these groups could be trusted to run and record their ceremonies properly. And I quite like having our wedding contract on the wall....

In Jewish law there is Levirate marriage which is called Yibbum where the brother of a man who dies is allowed to marry his widow. It's largely prohibited now but in some cultures marriage is more contractual and a way to keep the clan together both hereditarily and financially. Women are still often regarded as property and commodities. I was so aware of that throughout my marriage ceremony. Even had the rabbi lifted my veil beforehand to make sure I hadn't been swapped for someone else and my husband to be wasn't being duped. Absolutely vile. I had to go for sessions with the rabbi's wife to learn how to be a good wife and was subjected to a ritual bath before the marriage was allowed to go ahead to make sure I was totally 'clean' and pure. I am so angry even thinking about all this shit now and how I let myself be subjected to it and expected to feel special and part of a venerable tradition and culture by going through it. This crap is still going on and is very much alive and well .

As others have said, the bride’s family would be paying the dowry, no receiving it.

I can see the issue with the apparent interchangeability of women and how awful that is. But I can also see that if you’re in a culture of arranged marriages (which is NOT the same as forced marriages) the whole set up looks different. I think there’s been research which shows that arranged marriages are no less likely to be happy than the sort of ‘love matches’ we now expect in Western society. And the idea of a love match is very recent. In places where life is hand to mouth and choices few, marrying to shore up a dynasty/ for business reasons seems a lot more understandable.

I’ve personally been the subject of a DM article which scurrilously misrepresented the facts to the point of falsification and have also seen other stories in other papers get things horribly wrong when I know what really happened, so as others have said, I really don’t trust the DM to get a story about an event in rural India right.

You know, I don't know what these people were like in terms of their attitudes, and I tend to think that having just had your sister die might not be the best time to get married.

But I also think that western culture has a particular and in some ways ver romanticised view of marriage, where many others are much more pragmatic about it. Is this a good person, do we have similar values, can we get along living as a couple, will we be financially stable, etc.

This kind of situation seems a little different when instead of seeing marriage as what you do when you're in love, loving someone is what you do when you're married.

What is your alternate reading of the second bride being readurd to marry while her sister lies dead?

This article just brought home to me how women are seen everywhere. Disposable, utterly replaceable commodities.

Given that
a) it's the DM
b) they make major inaccuracies such as saying the bride's family would be receiving and not giving a dowry, which points to the reporter having not even a basic grasp of the facts
c) every time I have had some personal knowledge of a story reported in the press (e.g. when a friend died in an accident) there have been significant errors in the reporting, even when it's the local paper reporting on a local story
d) it's rural India, and no doubt the story will have been received fifth hand (at best) by the DM

... my interpretation is that there's very large parts of the story missing, or the whole story is a complete fabrication.

I couldn’t help wondering if the bride had had a heart attack because she was so stressed at being forced into a marriage . All suooosition of course, but who knows. That article really made me angry too. So long as the precious son gets his baby machine, the particular machine doesn’t matter. It’s disgusting.

I felt the language of the article was callous. 'Dropped dead.'

@mnhq don't have a board where we can not speak the truth. Its a fudging wind up!

Terrible culture to act like that.

This is the Daily Mail, not exactly renowned for its accurate reporting or its contribution to race relations, with a story where they can try and pass off brown people as savages.

Take it with a tablespoon of salt.