The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s6.6

c2.s6.6

We may still consider woman as far as possible apart from her social conditions if we examine the descriptions given by the poet, which, though applied to one specimen, are serviceable as portraying the mental and bodily ideal women—descriptions which do not vary much in law and in Epic. It is thus that the beautiful Krishnā† is described by her husband, after he has gambled her away as a stake in the madness of his dice-playing: ‘Not too short is she, and not too tall; black-eyed is she, and fragrant; her eyes are like the lotus, and her breath like autumn’s wind; welcome as autumn after the summer rain, and loved as autumn is beloved; slender is her waist, broad are her hips; blue-black her hair, and well-arranged’ (i. 67. 158, Draupadī). She is described again, and more fully, in another passage; and adding this to a description of another woman in a later book, we get for the bodily ideal a result that tallies well with the technical enumeration of beauties furnished by still a fourth passage, and is corroborated by the legal works that warn against certain faults in women’s personal appearance.* Blue-black hair seems to have been the favorite color. Red hair must have been well known, since the sages regard it as objectionable to marry a girl ‘with auburn hair,’ which is a characteristic, it is said, of Western girls. Girls so afflicted dyed their hair in later times. The Epic women are dark, and their hair is blue-black, parted in the middle, and the part marked, perhaps, with a pigment.† The eyes should be large and black; the lips, red; the teeth, white; the bosom and navel, deep; the breasts and hips, high. Further particulars, not specially edifying or translatable, but not differing from the Epic ideal, are found in the Bṛhat-Saṃhitā, and in the Purāṇas.‡