Page:The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago.djvu/144

Rh white tail of the yak, and to be escorted by guards armed with scimitars, when going out of their houses. Though intercourse with other’s wives was treated as a serious crime and severely punished, it was not considered indecent for a youth to visit harlots or courtezans, to stroll with them in the parks, or to bathe and sport with them in the public bathing places.

Boys were considered marriageable at sixteen and girls at twelve years of age. The love poems of this period furnish. many instances of young girls, who had not given up their toys and dolls, being courted by lovers. It was doubtless this custom of early marriages which Megasthenes exaggerates when he relates that “the women of the Pandian realm bear children when they are six years of age.” Amongst the higher classes marriages were solemnized with Brahininical rites. A few days before the marriage, young girls decked with jewels and mounted on an elephant, went round to their friends and relations and invited them to attend the ceremony. In the front of the bride’s house, a spacious and lofty shed was erected and the ceiling was covered with blue cloth and decorated with strings of flowers. On the auspicious day fixed for the marriage, a Brahmin priest lighted the sacred fire under the shed, while drums and pipes and chanks sent forth their music; and the bride and bridegroom were led round the sacred fire three times. A number of damsels bearing lighted lamps and trays of incense, flowers and fragrant powders then strewed flowers on the wedded pair and escorted them with songs and blessings to their bridal chamber. Among the lower classes residing in towns and among the hill tribes, who had not come under Brahmin influence, the marriage ceremony was performed by the Arivar or Tamil priests.

Except during marriages and, other domestic occurrences, there was, as a rule, no family gathering at meal time and each individual took his meals at the time most convenient to