It has long been recognized that the Indian subcontinent is home to two markedly different systems of kinship that broadly correspond to prominent linguistic and geographical divisions in the region: those of the Indo-Āryan North and the Dravidian South. Moreover, scholars have widely agreed that the most distinctive feature of Dravidian kinship is the widespread practice of cross-cousin marriage in its various forms. In the Indo-Āryan North, by contrast, a man is generally forbidden from marrying a woman to whom he is biologically related in any way within a fairly large number of generations. Nevertheless, by the close of the first millennium CE, Brāhmaṇa intellectuals throughout India shared in common both a canon of scriptural sources and a complex tradition of jurisprudence known as Dharmaśāstra. Hence, this raises the question: How did classical Brāhmaṇical jurists of the North and the South deal with the controversial issue of cross-cousin marriage? It is this question that this article aims to address in comprehensive detail. In particular, it will trace the treatment of cross-cousin marriage within Dharmaśāstra from the earliest texts of the tradition up to the two earliest and most prominent juridical defenses of the custom, composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It will then conclude by drawing attention to a rare case where a particular Dharmaśāstra work can be seen to have influenced the marriage practices in a particular region of South India in the premodern past.

人们早就认识到，印度次大陆拥有两种截然不同的亲属制度，这两种制度大致对应于该地区突出的语言和地理划分：印度-Āryan 北部和德拉威南部。此外，学者们普遍认为，达罗毗荼亲属关系最显着的特征是各种形式的表亲通婚的普遍做法。相比之下，在 Indo-Āryan 北部，一个男人通常被禁止在相当多的几代内与一个与他有任何生物学关系的女人结婚。尽管如此，到公元第一个千年结束时，印度各地的婆罗门知识分子共享了一个经典的经典来源和一个被称为 Dharmaśāstra 的复杂法学传统。因此，这就提出了一个问题：北方和南方的古典婆罗门法学家如何处理有争议的异族通婚问题？本文旨在全面详细地解决这个问题。尤其是，它将追溯法经中对表亲通婚的处理，从最早的传统文本到 13 和 14 世纪编写的两个最早和最突出的习俗法律辩护。然后，它将通过提请注意一个罕见的案例来结束，在这个案例中，可以看到特定的佛法工作影响了前现代时期南印度特定地区的婚姻实践。