Hinduism And Law

Covering the earliest Sanskrit rulebooks through to the codification of 'Hindu law' in modern times, this interdisciplinary volume examines the interactions between Hinduism and the law. The authors present the major transformations to India's legal system in both the colonial and post colonial periods and their relation to recent changes in Hinduism. Thematic studies show how law and Hinduism relate and interact in areas such as ritual, logic, politics, and literature, offering a broad coverage of South Asia's contributions to religion and law at the intersection of society, politics and culture. In doing so, the authors build on previous treatments of Hindu law as a purely text-based tradition, and in the process, provide a fascinating account of an often neglected social and political history.

This intensively researched book argues that Hindu Law is an essentially flexible and constantly evolving system, that scholars have wrongly proclaimed it dead and merely a relic of an ancient past. The author contends that Hindu Law is very much alive and playing a role even in the current post-modern environment as is apparent in the way the courts themselves interpret various aspects of law, including the rules of inheritance, marriage, maintenance, and divorce. He also suggests that it would be wrong to see this law as uniformly oppressive. Wide in scope, the book examines the development of Hindu law from the ancient period, through it drastic remolding in the colonial era, to its emergence as a postmodern entity.

This introduction to Hindu law and jurisprudence questions the traditional perception of law, and reveals law's close linkage with religion. Emphasizing the household, the family, and everyday relationships as additional social locations of law, it contends that law itself can be understood as a theology of ordinary life.

"The foundation of Hindu law is the voluminous textual tradition called Dharmaśāstra, the expert tradition on dharma. This book seeks to delineate the historical development of Dharmaśāstra, even though the tradition presented dharma as timeless and ahistorical. The volume establishes the importance of law for the history and study of Hinduism by providing interpretive descriptions of all the major topics of Hindu dharma according to this tradition. First, two broad introductions to the historical development of the textual sources of Hindu law suggest new ways to understand both the original texts (smṛti) and the later commentaries and digests. Next, groundbreaking research into the origin of the householder (gṛhastha), who is at the center of the Dharmaśāstric enterprise, provides new insights into both the origin of this genre and many of its topics, such as the āśrama system and married household life. The book devotes its central chapters to each of the major topics of Dharmaśāstra: epistemology of dharma, caste and social class, orders of life, rites of passage, Vedic student and graduate, marriage, children, inheritance, women, daily duties, food, gifting, funeral and ancestral offerings, impurity and purification, ascetic modes of life, dharma during emergencies, king, punishment, legal procedure, titles of law, penances, vows, pilgrimage, images, and temples. The final chapters then explore both the reception of Dharmaśāstra in other religious traditions, both Hindu and Buddhist, and the relevance of Dharmaśāstra to studies of critical concepts in religious studies—the body, emotions, material culture, subjectivity, animal studies, and vernacular culture."--

"Covering the earliest Sanskrit rulebooks through to the codification of 'Hindu law' in modern times, this interdisciplinary volume examines the interactions between Hinduism and the law. The authors present the major transformations to India's legal system in both the colonial and post colonial periods and their relation to recent changes in Hinduism. Thematic studies show how law and Hinduism relate and interact in areas such as ritual, logic, politics, and literature, offering a broad coverage of South Asia's contributions to religion and law at the intersection of society, politics and culture. In doing so, the authors build on previous treatments of Hindu law as a purely text-based tradition, and in the process, provide a fascinating account of an often neglected social and political history"--Provided by publisher.

Through pointed studies of important aspects and topics of dharma in Dharmaśāstra, this comprehensive collection shows that the history of Hinduism cannot be written without the history of Hindu law. Part One provides a concise overview of the literary genres in which Dharmasastra was written with attention to chronology and historical developments. This study divides the tradition into its two major historical periods—the origins and formation of the classical texts and the later genres of commentary and digest—in order to provide a thorough, but manageable overview of the textual bases of the tradition. Part Two presents descriptive and historical studies of all the major substantive topics of Dharmasastra. Each chapter offers readers with salest knowledge of the debates, transformations, and fluctcating importance of each topic. Indirectly, readers will also gain insight into the ethos or worldview of religious law in Hinduism, enabling them to get a feel for how dharma authors thought and why. Part Three contains brief studies of the impact and reception of Dharmasastra in other South Asian cultural and textual traditions. Finally, Part Four draws inspiration from "critical terms" in contemporary legal and religious studies to analyze Dharmasastra texts. Contributors offer interpretive views of Dharmasastra that start from hermeneutic and social concerns today.

This book presents a study on a postmodernist analysis of classical Hindu law, which has become neglected due to the modernist assumptions about the increasing irrelevance of ‘religious’ legal systems. The book is split into three parts. The first part focuses on the historical and conceptual background of Hindu law, while the second part concentrates on five facets of Hindu law that go beyond tradition and modernity, namely the Hindu marriage law, child marriage, polygamy, divorce, and the maintenance law. Finally, the third part presents a concluding analysis to the preceding chapters, where it presents the postmodern condition of Hindu law.