Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c5.387

v1.c5.387

In spite of the ill-report, probably not altogether unfounded, as to the loose morals of certain districts, and in spite of occasional passages where utter freedom in things of sex is described as the primitive and as the ideal,¹ there is likewise to be seen in the Epic that earnest and strait view of wedlock which is so often manifested by the Indian; and in spite of the somewhat curious Indian garb we get a quite modern feeling of pleasure when Yudhishṭhira in xiii, 19 ff. is wrestling with dark doubts: what is marriage, then, really? Is it a holy and divine thing,