Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c5.s3.41

c5.s3.41

Some other points in MM. Sastri's work call for comment. He identifies Śvetaketu,¹ the mythical reformer of primitive society, who according to an account in the Mahābhārata set up the institution of marriage, with Śvetaketu Āruṇeya, the highly cultured philosopher of the Upaniṣads. The Ṛgveda shows a well-organised family life with the institution of marriage fully developed amongst the Indo-Aryans, and therefore, the age when that institution grew and developed must have preceded the Ṛgvedic era by a very long period and the age of Śvetaketu Āruṇeya—an age of intense metaphysical speculation when the Upaniṣadic literature grew, could certainly not be identical with it. Then there is not the least justification for MM. Sastri's statement that "Auddālaki wrote more on union or Samprayoga than on other subjects. He divided that subject into ten major heads. So his work was called Daśatayī"² These are all statements unauthorised by Vātsyāyana who on the other hand asserts that Śvetaketu's huge work in five hundred chapters dealt with the whole of the Kāmaśāstra and that it was Bābhravya who divided and arranged the contents of Śvetaketu's work into seven adhikaraṇas or sections; in fact, of the three passages in the Kāmasūtra where Vātsyāyana quotes Auddālaki, one belongs to the Samprayoga section, another to the Pāradārika, and the third to the Vaiśika section.³ The third of these is the longest quotation from Auddālaki where a whole group of sūtras is spoken of by Vātsyāyana as the opinion of Auddālaki as distinguished from the theory of Bābhravya, so that there is no justification for the conjecture that Auddālaki's work dealt with the one topic of Samprayoga alone It was rather Bābhravya, the Pāñcāla who specially shone in his delineation of the sixty-four Samprayoga-kalās. For the other statements that Auddālaki's work was called Daśatayī or that he divided Samprayoga into ten sections, there is absolutely no foundation. Vātsyāyana says that the Rgveda was called Daśatayī and not Auddālaki's work and in the whole chapter where this topic is dealt with there is no reference to Auddālaki at all.