Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c6.96

v1.c6.96

² I have referred in my Daçakum., p. 54, to a very drastic case from the Jātaka. According to Manu, ix, 59 the "commissioning" can or must take place wherever there is no offspring, that is, probably, even if the husband is still alive. But only the kinsman is there named as one qualified. The rest of the law and Purāṇa literature also contains highly instructive statements on begetting by proxy in the husband's life-time. According to Āpast., ii, 10, 27.2 ff., the custom of giving up the wife to a man of the clan (gentilis) to get a son, not to speak of another man, is forbidden in this age of Kali; a union with the clan-fellow is now looked on as adultery, both husband and wife alike then go to hell; there is a better reward given in the world beyond for keeping the law than for offspring so begotten. This passage is enough to show that in such cases of need, at least at first and in many places, the help of a clansman or member of the family was asked, as is indeed quite natural. "For they say that the bride is given to the family," that is, the whole family has a right to hope that from her an upholder of the line will come; and if the husband is unsuccessful then he calls for the help of those so nearly concerned. But why should the express charge be needful at all, if the wife anyhow were at the disposal of all the members of the family? There is therefore here no trace of such a handing over of the bride to the whole family or, indeed, to the gens; just as there is nothing of the kind to be deduced for India from Bṛhaspati's statement that in "other lands" there is found the highly reprehensible custom of marrying the girl to the whole family. Indeed, Brishaspati himself directly afterwards names the Persians as evil sinners, who unite even with their mother (xxviii, 20-21). Gautama, xviii, 11 ff., gives rules as to whom the child belongs to, if the husband himself has given his wife over to another man to raise up children. So Baudhāyana, ii, 2, 3.17 ff. speaks of the son of a man who cannot beget or of an incurably sick man, that had been ordered from another. Yājñavalkya, ii, 127 says: "If a sonless man through niyoga (commissioning) begets a son on another's field, this son is the heir and giver of the forefathers' cake to both men." Parāçara, xii, 58 ff. lays it down that: "If by leave of the owner of the field (the husband) seed is sown in his field, then the offspring is looked on as the property of both, the seed-giver and the owner of the field. . . . But the offspring does not belong to the man that unites in another man's house with a woman; this is looked on by the learned as adultery