Voluntary Unions Not Respectable

________________________________________________
_ In _Sakuntala_, Kalidasa resorts to the third of the expedients I have mentioned. The king weds the girl whom he finds in the grove of the saints in accordance with a form which was not regarded as respectable--marriage based on mutual inclination, without the knowledge of the parents. The laws of Mann (III., 20-134) recognized eight kinds of marriage:

(1) gift of a daughter to a man learned in the Vedas,
(2) gift of a daughter to a priest; (3) gift of a
daughter in return for presents of cows, etc.; (4) gift
of a daughter, with a dress. In these four the father
gives away his daughter as he chooses. In (5) the groom
buys the girl with presents to her kinsmen or herself;
(6) is voluntary union; (7) forcible abduction (in
war); (8) rape of a girl asleep, or drunk, or imbecile.

In other words, of the eight kinds of marriage recognized by Hindoo law and custom only one is based on free choice, and of that Mann says: "The voluntary connection of a maiden and a man is to be known as a Gandharva union, which arises from lust." It is classed among the blamable marriages. Even this appears not to have been a legal form before Mann. It is blamable because contracted without the consent or knowledge of the parents, and because, unless the sacred fire has been obtained from a Brahman to sanctify it, such a marriage is merely a temporary union. Gandharvas, after whom it is named, are singers and other musicians in Indra's heaven, who, like the apsaras, enter into unions that are not intended to be enduring, but are dissoluble at will. Such marriages (liaisons we call them) are frequently mentioned in Hindoo literature (_e.g., Hitopadesa_, p. 85). Malati chides her friend for advising her to make a secret marriage, and later on exclaims: "I am lost! What a girl must not do, my friend counsels me." The orthodox view is unfolded by the Buddhist nun Kamandaki: "We hear of Duschyanta loving Sakuntala, of Pururavas loving Urvasi ... but these cases look like arbitrary action and cannot be commended as models." In _Sakuntala_, too, the king feels it incumbent on him to apologize to the girl he covets, when she bids him not to transgress the laws of propriety, by exclaiming that many other girls have thus been taken by kings without incurring parental disapproval. The directions for this form of courtship given in the _Kama Soutra_ indicate that Sakuntala had every reason to appeal to the rules of propriety, social and moral. Kalidasa spares us the details.

The king's desertion of Sakuntala after he had obtained his self-indulgent object was quite in accordance with the spirit of a Gandharva marriage. Kalidasa, for dramatic purposes, makes it a result of a saint's curse, which enables him to continue his story interestingly. A poet has a right to such license, even though it takes him out of the realm of realism. Hindoo poets, like others, know how to rise above sordid reality into a more ideal sphere, and for this reason, even if we had found in the dramas of India a portrayal of true love, it would not prove that it existed outside of a poet's glowing and prophetic fancy. There is a Hindoo saying, "Do not strike a woman, even with a flower;" but we have seen that these Hindoos often do physically abuse their wives most cruelly, besides subjecting them to indescribable mental anguish, and mental anguish is much more painful and more prolonged than bodily torture. Fine words do not make fine feelings. From this point of view Dalton was perhaps right when he asserted that the wild tribes of India come closer to us in their love-affairs than the more cultured Hindoos, with their "unromantic heart-schooling." We have seen that Albrecht Weber's high estimate of the Hindoo's romantic sentiment does not bear the test of a close psychological analysis.

The Hindoo may have fewer uncultivated traits of emotion than the wild tribesmen, but they are in the same field. Hindoo civilization rose to splendid heights, in some respects, and even the great moral principle of altruism was cultivated; but it was not applied to the relations between the sexes, and thus we see once more that the refinement of the affections--especially the sexual affections--comes last in the evolution of civilization. Masculine selfishness and sensuality have prevented the Hindoo from entering the Elysian fields of romantic love. He has always allowed, and still allows, the minds of women to lie fallow, being contented with their bodily charms, and unaware that the most delightful of all sexual differences are those of mind and character. To quote once more the Abbe Dubois (I., 271), the most minute and philosophic observer of Indian manners and morals:

"The Hindoos are nurtured in the belief that
there can be nothing disinterested or innocent
in the intercourse between a man and a woman;
and however Platonic the attachment might be
between two persons of different sex, it would
be infallibly set down to sensual love."

[THE END]
[Henry Finck's Book: India--Wild Tribes & Temple Girls] _


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