Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c5.232

v1.c5.232

¹ It is true that marriage by capture is more than once represented as wrong, and according to Vasisṭha, xvii, 73, and Baudh., iv, 1.15, a girl that has been carried off, but not wedded to the accompaniment of the holy song texts, can be given away again as a virgin. But Vasisṭha, i, 34, brings forward this very form as that of the Kṣattriyas (kṣattra), and Baudh., i, 11, 20.12 holds that it and purchase marriage correspond with the laws or customs of the warrior nobility; so also Manu, iii, 24 and 26. Mārk.-Pur. states in cxxxiii, 27 ff. that it is still better for the warrior than the Gandharva marriage, and in cxxii ff. Prince Avikṣita carries off many princesses at their Svayaṃvara, because they do not choose him out; his heroic mother praises him for it, when he has been taken prisoner in the fight thus brought about, and fires him on to go to war. And there are other such cases. It has often been stated that the very name Rākṣasa marriage points to the Aryans having found this form, as also the Āsura or purchase marriage, already among the primitive population, and called it thus after them (e.g. J. Lippert, *Kulturgesch. d. Menschheit*, 1887, Bd. ii, p. 95; *Anthropos*, iv, pp. 7 ff., especially 10; vii, 102). It would be easy to see how, corresponding to these names, those may have been invented for the other kinds of marriage. But probably the Aryan settlers did not have to be introduced by the aborigines to such ways of marriage; and I think the terminology arose rather from the “Brahmanic” kind, being interpreted as “Brahma marriage”. Both marriage by capture and marriage by purchase are, indeed, Indo-Germanic. See e.g. Feist, *Indogermanen*, 305-308.