History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v2.c26.5

v2.c26.5

Before dwelling upon the various aspects of marriage, the question, whether our authorities point to a state of society when there was no institution of marriage, but there was only promiscuity, requires to be considered. The Vedic works contain no indications about a society in which the relations of the sexes were promiscuous and unregulated. In the Mahābhārata,¹⁰¹⁴ however, Pāṇḍu is made to state to his queen Kuntī that women in former ages were under no control, indulged themselves as they liked and that they left off one man and went after another, that this state of things continued to his (Pāṇḍu's) day in the country of Uttara Kuru, that it was Śvetaketu, son of Uddālaka, who for the first time stopped all this license and laid down the rule that if a woman proved false to her husband or if a husband was false to a chaste wife, very grave sin would be incurred. In the Sabhāparva (31. 37-38) it is said that through the favour of Agni women in Māhiṣmatī did what they liked and could not be restrained. These passages cannot be relied upon for proving promiscuity of intercourse. In the first place, the country of Uttara Kuru is more or less mythical. This passage rather gives expression to what the poet imagined about remotest ages and not what he knew was the real state of society thousands of years before him. The theory of an original state of promiscuity once advanced by several sociologists has now ceased to be respectable (vide Mrs. M. Cole in 'Marriage, past and present' p. 10.