The stability of marriage, then, depends entirely on sanctions built into the local community, and is totally unaffected by the State laws. For fruitful, honourably celebrated first marriages these are effective, and the divorce rate almost nil. Failure by the wife to fulfil her duties does give respectable grounds for divorce, the commonest and most pressing grounds being failure to bear and rear sons. Misconduct in such marriages is apparently extremely rare. Owing to the relatively high death rate, and to a few justified divorces, secondary marriages form a considerable proportion of all marriages. Among the more respectable of these divorce is still rare but among a minority whose marriage was less honourable in the first place, or who were forced to contract a secondary marriage at very short notice, divorce is commoner, and cases of this kind account for a considerable part of the relatively modest total of divorces.
Since no formal procedure, enforced by higher authority, is recognised, nothing can prevent a couple performing a religious nikah, even if in strict Islamic law they are not permitted to do so, so that no one in the villages lives in a state of concubinage. All unions are marriages in village eyes.