Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c4.t2.381

c4.t2.381

The Kuṇāla Jātaka² furnishes such other examples apparently historical—of queens misbehaving themselves—Kaṇhā,³ Kākaṭī,⁴ and the fairhaired Karuṇgavi.⁵ The woman of surpassing beauty—Sussoṇḍi—the chief queen of Benares, falls in love with a Garuḍa king who comes to play at dice with the Benares king and flies away with him.⁶ Even the son of a royal priest has illicit connections with the chief-queen. Here the king himself grants permission to the priestly youth to enjoy her for seven days, but then, both of them abscond. The king after great mental sickness is brought to reconcile himself to his fate. And so he says: "If she loved me she would not forsake her kingdom and flee away; what have I to do with her when she has not loved me but fled away?"⁷ A bold utterance of a true champion of free love indeed! A more pathetic and a ghastly scene, is portrayed in the Parantapa Jātaka.⁸ The king flees away from his kingdom with his queen, his household priest and a servant, Parantapa, when attacked by a hostile king. They make a hut of leaves on a river-bank in a wood and live there. The queen, taking advantage of loneliness, sins with the servant and to escape danger she asks him to do away with the king. "If the king knows, neither you nor I would live: kill him." "In what way?" asks the guilty servant. Replies she: "He makes you carry his sword and bathing-dress when he goes to bathe: take him off his guard at the bathing-place, cut off his head and chop his body to pieces with the sword and then bury him in the ground." The ghastly deed is accomplished. Another passionate queen seizes the hands of her stepson, when he comes to take her leave to go and receive his father returning from a frontier expedition, and invites him to enjoy the bliss of love. The prince is adamant. "Mother, my mother you are, and you have a husband living; such a thing was never before heard of, that a woman, a matron, should break the moral law in the way of fleshly lust. How can I do such a deed of pollution with you?"¹ Even an *Uparāja* is seen intriguing in the harem of the king—his own brother—and fleeing away for fear of punishment.² These and such other instances seem to show that the "inner politics of the harem are often corrupt and polluted." As to their diabolical repercussions on the 'inter-state relations' we may only remind ourselves of several instances of the traditional rivalry of *Kāsī* and *Kosala*. There we saw how the guilty minister of the one went over to the side of the other and fomented bitter enmity between the two.