Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c5.388

v1.c5.388

¹ It is this very fact, that promiscuity is set before us so persistently as the primitive state, which must be puzzling to the reader. Here we have the sensual and the thinking Hindu: how then could it be but that his glowing passionate love, his boundless, eager fantasy, and his piercing understanding should have led to such thoughts? Thus, too, the sexual freedom among the more primitive peoples, dwelling around the Indian Aryans and among them, may well have led to the conception that these were indeed the more primitive conditions; and what is old, is also, to the Hindu, that which is perfection. It should also be borne in mind that among the Uttarakurus, dwelling far to the north, and the people of King "Blue-Black", dwelling in the farthest south, a love paradise of this kind is to be found. And it is the women that have pleasure and profit from these loose sexual ways, they who compared with men have so little freedom, and according to the Indian view are yet by nature so infinitely more sensual. Here the philosopher has the word. Here and there, anyhow, there may have been in "Epic times", too, great immorality and hetæristic abominations, it may be, not without the influence of the non-Aryan tribes. The people and culture of India is, indeed, from earliest times, a mixture, ever growing in complexity, of what is Aryan and what is due to the aboriginal population. But this is the exact opposite of "survivals" and memory, of the far past of the Aryans. It is truly Indian to find Bṛihaspati, ii, 28 ff. saying that, in the East, the women practised promiscuity, and that there this was, as the custom of the land, right.