Hindu Law and Custom (Recht und Sitte) c7.617

c7.617

None of these passages however says anything of a second marriage. Thus in the law of debt too we find that a wife or a widow who has lived with another man binds him under certain circumstances to pay the debts of her former husband (Nār. 1, 20—24; Y. 2, 51; Vi. 6, 30; Bṛh. 11, 52) but nothing has been said about their relation being legalised by a fresh marriage. Therefore statements like these hardly affect the general validity of the principle that the Mantras of the marriage are for virgins alone (M. 8, 226). It is also very well known that the daughter is given away in marriage only once¹, and M. 5, 162 expressly remarks that a second husband is never prescribed for a virtuous woman. In the law of inheritance the paunarbhava, the son of a punarbhū is indeed generally included as one of the twelve sons but he occupies no high place among them and according to M. 9, 160, Baudh. 2, 3, 32, Gaut. 28, 33 and Devala etc. the paunarbhava is one of the lower six subsidiary sons and may be regarded only as a relation but not as the heir of his father. However, here too, as in the questions of child marriage, niyoga and widow burning (§ 20), the stricter views have arisen only gradually. Thus Kaśyapa was the first to extend the category of punarbhūs also over such daughters whom their father had promised or intended to give in marriage to some other person or whose mother is a punarbhū. The secondary sons (gauṇaputra) are for the first time condemned by Bṛh. 25, 41 who were however already passed over in silence by Āp. The general prohibition of marriage with a woman who is already married (ūḍhāyāḥ punarudvāhaḥ) is found for the first time in the well-known lists of practices forbidden in the present age of sins (*kalivarjyāni*) in the Ādipurāna and other later works ¹.