Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence

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.