| |
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XX Adoption.— Rules regarding the Partition of Property. When a Brahmin finds that he has no male issue, whether by reason of the barrenness of his wife or through the untimely death of all the sons he has had by her, he is permitted, nay .bound, by the rules of his caste to procure a son by means of adoption, in order that he may, at least fictitiously, fulfil the great debt to his ancestors, namely, the propagation of a direct line of posterity. Although marriage constitutes the perfect state of man, this perfection is nevertheless deficient when a man does not leave a son behind him to perform his obsequies; and this defect alone, according to Hindu writers, is quite sufficient to deprive him of happiness in the next world. This notion prevails so strongly among the Hindus that I have known barren women not only consenting to their husbands taking other wives, but even earnestly advising them to do so, and helping them in their quest. There is not one of them, however, who is not fully alive to the annoyances and discomforts to which she is exposing herself by thus introducing as her rival another woman, who must naturally, by her youth- fulness and fecundity, soon become an object more beloved than herself by their common husband. It has already been said that polygamy is tolerated among the ruling classes only; and when we find other women besides the lawful wife living in the families of private individuals of high caste, especially among the Brahmins, either they are living there, as already stated, with the consent of the lawful wife, or else they are merely hired concubines. However, a husband who has had no male issue by his wife,being fully alive to the unpleasant consequences arising from a second marriage, almost invariably prefers to have recourse... ISBN - 9788171673452
|
| |
Pages : 842
|