Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c7.48

v1.c7.48

WHILE woman in the Indian view is above all destined for motherhood, yet this cannot be brought about without man, and woman in her sexual relations, therefore, makes up an important chapter. Furthermore, there is the fact that love and the life of love presents in itself a subject which is ever new, ever inexhaustible, ever filled with enchantment; and poetry, moreover, has in more senses than one its vital nerve therein. The Epic, too, yields many contributions to this theme: tales, sayings, details. But in agreement with the stricter, relatively pure and moral outlook governing the Epic poetry, we are not to seek here any variegated collection of love and even lecherous adventures, allusions, and so forth. Dramas and short plays of adultery, or merry cuckold tales are not found in the fare here set before us; and the loose relations, too, between maidens and men, which are in many other lands so much a matter of course, and not a rare thing in the later Indian literature, are quite foreign to the Epic, for all that even Vyāsa, the so-called author of the Mahābh., and playing no unimportant a part in it, and the hero Karṇa, unsurpassed in Indian literature, are sons of unmarried women. We saw, indeed, how they owed their life only to the whim of their fathers, and not to the loving choice of their mothers. True indeed that also the Epic has in it very many tales and references that in the Western world would be branded as improper. But in this a great injustice is done them. Such things are almost always brought forward in all scientific seriousness, and quite simply as a matter of fact, as though we were in an anatomical lecture-room. The Indian, the old Italian novelist, a French poet of Troubadour times, and, for instance, a Brantôme can apparently tell us something more or less of the same kind, but *si duo faciunt, idem non est idem*. Brantôme grunts in his slush like five hundred erotomaniac swine; the fabliau poet treats us, indeed, to the nastiest filth, sometimes with finesse, but often to our taste unspeakably gross; from the Italian's face there not seldom looks out what is rather a very naughty, but almost innocent child of nature—one might almost say urchin—and this along with even a fully ripened mind and style. How the Old Indian, however, describes such things, at least usually, is seen, we hope, clearly enough in this book. Love tales of the usual, and above all European kind are, therefore, not to be found in the Epic. Love and wedlock here cannot be separated.¹ The Trojan War came about through a flighty wife choosing to let herself be seduced—the struggle between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas, the subject of the Mahābh. proper, breaks forth, as we are assured several times in the poem, because the slight cannot be forgotten which has been cast on a noble lady, though this can only be looked on as "the straw that breaks the camel's back", and in the Rāmāyaṇa all that is really dealt with is the chastising of the insolent robber of the chaste Sītā, and the setting free of this great lady. The world's literature has no more lovely songs of the faithful wife's love for her husband than the poem of Damayantī and that of Sāvitrī. Both are found in the Mahābh., and they are not the only ones to treat of this subject. The heroine, moreover, of the Rāmāyaṇa has for thousands of years in India been shining forth as a picture of most spotless womanhood.