Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c5.350

v1.c5.350

² Such mythical tales of earlier times often seem to me to be altogether too bold to be used as wholly credible grounds of proof. Like other peoples, the Indians too—and especially often and gloomily—speak of an earlier "time without a ruler and filled with terror": there was at that time utter lawlessness, they ate one another, all crimes were daily events, until men met together, and chose themselves a king (from the Epic cp. for instance MBh., xii, 67; Rām., vii, 76.33 ff. under the text as çlokāḥ prakṣiptāḥ). To say nothing of the fact that this picture does not correspond with more primitive conditions, the Indians who told such tales had at any rate no longer any memory of such misty far-off days. A pet theory set the powers of imagination at work. The Aino, who are well known to be monogamic, relate in their tales that men were allowed in olden days to have more wives than one (Chamberlain, Aino Folk Tales, p. 48). Here it is a quite natural sophistication of the understanding that is speaking, or the knowledge that such a thing is customary among other peoples. Polyandry is nowhere found in the Veda, but probably, as already pointed out, it was to be found among the primitive population in and about India. The conditions among them have, anyhow, been the leading cause of such suggestions. But then, mainly under their influence, polyandry