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Nata Pratha,\u00a0\u00a0practiced in some tribal belts, allows women to shun unhappy marriages. But this remarkable avant garde instead of empowering women, has given men licence for extra-marital relationships. An investigative report by Tehelka SIT<\/span>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n In January this year, when India was talking about \u201cBulli Bai\u201d, and \u201cSulli Deals\u201d apps \u00a0involved in fake online \u201cauction\u201d of hundreds of Muslim women, not many would know that women are actually auctioned — albeit offline! \u2013 in some parts of India in the centuries old tradition of \u00a0Nata Pratha<\/em>, prevalent in tribal belts of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.<\/p>\n Nata Pratha<\/em>\u00a0is mainly practiced by the Bhil tribe, one of the largest tribes in South Asia. Traditionally, both the man and the woman who enter into a relationship are supposed to be married or have been widowed, but the custom has evolved to include single people as well. The word \u201cNata\u201d means relationship. Under this system, no formal marriage ceremony is required to live together. Couple can perform all obligations of husband and wife without entering into wedlock. According to the practice, man has to pay money to live — a la modern day live-in relationship — with a woman of his choice, after the woman\u2019s first husband walks out of the marriage and pass on his wife to other man in return for money. This money, the \u201cbride price,\u201d is fixed by members of the community, or middlemen, who may receive a cut for doing so. The sum may range from a few thousand bucks to even a few lakhs depending upon the paying capacity of the person concerned. Interestingly, men sometimes use this amount for \u201cbuying\u201d themselves new wives!.<\/p>\n Tehelka<\/em>\u00a0carried out an investigation into\u00a0Nata Pratha<\/em>\u00a0in the villages of Banswara district of Rajasthan, where many such cases crop up every year.\u00a0 Investigation suggests that this custom was introduced against male domination, giving wives the authority to get out of marriage if their husbands have betrayed them or are making them suffer through domestic abuse and violence. Ancestors of the Bhil community created this custom and the tribe is of the firm belief that it cannot be wrong. However, the thought of this primitive custom has evolved over the years in a negative manner.<\/p>\n Tehelka<\/em> has learned that outcome of such a custom has been fourfold. People have exploited\u00a0Nata Pratha<\/em>\u00a0as an easier option of getting into an extra-marital affair. A man has to pay a certain amount of money to enter into a \u2018Nata\u2019 that is to live with a woman to whom he is not married and the amount is decided by the panchayat comprising people from side of both the man and the woman. Which, if thought upon holistically, replicates the supposed auction of women on the pattern of \u201cBulli Bai\u201d and \u201c Sulli Deals\u201d apps.<\/p>\n Children from the first marriage are also left behind when mother goes for\u00a0Nata Pratha<\/em>. They, in majority of the cases, face neglect when a new woman comes into the family, says a report prepared by an NGO Vaagdhara in association with UNICEF. The report states that 2% of the 35 lakh tribal children in the age group of 4-14 have been impacted due to \u2018Nata\u2019 practice. Disturbed childhood, unhappy families along with financial crisis, force them into miserable conditions often exposing them to unethical activities such as drug abuse. Also, at times these kids are forced into flesh trade to forgo the requirements of their healthy upbringing or sustainable future by their parents.<\/p>\n Nata Pratha is practiced by the Bhil tribe. Traditionally, both the man and the woman who enter into alliance are supposed to be married or have been widowed, but the custom has evolved to include single people as well<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cNata Pratha<\/em>\u00a0is a poor practice. It should be done only when required. Families fall apart and children\u2019s life get ruined. When I was a sarpanch of Rohanwari village, I introduced a rule to impose fine and socially\u00a0boycott the couple who do \u2018Nata.\u2019 The fine ranges from Rs 25,000 to Rs 51,000. So far, eight couples of my village who did \u2018Nata\u2019 have been punished under this rule,\u201d says Daulat Ram Baria, a former sarpanch of Rohanwari village.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that money is involved during \u2018Nata\u2019 doesn\u2019t sound all right. As is the practice, village panchayat sits and negotiate the rate of \u00a0\u2018Nata.\u2019 Sometimes, demand as high as Rs 5 to 6 lakh is made. Then they call me and I bring it down to somewhere around 1.5 lakh. This is an auction of a woman.\u00a0 If woman is a widow, her parents take this money. If her first husband is alive, then the money goes to him. But in many cases women\u2019s parents also take the \u201cnata\u201d money decided by the village panchayat along with her first husband. The government has not yet framed any law to stop this practice,\u201d adds Daulat Ram Baria.<\/p>\n \u2018Nata\u2019 allows a woman to marry another man after her marriage breaks down. That sounds reformist, except that in most cases, it\u2019s the husband who walks out of the marriage and pass on his wife to someone else in return for money. Money plays an important role in \u2018Nata\u2019. In some cases\u00a0even father of a woman forces her into one marriage after another, making money from each deal. With breaking and fixing of marriages a lucrative proposition, there are many who try to dissolve marriages and fix new ones to get a cut of the \u201cbride price\u201d. It is also common for girls\u2019 families to slap false cases of dowry and torture on men to deny them their share of the \u201cbride price\u201d on the\u00a0subsequent marriage of their wives.<\/p>\n Homing in on \u2018Nata\u2019 cases<\/strong><\/p>\n In Kherda village of Banswara district of Rajasthan, Vimla (name changed) was married to Bhan Singh (name changed) 14 years ago. They had three children from the marriage. Bhan Singh was a labourer and Vimla looked after her three children at home. One day while returning from his work, Bhan Singh met his friends who forced him to have liquor at a wine shop. Bhan Singh after having liquor for the first time fell down and couldn\u2019t go home. After a long wait, Vimla decided to go out and look out for her husband while leaving her three children back at home.<\/p>\n After sometime she managed to trace her husband and took him home. Bhan Singh promised Vimla that in future he would not touch the liquor again. But Bhan Singh couldn\u2019t keep his promise and became a habitual drunker, which became a reason for frequent fights between him and Vimla. Finally, Vimla walked out on Bhan Singh leaving her three children behind to do \u2018nata\u2019 \u00a0with some other man during Covid time in 2020.\u00a0 Village panchayat after negotiations fixed Rs 1.50 lakh for Vimla\u2019s \u2018nata.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201c Panchayat decided that Vimal\u2019s new man should pay Rs. 1.50 lakh to Vimla\u2019s first husband to do Nata. But so far, Vimla\u2019s new companion has only paid Rs 46k to her first husband. For the remaining amount, Vimal\u2019s husband is building pressure on Vimla\u2019s companion,\u201d says Manohar, an activist of the area.<\/p>\n According to Manohar, wives of abusive husbands are doing \u2018Nata.\u2019 According to a rough estimate, nearly 10-12 \u2018natas\u2019 take place every year in the Banswara district. In each case, a woman is allowed to do \u2018nata\u2019 after the panchayat decides her money. That money is a must for her second man to pay to her first husband. If the latter fails to do so, the woman is not allowed to go with him. In some cases if a woman goes without paying money, it leads to two villages locking horns with each other over the issue. The woman is finally brought in front of the Panchayat which decides on the money. She is allowed to go with the second man after payment is made , adds Manohar.<\/p>\n ‘Nata’ allows a woman to marry another man after her marriage breaks down. That sounds reformist, except that in most cases, it’s the husband who walks out of the marriage and pass on his wife to someone else in return for money<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cLike women, children also suffer because of\u00a0 \u2018nata.\u2019 In Vimla\u2019s case after Nata, she left her three children with her first husband. The children are surviving on the limited income of their father, with the result that the children have stopped going to the school. And there is none in their family to look after them, after their father goes out for a labourer\u2019s job,\u201d says Manohar.<\/p>\n Tehelka discovered another \u2018Nata\u2019 case in the Mahori village of Banswara district. Woman Samta Devi (name changed) underwent \u2018Nata\u2019 after her first husband left her. Samta was married a few years ago to a man named Veerpal Singh (name changed).\u00a0 They had two children, out of which one died. A few years after the marriage, Samta and Veerpal, who is a labourer, started fighting with each other very often. With the result that Samta decided to leave Veerpal and did \u2018Nata\u2019 with another man in 2019. The village panchayat decided that Samta\u2019s second man should pay Rs 1 lakh to Veerpal after which she was allowed to go with him.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cIt was decided by the village panchayat that Samta\u2019s second husband should pay Rs 1 lakh to her first husband. Samta did \u2018Nata\u2019 with a man who is already married. She was going for a labourer\u2019s job in Rajkot, Gujarat, with her husband where she met the second man with whom she later did \u2018Nata.\u2019 The village panchayat tried hard to bring Samta back to her first husband because she had a son. But she refused to return. After her decision, I have broken all relations with her,\u201d says Samta\u2019s uncle Kamlesh to\u00a0Tehelka<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n After Samta, another case of \u2018Nata\u2019 surfaced in Covid time in 2020. This time it was Maya (name changed), a mother of two, who was married to Rohan Lal (name changed). Maya and Rohan were living a happy married life before their relations started to fall apart. And finally Maya decided to go with other man after doing \u2018Nata.\u2019 According to \u2018Nata\u2019 custom, Maya was forced to abandon her two children from previous marriage. The village panchayat decided that Maya can go with other man only after paying Rs.1.50 lakh to her first husband. The amount fixed by the panchayat in the presence of then sarpanch of Rohanwaari village Daulat Ram Baria, was paid to Maya\u2019s first husband, after which she was allowed to go with the man of her choice.<\/p>\n \u201cOur then sarpanch, Daulat Ram Baria played a major role in fixing a \u2018Nata\u2019 amount of Maya. A village panchayat was held and it was decided that Maya\u2019s second man should pay Rs 1.50 lakh to Rohan Lal. The amount was paid and Maya was allowed to walk on Rohan Lal,\u201d says Basu (name changed), Maya\u2019s brother-in law.<\/p>\n Another Covid time \u2018Nata\u2019 was done in a village of Dungarpur District of Rajasthan. Rano Devi (name changed) did Nata two months ago. She was married in 2014. She had a son after two years of marriage. She started having a dispute with her husband after realising that her husband is having an affair with another woman. When she confronted her husband on the issue, he started beating her, with the result that Rano returned to her parents. Her parents made\u00a0futile\u00a0efforts to re-unite Rano with her husband, prompting them to arrange a married man for their daughter\u2019s \u2018Nata.\u2019 In this case, Rano was not asked by the village panchayat to pay money to her first husband before doing \u2018Nata,\u2019 because the first husband gave divorce to Rano. According to the tradition \u2018Nata\u2019 money is paid only when the first husband did not divorce his wife, and the wife after leaving him decided to live with another man without marriage.<\/p>\n \u201c Rano\u2019s husband was very abusive and had an affair with another woman. When Rano objected, he started beating her. With the result that Rano\u2019s parents arranged a married man for her \u2018Nata.\u2019 In this case, Rano was not asked to pay any money to her first husband, because he had already divorced her. According to the \u2018Nata\u2019 tradition, money is paid only when women, after running away from her first husband, start living with a second man, without taking a divorce from the husband,\u201d says Motilal, social activist of the area.<\/p>\n \u201cRupa (name changed) was another woman from Tori village in Banswara district, who did \u2018Nata\u2019 a year after her husband died in 2017. We don\u2019t know the amount Rupa\u2019s parents got from another man. But the two children from the first marriage who are living with their grandparents are in a pathetic condition. They have no future, no schooling,\u201d says Mansingh, a social activist of the area.<\/p>\n Covid also lets a woman do \u2018Nata.\u2019 Beena Devi (name changed) of Patiya village district Banswara was married to Sohan Lal (name changed) \u00a0in 2005-2006. They have five children. Sohan Lal, who was a daily wage worker, going to Gujarat for the labour, lost his job in Covid and was forced to sit at home with no work and no money. Without money, it was difficult for Sohan Lal to run the household. Realising this, his wife decided to do \u2018Nata\u2019 with another man, and ran away with him. It has been one and a half year since. But Rupa\u2019s\u00a0 where about is not known to her husband Sohan Lal, who is financially in a very tight situation.<\/p>\n \u201cSohan Lal lost his job due to Covid, resulting in his wife running away with another man after going \u2018Nata.\u2019 Her five children are now living with Sohan Lal and surviving on the government\u2019s free ration support. Sohan Lal is looking for his wife so that he can claim \u2018Nata\u2019 money from him,\u201d says Kailash Chandra, a local activist.<\/p>\n \u201cNata<\/em>\u00a0Pratha indicates how advanced the Tribal culture was. It gives the right for widow re-marriage and also gives the right to the women to leave their abusive husband, which is tough in our culture. This tradition is of women empowerment. But over the years things have changed. Children are most affected by \u2018Nata.\u2019\u00a0 Women are not allowed to take their children from their first marriage with them if they do \u2018Nata.\u2019 Actually money in \u2018Nata\u2019 is not the rate of the woman; it is their tradition. But the outside world thinks that women are auctioned in this practice. There is no law so far to curb\u00a0Nata Pratha<\/em>. But the educated among the Bhil tribe are coming out of this\u00a0Nata Pratha<\/em>\u201d, says Jayesh Joshi, Secretary, NGO Vaagdhara.<\/p>\n Anita Damor, the woman rights activist of the area, describes\u00a0Nata Pratha<\/em>\u00a0both good and bad. Good in the sense that it empowers women. And bad because money is involved in it. Unmarried girls\u2019 parents demand Rs 4-5 lakh from the man\u2019s parents in the marriage unlike in our society where girl\u2019s parents give dowry. And married women going for \u201cNata\u201d also give money to her first husband. Sometimes it so happens that the first husband who demands money from his wife\u2019s second man also demands his wife back. The involvement of money is bad in\u00a0Nata Pratha,\u00a0<\/em>says Anita Damor even as she demands that there should be some law to curb this practice.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Parmesh Chandra Patidar, a theme leader associated with Vaagdhara, an NGO, also demands a law to curb\u00a0Nata Pratha<\/em>. For him it is bad for both women and children. The children left behind after \u2018Nata\u2019 suffer\u00a0a lot. And involvement of money in the custom is also bad. Unfortunately, \u00a0children do not get anything from the money which changes hands in\u00a0Nata Pratha<\/em>. Money is generally used by the husband to pay his debt.<\/p>\n In this practice, middlemen also play a vital role in deciding the money to be paid to a woman’s first husband by her second man. They get their cut out of the money fixed by the panchayat. Sometimes, the panchayat appointed for deciding money goes on for a month if consensus is not reached on the money.<\/p>\n When contacted, Rajesh Meena, Superintendent of Police (SP), Banswara, said that there is no law to curb\u00a0Nata Pratha<\/em>. When asked about his views on women being auctioned in front of Panchayat as per the practice, Rajesh Meena said that since he had no knowledge of the subject, he would not comment on this.<\/p>\n For a simple want of having more than one partner, people have modified \u2018Nata\u2019 custom into as many forms as they wanted, suiting their unworthy desires, summarily ignoring the fact that their actions are not only affecting women and children but also impacting the society on a whole, further subjugating human values that forms the basic foundation of a ethical life.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nata Pratha,\u00a0\u00a0practiced in some tribal belts, allows women to shun unhappy marriages. But this remarkable avant garde instead of empowering women, has given men licence for extra-marital relationships. An investigative report by Tehelka SIT. In January this year, when India was talking about \u201cBulli Bai\u201d, and \u201cSulli Deals\u201d apps \u00a0involved in fake online \u201cauction\u201d of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":337385,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2205],"tags":[15305,15304,593,1043,6150,15302,1478,15303],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337289"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337289"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":337384,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337289\/revisions\/337384"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media\/337385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Cover-story-Neglected-Nata-Children...pls-cover-face-1.jpg\")
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