Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c5.282

v1.c5.282

The Gandharva marriage was thus a right of lords, a part of the morality of lords, and certainly not seldom found among the nobility. For the Brahmanic outlook it naturally seemed offensive, but the crafty priest all over the world, and above all in India, has from shrewdness often kept an eye shut, and the thirst for systematization, as also the pious respect for all tradition, brought down this part of the marriage theory, too, into late times, where in the narrative literature Gandharva weddings are extraordinarily frequent. But it is not altogether “free love affairs”, as has been thought, that are here to be generally understood by this; for however light-heartedly such a union is often entered upon there, it is mostly held to be binding. True, exceptions are to be found, just as here the old holy King Dushyanta looks on his adventure with the penitent-maiden as the forest tale of a fleeting hour, and as a result our story develops a long train of effects.