The Rashtrakutas and their Times c21.155

c21.155

There is a difference of opinion among the Smriti writers of our period as to whether virgin widows should be married or not. Parās'ara (123), Nārada, (124) and Laghu-S'ātātapa (125) permit remarriages in the case of such widows, bu Angiras, (126) and Laghu-As'valāyana (127) prohibit the marriage with a bride, even when she was merely accepted by, but not married to, another previously. It is, therefore, difficult to say whether virgin widows in the higher classes were remarried or not in our period. The present writer has shown elsewhere (128) that the Gupta Emperor Chandragupta II had married his brother's widow Dhruvadevī, but that is a much earlier case. Inscriptions, accounts of foreign travellers and the literature of the period nowhere refer to widow re-marriages.¹²⁹ Later Nibandha writers are unanimous in declaring that such marriages are illegal in the present age. We may, therefore, conclude that widow remarriages were getting unpopular in our period. It must of course be remembered that the question of widow marriages never troubled the lower classes, among whom they were and are fairly common.