BOOK: Christopher T. FLEMING, Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence (Oxford: OUP, 2021). ISBN 9780198852377, 85.00 USD

 

(Source: OUP)

OUP is publishing a new book on the history of ownership and inheritance in Indian Sanskrit intellectual history.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence provides an account of various theories of ownership (svatva) and inheritance (dāya) in Sanskrit jurisprudential literature (Dharmaśāstra). 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 (Mīmāṃsā) and logic (Nyāya) 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 Dharmaśāstra 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher T. Fleming, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oxford

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures

Introduction

1. Mīmāṃsā and the Mitākṣarā School of Jurisprudence

2. Navya-Nyāya and the Maithila and Gau.da Schools of Jurisprudence

3. The Bhāṭṭa a School of Benares

4. Anglo-Indian Schools of Hindu Law

Market Governance, (Neo)Liberalism, and the Future of Dharmaśāstra in the 21st Century

Glossary of Sanskrit Terms

Bibliography

 

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