Anglo-Indian Schools of Hindu Law

Abstract

This chapter turns to the British encounter with traditional Sanskrit learning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and traces the construction of schools of Hindu Law in colonial India between 1772 and 1864. The chapter examines three digests of Sanskrit Dharmaśāstra that were compiled at the behest of the East India Company and whose English translations were utilized by British jurists the Ṣadr Dīwānī ‘Adālats (colonial civil courts): the Vivādārṇavasetu (translated in 1776 as A Code of Gentoo Laws), the Vivādabhaṅgārṇava (translated in 1795–6 as A Digest on Contracts and Succession), and the Dharmaśāstrasamgraha (which likely served as an impetus for Henry Colebrooke’s Two Treatises). Furthermore, it argues that these colonial-era Dharmaśāstra digests articulate discernible schools of jurisprudential thought regarding ownership and inheritance that frame themselves using the regional terminology of the early modern Dharmaśāstrins whose work is examined in Chapters 2 and 3 of this book. The treatises do this by recapitulating and by enhancing the eastern and southern scales of Dharmaśāstra texts that developed originally in Navadvīpa and Vārāṇasī in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.