Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c20.9

v2.c20.9

It is, first of all, highly meritorious to give of one’s free will one’s own daughter, above all if it is a question of honouring or gladdening a Brahman, a penitent, or a holy man. It has been already seen in the discussion of the different kinds of marriage that under the “Brahmanic” form of marriage the father gives the daughter for nothing; and this method has been put at the head and distinguished with its name by the priesthood, of course not on moral, but on very selfish grounds. The quite gratuitous marriage of a princess with a Brahman, a holy man, or a penitent is found, too, in many of the tales in the Epic; and in the Brahmanic view a very great honour is done to a ruler when the pious man accepts such a gift. That the proud nobility, however, in reality often even looked down with contempt on the begging pack of Brahmans, is put on record by the Mahābh. in various places, as already indicated; and we are told of King Duryodhana: “The prince would not give his daughter to the Brahman, for he said: ‘He is poor, and is not equal to me in caste’” (asavarṇa, xiii, 2.22). It is no wonder that a whole set of pious kings of the fabled earliest times have their praises trumpeted as having thought otherwise and given their daughters to the Brahmans, and as a reward gone into the worlds of the blest together with all their kinsfolk. So xii, 234; xiii, 137.¹ Such a shining contrast to rulers of Duryodhana’s kind is the pious King Yayāti, who at once assigns his daughter Mādhavī to the Brahman Gālava, so that the Brahman, like a kind of better master of hetæræ, can even hand her over to one ruler after another, and so through her acquire his wonderful steeds (v, 106.19 ff.).