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There is an Indian custom of marrying cousins, the son or daughter of a man's sister is eligible to marry his daughter or son and vice versa and a lady can marry her daughter off to her younger brother.
Primarily, such marriages are conducted to keep family attachment intact - if any trouble arises it can be solved easily by the interference of the relatives and generally, they live in one house, in joint family system.
Another reason for this practice is to prevent anti caste marriages, whereby a woman or a man of different castes, either of them belonging to upper or lower caste fall in love and want to tie the knot much to their respective family's disapproval. Indian culture is not like Western culture, approval from both families of the girl and guy to get married is paramount; you don't marry only the person, you marry his and family as well.
When marrying within the family, caste is preserved and often times, parents give vow that their daughter or son would be married to their brother or sister's son or daughter even before they are born! And, as children, they are told that they would marry each other. There are many Tamil movies to testify to this scenario.
Scientifically, such marriages are nothing but inbreeding. Even the animal kingdom doesn't behave like this - in lion prides, the male cubs which have reached maturity leave the pride and go on to form other prides of their own. This is nature's way to prevent inbreeding and some of us want to defy nature and then pay the price of their ignorance or more correctly, apathy.
Babies born out of such wedlock could have a multiplicity of congenital problems. Heart problems top the list, followed by nervous disorders, limb anomalies and so forth. A study on this issue revealed the lifestyle, smoking, drinking habits, income and poverty and other factors that might contribute, and found that consanguinity is the leading culprit.
The problem in such close relative marriages surfaces when one of the partners carries a defect in any of the genes associated with some form of illness. When you marry within the community with one who may also have such a family defect, the child inherits two copies of this faulty gene, and thus has the defect. This is due to the limited gene pool for natural selection to take place.
But, when you marry outside the community, you bring in genes from a much larger gene pool, and the odds that the child will inherit the problem reduce remarkably as natural selection takes place.
It is high time for this practice to stop. Don't avenge the next generation. We should progress with times and outdated and volatile customs like this should be renounced
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