Polygyny
Topic: Society in Early India: Kinship, Varna-Jati, Women · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 3 "Kinship, Caste and Class - Early Societies"
Meaning
Polygyny is the practice of one man having several wives at the same time. In early India it was common among kings and rich men. It matters because royal marriages show how kinship rules worked in practice. They also show how those rules differed from region to region.
Example
Some Satavahana kings (c. 2nd century BCE – 2nd century CE) were polygynous. Their inscriptions name several queens. Many queens kept their father's gotra (family line named after a Vedic sage) instead of taking the husband's. Some queens even came from the same gotra as the king. This points to endogamy, meaning marriage within the kin group. It went against the Brahmanical rule that a wife takes her husband's gotra.
Don't confuse with
- Polyandry: one woman has several husbands, as Draupadi did in the Mahabharata. Polygyny is one man with several wives.