Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c12.1

v2.c12.1

IF the man in the Old Indian Epic in his life of love, in spite of many beautiful exceptions, and in spite of the noble, often-stressed view that the man must be as chaste as the woman, nay, that his duty is even to surpass her, the weaker vessel, in this virtue also—if in spite of this he actually felt himself evidently very free, yet for the woman on the other hand there was a far stricter moral law : it was only as a wife that she had any real right to the joys of love ; it is only for the wife that life has worth, and it is only the wife that has any worth for life, that has a right to life and its gifts. For the maid also is, above all, a wife, even if it is firstly the future wife ; she is but a pledge entrusted by the Maker, which the father must carefully keep for the husband to be (i, 157.35). On woman as wife, therefore, falls the fullest and most wonderful glory of the noblest Indian poetry, especially of the Epic. Figures such as Damayantī and Sāvitrī will “have undying life”, for they also “were made by the heart”, not by the mere selfishness of the man, setting a pattern before the woman only for his own advantage and good, as Finck, for instance, believes. The Epic is filled with the praise and the examples of womanhood faithful in wedlock ; and from the two mighty poems there could be gathered a collection of such pictures, great and small, of Old Indian women, and one by no means lacking in variety.