Vedic Index of Names and Subjects v1.c3.s21.173

v1.c3.s21.173

Child Marriage.—Marriage in the early Vedic texts appears essentially as a union of two persons of full development. This is shown by the numerous references¹ to unmarried girls who grow old in the house of their fathers (amā-jur), and who adorn themselves in desire of marriage, as well as to the paraphernalia of spells and potions used in the Atharvavedic tradition² to compel the love of man or woman respectively, while even the Rigveda³ itself seems to present us with a spell by which a lover seeks to send all the household to sleep when he visits his beloved. Child wives first occur regularly in the Sūtra period, though it is still uncertain to what extent the rule of marriage before puberty there obtained.⁴ The marriage ritual also quite clearly presumes that the marriage is a real and not a nominal one: an essential feature is the taking of the bride to her husband’s home, and the ensuing cohabitation.⁵