(In Śākala) the women, drunk and naked, laugh and dance outdoors in the city; unadorned with garlands or unguents, they drunkenly sing various obscene songs that are as musical as a donkey’s bray or a camel’s bleat. They are without restraint in intercourse as in all other matters; in drunken madness they call each other various endearing epithets. Making drunk cries to their husbands, these fallen women give themselves up to dancing without observing restrictions even on sacred days.
What man would willingly dwell, even for a moment, among these fallen, depraved Bāhlīkas?
Crossing the Śatadru, returning to my own country, I await to cast my eyes again upon the beautiful women with thick frontal bones, with blazing stickers of red arsenic on their foreheads, with streaks of jet black collyrium on their eyes!
—Mahābhārata 8.44
