Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c7.42.1

v1.c7.42.1

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.).