Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c17.3

v2.c17.3

gruesome the ways of the beasts devouring the dead bodies; heart-rending the grief and the tender love that breaks forth from wife and mother. Vast pictures of terror in which whole hosts appear, and pictures where individual grief vents itself to the full are set before us. A whole book of the Mahābhārata, the Strīparvan, “the section of the women,” is mainly given up to this theme. “Women can only seldom act with you, but to suffer with you they are always there.” And elsewhere, too, in the course of the narrative the poem dilates on such episodes. We may mention above all the dreadful torment of Gāndhārī, to whom Vyāsa grants supernatural powers of sight, and who now looks out over the whole battlefield, and describes it (xi, 16 ff.); then Subhadrā’s and Uttarā’s lament for Abhimanyu, cut off in tender years (vii, 78; xi, 20; xiv, 61.24 ff.); lastly the descriptions in iii, 172.21–25; 173.61–64 (these two passages are particularly impressive); xi, 10.7 ff.; 16.48, 55; 17.30; 29.68 f.; xv, 15.35 ff.; xvi, 7.15 ff. To dwell on details would take us too far. And much that is conventional often slips in, too. On the other hand, this utterance is worthy of remark: “The sorrow to which men give themselves up all too much in their heart, arouses burning grief in the forbears that have gone before” (xiv, 2.2).¹