ABSTRACT
The Patidars' or patels' village-based marital system, with its exogamous and endogamous principles serves, as do other caste systems, to transmit genes and property while maintaining a social exclusivity that, in author's judgement, first arose as a quarantining precaution and then was preserved by pickling in religion. Women leave their parents' village to spread their genes; men remain in the village and inherit family property. Whether or not the trend for British Patels to marry within their caste is weakening is not, to author's knowledge, properly known but anecdotes and researchers suggest that within this highly status conscious community, although "marrying out" may no longer be scandalous or rare, it is still nonetheless unorthodox. In Britain, South Asians are the least likely to marry someone from a different "ethnic" group among a total population of whom a mere two percent marry someone from a different "ethnic" background.
