What’s love got to do with it? Thoughts on Gāndharva marriage

Abstract

The Gāndharva type of marriage codified in the Dharma literature is commonly characterised by modern scholars as a kind of ‘love marriage’, and indeed there is support for this view already in the late Vedic Sūtras. However, its ambiguous status in these and in later texts has rarely been scrutinised, and it has seldom been asked why it is that this type of marriage is routinely listed next to the Rākṣasa type of marriage by forced abduction or indeed what it is that makes these two forms of marriage so compatible that they can be conducted conjointly. In this paper I will argue that older Vedic literature can help us to answer these questions, can explain several pecularities in the depictions of Gāndharva marriage in both juristic and narrative literature, and can help us towards a better understanding of the origins of the name gāndharva than have been provided by post hoc attempts to explain this.