Vedic Index of Names and Subjects v1.c3.s21.335

v1.c3.s21.335

wasteful action; even the chief wife would often have had to be spared on one ground or another. The Rigveda already reveals a state of society in which the actual burning of the wife was avoided by a semblance of it in the funeral ritual of (cf. Macdonell, Sanskrit Literature, 126). The reward of a good wife was to go to the world of her husband (pati-loka) after death (cf. Av. xiv. 1, 64; xviii. 3, 1; Rv. x. 85, 43). A Vedic citation in the scholiast on Pāṇini, iii. 2, 8, Vārttika, 2, says that a Brahmin woman who drinks Surā, an intoxicating liquor, does not go to the world of her husband after death.