society. Under the system they advocated (sometimes called Manuvad), women were stripped of their traditional independence and placed permanently in male custodianship: first of their fathers in childhood, then of their husbands through married life, and finally of their sons in old age. It is also speculated that parental control of marriage may have emerged during this period as a mechanism to prevent the intermixing of ethnic groups and castes. Early marriage, in which girls were married before they reached puberty also became prevalent, though not universal, over time. This emergence of early arranged marriages in the Indian subcontinent was consistent with similar developments elsewhere, such as Indonesia, various Muslim regions and South Pacific societies. Commentators on both Hindu and European Jewish communities (where early arranged marriages had also gained prevalence) have hypothesized that the system may have emerged because "the answer to the raging hormones associated with teenage sexuality was early, arranged marriage." With kinship groups being viewed a primary unit to which social loyalty was owed by individuals, marriage became an affair deeply impacting the entire family for Indian Hindus and Muslims alike and key to "the formation or maintenance of family alliances." Sometimes, these arrangements were made at the birth of the future husband and wife with promises exchanged between the two families. Where specific alliances were socially preferred, often an informal right of first refusal was presumed to exist. For instance, marriages between cousins is permissible in Islam (though not in most Hindu communities), and the girl's mother's sister (or khala) was considered to have the first right (pehla haq) to "claim" the girl as for her son (the khalazad bhai). Systems such as watta satta (exchange marriages, which occur in rural Punjab) evolved where two families unite by exchanging women in two brother-sister pairs through marriage. As with other cultures, levirate marriages (where the brother of a deceased man is obligated to marry his widow) also became customary in some regions for all religious groups, partially to ensure that clan alliances and clan ownership of land rights remained intact even if the husband died. Developments in the modern period With the expanding social reform and female emancipation that accompanied economic and literacy growth after independence, many commentators predicted the gradual demise of arranged marriages in India, and the inexorable rise of so-called "love marriages" (i.e. where the initial contact with potential spouses does not involve