What does each tell us about Indian attitudes and expectations towards marriage? How similar or different are the ideas about love and marriage in these two texts from the same culture? A. Daughter, whispered Aswapati, now, methinks, the time is come, Thou shouldst choose a princely suitor, grace a royal husband’s home, Choose thyself a noble husband worthy of thy noble hand . . . For our sacred sastras sanction, holy Brahmans oft relate, That the duty-loving father sees his girl in wedded state, That the duty-loving husband watches o’er his consort’s ways, That the duty-loving offspring tends his mother’s widowed days, Therefore choose a loving husband, daughter of my house and love, So thy father earn no censure or from men or gods above. B. I may not choose but follow where thou takest my husband’s life, For Eternal Law divides not loving man and faithful wife, For a woman’s true affection, for a woman’s sacred woe, Grant me in thy godlike mercy farther still with him I go! Fourfold are our human duties: first to study holy lore, Then to live as good householders, feed the hungry at our door, Then to pass our days in penance, last to fix our thoughts above, But the final goal of virtue, it is Truth and deathless Love! C. I would bless thee, fair Savitri, but the dead come not to life, Ask for other boon and blessing, faithful, true and virtuous wife!” “Since you so permit me, YAMA,” so the good Savitri said, “For my husband’s banished father let my dearest suit be made, Sightless in the darksome forest dwells the monarch faint and weak Grant him sight and grant him vigour, YAMA, in thy mercy speak!. D. To wed a maid is therefore good before developed womanhood; nor need the loving parents wait beyond the early age of eight. . . For if she bides a maiden still, she gives herself to whom she will; then marry her in tender age: so warns the heaven-begotten sage. If she, unwed, unpurified, too long within the home abide, she may no longer married be: a miserable spinster, she. E. My own kind, my own kind. . . Father dear, turn me into a mouse, and give me to him. Then I can keep house as my kind of people ought to do.