Studies in Dharmasastra (An Old and Rare Book)

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Late Prof. De had written quite a few books on Sanskrit Poetics as well as a history of Classical Sanskrit Literature.

We believe that he adorned all that he touched. We also believe that there is little likelihood of improving and adding to his dissertations on the History of Sanskrit Poetics, Aspects of Sanskrit Literature, Vakroktijivita of Kuntaka and other books.

His English is both chaste and crisp and the economy of his use of words in getting his ideas across elevates his style to almost an art.

Essays in the present volume styled "Problem of Poetic Expression" and "Theory of Rasa" are masterpieces of delineation and deep scholarship.

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 indological journal contained some- thing on the subject of dharmasastra 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 dharmasastris 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 dharmasastra cannot claim that the field is exhausted, or that it is not "relevant" to any other disciplines. (A more likely explanation may 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.

**Contents and Sample Pages**