According to an old Hindu custom, the only way to break the curse for a bride is to marry a peepal or banana tree! Yes, a tree!!! The tree is then destroyed, and the curse is broken.
A bride can also marry a silver or golden idol of the Hindu God Vishnu. Among the Gauras in Orissa, tree marriage appears in its cruelest form. They take the girl who is supposed to get married to the tree to the forest and fastened up to a tree. Tree marriage, the symbolic marital union of a person with a tree that is said to be infused with supernatural life.
Tree marriage may also be a form of proxy marriage. In one such practice, between a bachelor and a tree, the tree was afterward felled, endowing the man with the widower status required to marry a widow. Tree marriage was once widespread in India.
The term can also refer to a nuptial ceremony that takes place in, on, or around a tree, or that is sanctified with some part of the tree, such as the bark or sap. The latter practice is more usually part of a religious system or cult organized around beliefs that trees contain hidden or sacred power to cure or to enhance fertility or that they contain the souls of ancestors or of the unborn.
The risk of being eaten up by the wild beasts is at its most, and the first comer is tied to the best tree in the locality. Some youngster of the other tribes of inferior branches arranges this ritual. But the girl is usually not married to this young man of the other tribe, rather she is carried her away by some other tribe when her people had abandoned her.
For certain people in India, custom holds that a younger brother cannot marry until his older brother is married. What happens if a young man wants to marry, and his older brother is still single? Then the older brother is officially married to a tree! The marriage between the older brother and the tree often takes place at the same time as the younger brother’s marriage.
The Indians believe that when the marriages are held together, the bad luck that might befall the young married couple can be passed on to the tree instead.
The current Indian constitution, however, assesses such practices as illegal because they believed to violate the rights of women, who are already oppressed enough in the country.
There was even a lawsuit filed against Aishwarya Rai, the Indian film star and a former Miss World, for following this tradition and marrying a tree.
The tradition of marrying a tree refers to untouchability, a practice when a group segregates itself from the mainstream by rejecting a change of customs.
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