Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c7.42

Language: English

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The mother of Old India, like her daughter to-day, shows herself fully worthy of this childish love. The Epic, too, offers both in the inwoven tales and in the main narrative many heart-gladdening pictures of the tender love of the mother, self-forgetting and only thinking of the child’s welfare. Here only one or two features in the life of the leading heroines may be given. Kuntī, whose youthful adventure with the sun god was to bring her so much sorrow throughout her life, had also to go through much anxiety, care, and suffering for the sake of her other sons.² In their childhood days they, indeed, already gave her many an anxious moment. Bhīma was a very high-spirited lad, and as he had the strength of a giant, not only did he surpass his cousins and play-fellows in all trials of strength and skill, but he picked them out to be the victims, too, of the wildest pranks. “By the hair did the strong one catch hold of them, pulled them headlong down, and dragged them screaming along the ground, barking their knees, heads, and shoulders. When playing in the water he clasped ten boys (at once), took a long dive with them under the water, and only let them go when they were half-dead. When they climbed trees to look for fruit, Bhīma would make the trees quiver by kicking them. Then the trees would shake to and fro under the wild force of his blows, and the frightened boys would soon fall down, together with the fruit” (i, 128.19 ff.).

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In this wise he found he had no friends at all, and Duryodhana especially pursued him with a bitter hatred. This cousin now one day had splendid “houses of cloths and rugs” made by the Ganges, and furnished with choicest food and heady drinks. There the princes then made merry, and threw cakes into one another’s mouths. Duryodhana kept this game up with Bhīma a long time with great spirit, for Bhīma, the “wolf’s belly” (Vṛikodara), was a mighty eater. But he put poison withal into the cakes, and while Bhīma lay fast asleep, wearied with many athletic exercises, and overcome with drunkenness, Duryodhana had him bound and thrown into the Ganges without his brothers knowing anything about it. When they wanted to go home, they could not find him, and the good mother was now in mortal anguish, when they came back without him; for she knew his cousin’s hatred and cruelty (i, 118 f.).—But they all grew up to be strong and skilful youths, and at the festal exhibition, where the accomplished sons of Pāṇḍu and of Dhṛitarāshṭra gave a show of their skill, Kuntī sat glad and proud among the women onlookers. When now Arjuna so greatly distinguished himself and was greeted with a storm of shouts by the onlookers, then did Kuntī’s bosom grow wet with the flood of her tears of joy (i, 135.13).¹ But short was the time her delight lasted, as we have seen : Karṇa came onto the stage, the son of her maidenhood, and the embittered opponent of Arjuna, and challenged him to fight.

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Swooning, the mother of them both sank to the ground (i, 136.27 ff.). Together with her sons she was to be burned in the house of resin but escaped with them, and now shared their wanderings filled with danger and hardship 1; her splendid children, from whom she had hoped so much, were fugitives and beggars, and with them she lived on alms. Arjuna’s skill with the bow now won the princess Draupadī, and in spite of the strong opposition of the disillusioned rivals they brought home this fair prize of victory. The mother knew nothing of all this, and hovered in the darkness of anguish lest the hostile men or evil spirits had slain the sons who did not come back in the evening at the proper time (i, 190.43 ff.). The evil game of dice followed, and the thirteen years’ banishment of her children. Filled with the sorrow of despair, she bade them farewell, and showed herself especially anxious on behalf of Sahadeva, the son of her fellow-wife Mādrī—a complement to the love which the sons in the Epic are wont to give the fellow-wives of their mother.² But not one word of reproach against Yudh., who has brought about all the wretchedness, escapes from her lips here ; it is only her own, her deserved fate that she makes responsible — a true Indian mother (ii, 79.10 ff.).

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In the end the great fight blazed up which brought her the long wished for triumph of her reviled sons, but along with it sorrow abounding beyond words, and so finally, as an old woman with her blind brother-in-law and his wife, she went off into the penitential forest—a much-tried, much-loving mother, but no weak or faint-hearted one, as we shall yet see. Characteristic, too, is Draupadī’s behaviour (ii, 71.26 ff.). She has been gambled away by Yudhiṣṭhira, and has fallen into slavery and shameful ill-treatment, and Dhṛtarāṣṭra now offers her a favour. She says : “Yudhishṭhira must be free, that my son may not be called a slave’s son.”¹ The unmotherly disposition shown by Gāndhārī towards her son, which comes out especially in her sermon to Dhṛitarāshṭra, ii, 75, stands alone, and has been put in her mouth by a calculated partisan distortion.