The Gotra System

Introduction:
The term ‘Gotra’ has been procured from Rigveda which means ‘Group or Community’. The term also adverts to ‘Family’ and ‘Lineage Kin’. In Scientific terms, Gotra procures the origin of a community having similar features and behaviours. In Sanskrit ‘Go’ means Cow and ‘Gotra’ means Cow Pen where as in Hindu Society the term ‘Gotra’ symbolises clan and it broadly implies the descendants in a ceaseless male line from a common male ancestor. Panini defines ‘Gotra’ for grammatical purposes as ‘Apatyam Pautraprabhrti Gotram’ which means the word Gotra denotes the progeny (of a sage) beginning with a son’s son. The Gotra system augmented for catering the needs of increasing population by accumulating an additional number of racial and
As per the scientific lucidity, a human has 23 pairs or 46 chromosomes out of which only one pair determines whether a girl or boy will be born and it is also known as sex chromosome. Intrinsically, the chromosome of a male is XY and that of a girl is XX. X has female attributes while Y has male attributes. During initial embryonic stage, if an embryo has XY chromosome the female attributes are likely to suppress by the genes in the Y chromosomes and eventually the a male child is born and vice versa when a female child is born. Henceforth it can be undoubtedly said that the gotra of any male or female are coming from their fathers. And that is why marriages between same gotra are prohibited. Marriage under such situation would be taken into account as incest or which is extremely looked down upon by the society with an eye of hatred. Scientific studies highly support this fact as biologically Y chromosome is similar in all males among same gotra and correspondingly for X chromosome in females and therefore accordingly, off springs from a couple of same gotra possess a high chance of diseases in future the physical disability increases
The size of Y chromosome in a human body carries a special feature of male which is about one third of the size of Y chromosomes. Scientific facts have shown that the size of Y chromosomes are deliberately curtailing in human and in future this phenomena is likely to give rise to a calamitous scenario of extremely less number of males. Scientists have blamed the marriage within same gotra or family as a pivot factor in genetic defects which has been passing on from generations and DNA’s are repeatedly getting distorted. Therefore, a preventive measure that all people in cities and towns can take is by evaluating the blood groups and DNA profile to stop the passage of dangerous recessive genes in next generations. According to scientists, so far more than 1000 gene-specific diseases have been specified due to marriages within the same gotra. Disorders such as “Cystic Fibrosis”, “Sickle- cell Anaemia”, “Galactosemia”, “Thalasemia”, “Autism”, “Juvenile muscular dystrophy” and “Growth Hormone Deficiency” may occur due to same gotra