Sanskrit Law: Excavating Vedic Legal Pluralism

• Main Author: Menski, Werner F
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: SOAS School of Law Research Paper No. 05-2010 2010
• Subjects: KL Asia and Eurasia; Africa; Pacific Area; and Antarctica; Pacific; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/22055/; https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/22055/1/Menski_22055.pdf; http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1621384

In light of currently developing and purportedly postmodern global comparative legal analysis and recent theoretical writing about the ubiquitous phenomenon of law, this paper critically re-examines our somewhat self-congratulatory assumptions of the advances of postcolonial and postmodern legal scholarship and demonstrates that legal pluralism is actually nothing new at all. Ancient Sanskrit sources, which can be excavated because somewhat miraculously we still have some of the relevant texts with their many variant readings, indicate that legal pluralism has existed for thousands of years as a basic fact of human life. Thus legal pluralism is not appropriately seen and discussed today as a contested postmodern phenomenon. Rather it seems to be true, as Griffiths declared with some conviction, that legal pluralism is simply a fact. If this is correct, as seems confirmed even by ancient textual evidence, we have been ignoring this ancient truth at our peril and have simply been engaged in re-inventing wheels also in legal pluralism studies, an admittedly exciting but increasingly tired and overworked seam of academic knowledge about law. I myself assumed uncritically for many years that ancient Sanskrit had no proper word for ‘law’, accepting others’ positivistic and orientalising assertions, without conducting research of my own. Once I began to research the grammar of Sanskrit law in the light of legal pluralism theory, however, it became rapidly apparent that early Sanskrit did in fact develop and begin to distinguish an increasingly large number of terms for ‘law’, though notably not for state law. The admittedly difficult language of early Sanskrit reflects a richly patterned and fluidly evolving understanding of legal pluralism within ancient Indic societies and cultures, showing that various interlinked legal phenomena existed and were thought about thousands of years before our time. Since the purported absence of a single key word for ‘law’ in Sanskrit has given rise to rather misguided assumptions ...