Volume 1

Sexual life in ancient India : a study in the comparative history of Indian culture / by Johann Jakob Meyer.

  • Johann Jakob Meyer
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Sexual life in ancient India : a study in the comparative history of Indian culture / by Johann Jakob Meyer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    written in Old India beside what was written in the Middle Ages, or beside Romance, in particular old and even modern French literature ; in spite of so many, not always edifying, though nearly always interesting refinements, there is wafted to us from the world of the Old Indian books a deeply ethical spirit, one might even say a wholesomeness, which has a very pleasing effedt in contract with the so often empty frivolity— the nauseating filthiness and vulgarity—that meets us out of those other literatures. To put it otherwise and not to wander abroad : the Old Indian loose tales, indeed, in spite of the cautionary thread running all through them, have not been trimmed and put together by literary tailors working for girls’ schools ; and yet they are like real moral ftrait- waiftcoats, when compared with a great many of the more or less highly praised produdtions of the later and latent German writers. It is now well known, and it has been stressed by many with a special knowledge of India, that these two great Epics £till exert an influence to-day on the mind and the life of the Hindu people like no other literary work.1 There is the further fadt that the literature of the “ poft-Epic ” times is often very greatly dependent on the Epic, or influenced in many places by it. Owing to these inner relations between the Epic and the Classical literature, there thus arises, furthermore, a far-reaching indiredf influence. What Indian woman (to speak only of the obvious) did not know and honour Slta and Savitrl and other heroines of the Epic poems ! The Epic, however, in many respedts only gives us very fragmentary information about woman and her life and the value set on her among the Old Indians. But in general it is only a sedtion of Old Indian life that is opened before us in the Epic poems. How much, indeed, do we learn as to the great mass of the people ! The warrior and the Brahman take all 1 So J. C. Oman, The Great Indian Epic, London, 1906, p. 1 ff. ; Nisikantha Chattopadhyaya in his Indian Essays ; Sifter Nivedita, The Web of Indian Life, London, 1906, pp. 95-115 ; Ramakrishna, Life in an Indian Village, London, 1891, p. 142 ff.; Basanta Koomar Roy, Rabindra Nath Tagore (New York, 1915), p. 28 ; W. Crooke, The North-Weftern Provinces of India (London, 1897), p. 256.
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