Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c20.24

v2.c20.24

The splendid, bold flight of the unbending, pitilessly logical zeal of the dreamer for some one virtue or for virtue in general, the intoxicated ethical enthusiasm that so often carries the Hindu irresistibly away, is also brought out strongly by this legend. And needful, dreadfully needful, it is evident, was an incitement like this to the not at all so very hospitable Old Indian people.¹ This tendentious sermon, of course, does not refer to real conditions; it did not occur to the Old Indian actually to practise this kind of “piety”. And as the Brahman who here appears as guest is any guest in the fullest meaning,² what we have, at any rate in the first place, is a show feat of priestly pride. It was quite in the same way that the often very bold, and bodily and morally louse-ridden travelling community of little poets and singers, the band of the unhoused, used to sing the praises in the Middle Ages of that incomparable “warm charity”, so pleasing to God, that they so ardently yearned for from kind-hearted ladies (cp. Hagen’s *Gesamt-abenteuer*, ii, 248 ff.; Meyer, *Isoldes Gottesurteil*, 42-45, and the notes there; *Altind. Rechtsschr.*, 340; 398 f.). To be taken somewhat more in earnest is what Sanatsujāta says about the six marks of true friendship (v, 45.12 ff.). Among these is the giving to a friend of son and wife.³ A pattern friend of this door of his hut, and the paramour handing him out a bit of tobacco, the injured man contentedly smokes it till the other chooses to retire” (Hartland, ii, 212 after Sir James Edward Alexander, *An Expedition of Discovery into the Interior of Africa*, 1838, vol. i, 196). He thinks, indeed, as does that Bushman: “What are women otherwise for?” (Alexander, ii, 21).