Medieval Hindu Law

Abstract

This book seeks to study the changes which took place in the field of Hindu law as it evolved between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries and as reflected in selected Sanskrit texts written during this period. It also tries to explore the reasons which brought about those changes. Hindu law has a history of nearly four to five millennia recorded in an astonishingly large and varied range of texts. During this long journey, it has appeared in many different manifestations and has gone through several transformations with different sources, validating factors or justifications, methodologies and operative machinery. The Indian textual tradition can be broadly covered under three major stages, namely the stage of the Vedas, the stage of the ṣrtis, which includes both the later Vaidika texts called the dharma sūtras and the metrical sṃrtis, and the stage of commentaries and digests. This book argues that in the early medieval period, Hindu law emerged from the shadows of dharma and established itself independently as ‘vyvahāra’. This process is called the secularization of Hindu law. The book is an intensive study of seven leading ‘vyvahāra’ texts ranging from eighth to fourteenth-century.