Studies in Dharmasastra (An Old and Rare Book)

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The articles in this collection are not the result of a conference, nor do the articles all treat a similar theme or idea. What is the purpose of such a collection, then? Let it be considered a paean-even if a humble one to the diversity and importance of the field of dharmasastra for so many aspects of the history of Indian society. The study of this field seems in recent years to have been pursued with less widespread enthusiasm than in previous years. The days when the likes of Gharpure, Mandlik, Jolly, Jayaswal, Jha and Kane ensured that nearly every volume of an ideological journal contained some- thing on the subject of dharmalastra are gone. This is true not only in the realm of modern scholarship, but in the traditional circles as well, as witnessed by the absence of dharmalästris in the centers still famous for traditional learning.

There can be no accounting for the vogues of scholarship, but any attempt at explaining the relative neglect of the subject of dharmalastra cannot claim that the field is exhausted, or that it is not "relevant" to any other disciplines, (A more likely explanation mav lie in the imposing vastness and highly technical nature of the corpus.) Indeed, the field is very rich.

One of the recurring questions which one encounters in several fields of classical Sanskrit literature is the extent to which the prescriptions and descriptions are based on actual practice or on the writers' idealized norms. The difficulty in dealing with this question is that it is so hard to find quotidian data to confirm or contradict the descriptions of the text. The papers by D. C. Sircar, Ludo Rocher, and myself are all attempts to provide such data. Sircar draws upon epigraphic data from the 6th, 7th, 8th, 11th, 12th and 13th centuries as well as some literary sources. Rocher offers the first complete English translation of a French Jesuit's description of the legal system as he knew it in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.