Vedic Index of Names and Subjects v1.c3.s21.235

v1.c3.s21.235

Marital Relations.—Despite polygamy, however, there is ample evidence that the marriage tie was not, as Weber⁵⁶ has suggested, lightly regarded as far as the fidelity of the wife was concerned. There is, however, little trace of the husband’s being expected to be faithful as a matter of morality. Several passages,⁵⁷ indeed, forbid, with reference to ritual abstinence, intercourse with the *strī* of another. This may imply that adultery on the husband's part was otherwise regarded as venial. But as the word *strī* includes all the ‘womenfolk,’ daughters and slaves, as well as wife, the conclusion can hardly be drawn that intercourse with another man’s ‘wife’ was normally regarded with indifference.⁵⁸ The curious ritual of the Varuṇapraghāsās,⁵⁹ in which the wife of the sacrificer is questioned as to her lovers, is shown by Delbrück⁶⁰ to be a part of a rite meant to expiate unchastity on the part of a wife, not as a normal question for a sacrificer to put to his own wife. Again, Yājñavalkya’s doctrine in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa,⁶¹ which seems to assert that no one cares if a wife is unchaste (*paraḥ-pumsā*) or not, really means that no one cares if the wife is away from the men who are sacrificing, as the wives of the gods are apart from them during the particular rite in question. Monogamy is also evidently approved,⁶² so that some higher idea of morality was in course of formation. On the other hand, no Vedic text gives us the rule well known to other Indo-Germanic⁶³ peoples that the adulterer taken in the act can be killed with impunity, though the later legal literature has traces of this rule.⁶⁴ There is also abundant evidence that the standard of ordinary sexual morality was not high.