Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c6.120

v1.c6.120

Now there were, indeed, in the India of the Epic, too, people who did not wish for any children, and in the Mahābh. (xii, 331.16, cp. 20) astonishment finds expression at the strange way of the world, that they who wished not for children should get them, while to others who yearned for them with all their heart they were denied.¹ But married folk undoubtedly the forefathers for both men, his begetter and the husband of his mother, and is heir to them both. Cp. also Caland, *Ahnenkult*, 28, 193 (how the son born out of wedlock takes the ancestral gift away from his real father and bestows it on his father by law). See especially also J. J. Meyer, Kauṭilya, pp. 765-767; *Altind. Rechtsschr.*, 224 f.; 315; 343.