Discussions of Indian social structure that emphasize the patriarchal, patrilineal family system and the maintenance of caste and family purity through arranged marriages have encouraged sweeping assumptions about the control of women by men. Such assumptions underlie predictions that within a given community more men than women will "marry out. " Two hypotheses predicting greater control of women's than men's marriages are tested and largely invalidated, utilizing historical data documenting

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... venty-five years of declining endogamy among members of the Kayasth caste of Hyderabad City, A ndhra Pradesh. The empirical data, however, provide two significant findings about exogamous marriages: siblings rather than sisters are the appropriate units of analysis, and there is a progression within families from intersubcaste to intercaste marriages, with both types of exogamous marriages increasing. PUBLISHED DATA on exogamous marriages in India-marriages outside one's subcaste, caste, or religion-indicate that within a given community more men than women will "marry out" because of stronger corporate control of women in marriage arrangements (Rakshit and Dasgupta