Overview

Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence provides an account of various theories of ownership (svatva) and inheritance (d=aya) in Sanskrit jurisprudential literature (Dharma's=astra). It examines the evolution of different juridical models of inheritance--in which families held property in trusts or in tenancies-in-common--against the backdrop of related developments in the philosophical understanding of ownership in the Sanskrit text-traditions of hermeneutics (M=im=a.ms=a) and logic (Ny=aya) respectively. Christopher T. Fleming reconstructs medieval Sanskrit theories of property and traces the emergence of various competing schools of Sanskrit jurisprudence during the early modern period (roughly fifteenth-nineteenth centuries) in Bihar, Bengal, and Varanasi. Fleming attends to the ways in which ideas from these schools of jurisprudence shaped the codification of Anglo-Hindu personal law by administrators of the British East India Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While acknowledging the limitations of colonial conceptions of Dharma's=astra as positive law, this study argues for far greater continuity between pre-colonial and colonial Sanskrit jurisprudence than accepted previously. It charts the transformation of the Hindu law of inheritance--through precedent and statute--over the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries.

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9780198852377

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Reviews

This study makes a sizeable leap forward in our understanding of the philosophical and jurisprudential thought related to ownership and inheritance in medieval and early modern India. * Donald Davis, University of Texas at Austin, Philosophy East and West *

Author Information

Christopher T. Fleming is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford

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