Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c7.49

v1.c7.49

¹ Love for one's wife is impossible; this is what the basic principle, as we well know, of the old French polite world tells us; and to-day love between husband and wife is still almost always scorned, particularly by works of romance, as a subject for treatment. But times out of count on the other hand we find in Old Indian books, just as in the Epic: It is on the wife that the attainment of the three great goals of life depends—religious merit, worldly gain, and kāma (enjoyment, love): and Mārkaṇḍeyapur., xxi, 74 lays down the principle: "Without a wife no love." The man of the world in India—and often enough he has his say in Hindu literature—will, it is true, add in brackets as an explanation not only: itarasya, the other man's, that is to say, the wife or the future wife, as with us, but besides this the main object of Indian eroticism—the harlot.