Breaking down the question
The question asks for a broad comparison, so at 10 marks the examiner wants the principal contrasts between the northern and southern kinship zones drawn cleanly, not an exhaustive ethnography. The organising authority here is Irawati Karve, whose regional mapping of Indian kinship into distinct cultural zones supplies the framework the answer should use.
The pivot of the comparison is the treatment of marriage in relation to existing kin. The North extends exogamy outward and keeps affines separate from consanguines; the South folds marriage back into the kin group through cross-cousin and uncle-niece alliance. Establishing this single axis early lets every other contrast fall into place.
How to approach it
Open by crediting Karve's division of India into kinship regions and stating that the sharpest contrast lies between the northern and southern zones. Then organise the comparison around a few clear axes: rules of marriage and exogamy, the relation between affinity and consanguinity, marriage distance, and the position of women. Our notes on family and marriage in India give further regional detail.
Keep the treatment tabular in logic even if written in prose — North on one side, South on the other, axis by axis. Close with the qualification that these are broad regional tendencies, not rigid laws, and that Dumont read the southern pattern as a structure of enduring affinal alliance.
Model answer
Irawati Karve's pioneering work mapped India into distinct kinship regions, and the most instructive contrast she drew was between the northern and southern zones. The two systems differ most fundamentally in how they relate marriage to existing ties of kinship.
In the northern zone, kinship is governed by wide rules of exogamy. Marriage is prohibited not only within one's own clan or gotra but often across several generations and among a range of related lineages; the well-known four-clan rule bars alliance with the lineages of both grandmothers as well as one's own. The effect is to push marriage outward, well beyond the circle of known kin. Affines and consanguines are kept sharply separate — the family one is born into and the family one marries into belong to different worlds, and a new set of kinship terms marks the affinal side. Brides typically marry into distant villages, so marriage distance is great and a woman moves among comparative strangers.
In the southern zone, by contrast, marriage is characteristically preferential and turned inward. Cross-cousin marriage — a man marrying his mother's brother's or father's sister's daughter — is favoured, and in some communities uncle-niece marriage is practised. Here marriage does not create a wholly new set of relations but reinforces existing ones; the categories of affinity and consanguinity overlap, so that a cross-cousin is at once a blood relation and a potential or actual spouse. Marriage distance is short, alliances recur between the same families across generations, and a bride often marries into a household already linked to her own. Kinship terminology reflects this by merging categories that the North keeps apart.
The position of the married woman differs accordingly. In the North she enters a distant, unfamiliar affinal household as a subordinate newcomer, and her natal ties are attenuated by distance. In the South, marrying close kin nearby, she retains stronger links with her natal family and enjoys a somewhat more secure and familiar position after marriage.
Louis Dumont interpreted the southern arrangement not merely as a preference for cousins but as a principle of enduring alliance — repeated intermarriage binding groups together as affines across generations, so that affinity itself becomes a stable structural relationship rather than a fresh transaction at each marriage.
These are broad regional tendencies rather than exact rules; central India shows transitional features, and caste, community and modern change qualify the pattern everywhere. But as a first-order contrast, the North extends exogamy and separates affines from kin, while the South practises preferential close-kin marriage that fuses them.
Examiner's perspective
At 10 marks the examiner wants the central axis identified and exploited: exogamy pushing marriage outward in the North against preferential cross-cousin alliance pulling it inward in the South. Crediting Karve for the regional framework, and Dumont for the reading of affinal alliance, signals command of the literature.
The strong script keeps the comparison disciplined along a few axes — marriage rules, affinity versus consanguinity, marriage distance, the woman's position — rather than drifting into unstructured description. A closing caution that these are broad tendencies with transitional zones adds balance, and precise, British-spelt prose secures the top band.