Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c8.21

v1.c8.21

If women, then, have such a healthy and natural joy in the surata, the men indeed are in no wise behind. The frequently seen ideal of the Indian, and above all of the warrior, of the blissful life is intercourse with thousands of lovely women in the bloom of youth, smiling with long lotus-eyes at the man, winding their rounded arms about his neck, and pressing their swelling firm breasts against him—women who press great over, and how the two corpses are then burned with all proper ceremonies, this short enigmatic sentence strikes oddly. We only expect to find that Mādrī has killed herself, at least if what follows is looked on as belonging to the original, or at least to the same account. K. for this part has a true flood of words evidently from a very late period (i, 134 ff.). Kuntī here at the sight of the dead man falls to the ground like a felled tree, and gives herself up to a long conventionally-phrased wailing. The penitents who come running up also raise cries of woe, and the five brothers come up in single file, and in the order of their ages say their little verses of lamentation. Then there follows a regular suttee scene: first the penitents do all to dissuade the two wives from offering themselves up; they were to live in chastity and good works, and so be serviceable to their dead husband. Kuntī humbly consents to this, but Mādrī repeats her earlier declarations, solemnly makes her farewell, addresses a wise exhortation to the children, and is consecrated with pious prayers by Kuntī. The Purohita Kāçyapa has bits of gold, sacrificial butter, sèsame, sour milk, rice grains, water-jugs, and an axe brought by the penitents, and has the wood-pile set alight by Yudhishṭhira with fire from a horse-sacrifice (!), whereupon she dedicated to death leaps into the flames (i, 135). In what follows there is then a description given, somewhat as in the Bomb. text, of the body-burning, which in both places must now be thought of as carried out only on what is left of the bones, though this does not agree very well with the actual account. The whole is probably patched together from different versions. It looks as though the idea of the burning which had taken place before this in the penitential forest were borrowed from the example of the Brahman’s wife. In her case all happens naturally; for Mādrī was the wood-pile inserted for better or worse. The fact of the penitents only reaching Hāstinapura on the 17th day after Pāṇḍu’s death does not of course give any support to the text as handed down. Needless to say, however, there may have been a version of the tale in which the final burial was carried out at once in the forest, and then Mādrī’s fiery death quite fits in. But there was an unwillingness, I think, to lose the solemn and splendid public ceremony. Cp. i, 150.10 ff.