Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c18.5.2

v2.c18.5.2

Juliet with her Romeo on the balcony is indeed to be found, but such things are by no means the custom of the land—not Leander, but Hero swims to the tryst in the Indian version of the well-known tale.¹ Even in the newer Russian literature—the latest of all I know too little about—the same Eastern strength and firmness of will in the woman is to be seen alongside the wavering, useless weakness of the man. So it is above all in Turgeniev, and in Pushkin and others. Now as the Mahābh. has much more unspoiled naturalness and undistorted reality, as it is far truer to life than the Rāmāyaṇa, which is much more strongly under priestly influences in its very foundations, so too the woman, as she is represented here in the narrative, is probably drawn far truer to the actual conditions of earlier times than in the companion Epic.² Then the pictures drawn of women in the minded, it is true, set before our eyes in his *Rajasthan* the tende and manly respect which the Rājputs show towards woman (i, 74, 295), and the truly noble romantic feelings they are capable of. Here belongs the custom of the “Gift of the Bracelet”: a lady in distress sends her bracelet to a knight often quite unknown to her; he becomes thereby her “bracelet brother”, who hastens into the fray for her sake, looks after her interests, and never sees her, though he is in a near relation to her (*Rajasthan*, i, 332, 614).