Plate K·IIISapinda Marriage Checkerसपिण्ड
URN · vamshanidhi:folio:kinship.sapinda-checker
Sapinda Marriage Checker.
Combines sapinda generation rules from your community profile with gotra exogamy, pravara prohibition, and Dravidian cross-cousin allowance into a structured verdict. Primary smriti citations are appended.
This is a research aid. Dharmaśāstra is contested territory and different gurus, sub-traditions, and regional customs disagree. Confirm any verdict with a qualified purohit and your community elders before acting on it.
Sapinda marriage rules, explained.
What is sapinda?
Sapinda (सपिण्ड, “of the same piṇḍa”) describes blood relations who share a recent common ancestor. Dharmaśāstra texts prohibit marriage between sapindas, but they disagree on how far the relation extends: Manusmriti 3.5 counts seven generations on the father side and five on the mother side; Yājñavalkya Smṛti 1.52–53 keeps the same scope and makes gotra exogamy explicit; Āpastamba Dharmasūtra 1.6.19.14 draws the line at six generations; and Baudhāyana Dharmasūtra 1.1.2.8 allows five to seven depending on the line. South Indian traditions additionally recognise a cross-cousin allowance (documented in the 1981 study Dravidian Kinship by Trautmann) under which a match forbidden by the northern reading may be customary and preferred. The checker above encodes these rules per community profile and cites its sources with every verdict.
Why gotra exogamy matters
A gotra marks a patriline traced to a founding ṛṣi, recited formally as the pravara chain. Because two people of the same gotra are held to descend from the same sage, most śrauta traditions treat a sagotra match as marriage within the family and avoid it — and the stricter pravara prohibition extends the bar to any couple whose pravara chains share even one ṛṣi. This is why the checker asks for gotra and pravara separately: two different gotras can still share a pravara ṛṣi. You can browse every gotra pravara chain in the gotra registry.
What Indian law says
Under the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, section 5(v), a marriage between sapindas (as defined in section 3(f): up to the fifth generation in the father line and the third in the mother line) is not valid unless an established custom or usage governing both parties permits it, and courts have recently upheld this prohibition. Same-gotra marriage, by contrast, is not restricted by the Act — gotra exogamy is a matter of religious tradition and community custom, not statute. This page describes the traditional rules; it is not legal advice.