The primary social context for the reception of Dharmaśāstra throughout its long history was the gurukulam , the “family,” comprised of a teacher and student disciples. As with most educational contexts, this one too was both a sincere effort to transmit knowledge across generations and an elite institution of power consolidation and control. To know dharma through its texts was both to enter the deeply religious ritual life of an orthodox Brahmin and to claim a special social status premised on religious and legal knowledge. In short, scholars of this tradition believed in its efficacy and its claims but they also understood the social and political advantages it afforded those who mastered it. Dharmaśāstra had both an intrinsic value as a repository of sophisticated religious, legal, and intellectual thought and an instrumental value as a handbook of jurisprudence, substantive law, ritual instruction, and political strategy. Given the semiprivate nature of the guru’s household and the students who lived and studied there, however, we cannot see the inner workings of this basic social context but rather only the byproducts of this relationship.
The direct results or products of this educational setting are its graduates and the texts they wrote. We can see hints of the orality and the exchange that must have characterized the discussions in a guru’s house in the texts themselves. The texts are frequently framed as the systematic responses of a sage to requests for an exposition of dharma . The opening lines of the Laws of Manu read:
Manu was seated, absorbed in contemplation, when the great seers came up to him, paid homage to him in the appropriate manner, and addressed him in these words: “Please, Lord, tell us precisely and in the proper order the Laws of all the social classes, as well as of those born in between.” (MDh 1.1–1.2, Olivelle’s trans.)
Within the texts and their commentaries, the scholastic style of objection and reply mirrors an oral exchange: “if you say such-and-such, then we say no” (iti cen na ). Though the debates are often between authors of comparable status, the explanation is nevertheless pedagogical, hoping to instruct readers or listeners as to the correct interpretation of a subject. The commentarial style consists of other features or services that intend to make a foundational text intelligible to students. Each of these, we suspect, resulted from an oral explanation that made use of synonyms, supplied words, reframed grammatical structures, and argumentative refutations (Tubb and Boose 2007 : 3–5). In summary, the reception of Dharmaśāstra internal to the tradition itself took shape as training in an academic field, the philological methods for which were shared across several fields of study. Though the rest of this chapter focuses on the reception of Dharmaśāstra outside of its inner circle of practitioners and transmitters, it is worth keeping in mind the educational setting of its internal transmission.
What started in a guru’s house spread quickly into other areas. The wider reception of Dharmaśāstra into other social institutions and historical sources attracts our attention precisely because it did not remain confined to an isolated, elite transmission from teacher to disciple. Dharmaśāstra infiltrated many areas of the cultural life of India far beyond its intended audience of orthodox Brahmins. Still, Dharmaśāstra rules rarely controlled other cultural institutions directly. Rather, hints and traces of the traditions are found in sources ranging from epic literature to didactic story to epigraphy.
In many Sanskrit traditions, the idea of dharma in Dharmaśāstra was a key instrument of the “the brahmanical regulatory project” (Squarcini 2011 : 135; cf. Stein 1969 ). Other Sanskrit texts cite, use, allude to, and contest Dharmaśāstra, and this intertextuality is one of the most pervasive ways in which the dharma of Dharmaśāstra moved into so many branches of Hindu texts, not to mention influencing Buddhist and Jain thought. Dharma was one of the most fought over terms in the religious history of India (Olivelle 2005c ). Nevertheless, Dharmaśāstra, along with its philosophical partner the Pūrva-Mīmāṃsā, laid claim to preeminence as the “science” of dharma . Part of the motivation for its transmission was the promotion of a relatively stable concept of dharma as varṇāśramadharma , the duties of the castes and life-stages. The detailed aspects of dharma in the Dharmaśāstra are contained in Part 2 of this book. By about the seventh or eighth century ce and the work of Kumārila and Bhāruci, this way of looking at dharma had become the dominant meaning of the term in Hindu traditions. Dharma in the Dharmaśāstra thus served as a persistent touchstone or point of reference for other Hindu traditions that built on, challenged, or even rejected it (Davis 2007b ).
To being with, the epics Rāmāyaṇa and, especially, Mahābhārata present what should be considered competing conceptions of what dharma is and how to accomplish it. Part of the difference lies, however, in the manner of expression, namely the difference between narrative and treatise. Stories have to present complexity and conflict in relation to moral problems. Plots are hard to move otherwise. Systematic treatises, by contrast, may present moral problems in straightforward normative terms. The gray areas of moral life are part and parcel of good story, but anathema to normative texts.
For the characters in the Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, there are moral dilemmas and plenty of conflict, but their solutions rarely seem difficult or unclear. Rāma always seems to know just what to do and why, even if the moral justifications sometimes feel like technicalities. The nature of dharma in this text ranges from piety and righteousness to caste, family, and legal duties (Brockington 2004 ). In spite of this range, the Rāmāyaṇa emphasizes dharma in formalistic or legalistic terms that are less common in the Mahābhārata (see Matilal 1980 –1). Though immoral decisions and acts move the plot forward at every turn, for Rāma and his close narrative partners, Rāma almost never has doubts about what is right and lawful. To this extent, formal norms akin to those of Dharmaśāstra lurk within the narrative structure of the Rāmāyaṇa and its morally assured characters.
In contrast, the Mahābhārata did not receive a formalistic notion of dharma from Dharmaśāstra into its narrative proper. Moral quandaries, dubious acts, and complex moral figures run through the massive story from start to finish. Dharma in this literary world is ever subtle (sūkṣma ) and hard to discern, even and especially for its righteous heroes (Fitzgerald 2004b : 672–3). As a result, the nature of dharma in this text shifts and eludes simple categorization, functioning perhaps as a proving ground of competing notions of dharma (Hiltebeitel 2011 ).
In the twelfth and thirteenth books of the epic, however, there appears a long set of instructions by the dying preceptor Bhīṣma, about a range of dharma topics, from kingship to social emergency to women. As Hopkins (1885 ; 1902 : 17–23) and Bühler (1886 : 533ff.) showed long ago, many passages from the received text of the Laws of Manu are either directly quoted or found in reworked parallel forms in the Mahābhārata . Almost all of the directly parallel passages come from the two didactic, “Dharmaśāstra-like” books of the epic. These books interrupt the narrative in a way that has struck most readers as a later interpolation. Nevertheless, there may be good reasons to read the narrative and didactic portions of the text as a cohesive whole (Bowles 2007 ). The style, as well as some of the content, is hard not to liken to a Dharmaśāstra in its normative rather than narrative exposition. The narrative books of Mahābhārata did not directly accept Dharmaśāstra, but the didactic portions did. Why would the authors or redactors of the story feel compelled to incorporate a stylistically incongruous, yet very lengthy, section of normative thought into the story? My suggestion would be that these books are a response by Brahmins of the “Mahābhārata department” to the power of early syntheses of dharma such as the Dharmasūtras and the Laws of Manu . The Mahābhārata encompasses the Dharmaśāstra in a way that claims the epic to be a superior synthesis of dharma , even as it draws upon the influential formulation of dharma in Dharmaśāstra. In this way, the great epic had to respond to a culturally powerful discourse by creating an alternative discourse that nevertheless depended upon the normative mode of Dharmaśāstra.
Other genres such as the Purāṇas borrowed verbatim from Dharmaśāstra. At one extreme, we can point to the wholesale reproduction of the entire Book of Legal Procedure from the Laws of Yājñavalkya in the Agni-Purāṇa and of the majority of its two other books, Good Conduct and Expiation , in the Garuḍa-Purāṇa (see Mandlik 1880 : lvii–lviii). Likewise, the Bhaviṣya-Purāṇa reproduces the first three chapters of the Laws of Manu (Laszlo 1971 ). The open texture of Purāṇas allowed for the incorporation of many different textual genres under this amorphous label. Single verses, short passages, and whole chapters from known Dharmaśāstras find their way into many Purāṇas. In spite of their name, which means “ancient lore,” the Purāṇas are generally a more recent genre of Sanskrit text, associated especially with the rise and eventual dominance of temple cultures across India between the fifth and tenth centuries ce . Initially, therefore, it was the Purāṇas that borrowed from early Dharmaśāstra. By about the ninth or tenth century ce , however, dharma texts began to cite Purāṇas by name, though hesitantly. And by the thirteenth century ce , and the rise of a new class of dharma digests (nibandha s), new topics of Dharmaśāstra such as pilgrimage and pūjā rites were freely expounded with the help of Purāṇa materials (see Chapter 2 ). The appeal to Purāṇas for norms concerning such topics was necessary because earlier Dharmaśāstra said very little about these subjects. Digest writers thus needed material for matters that, by their time, were considered part of dharma in their community, or that they wanted to be so. In the seventeenth century, in texts such as the Vīramitrodaya , we can see that Dharmaśāstra set few limits on its purview, with almost no area of religious, legal, or daily life beyond its interest, even bhakti devotionalism. One may view these transformations as a gradual assimilation of new ideas and practices into Dharmaśāstra, an effort to bring more and more topics under the heading of dharma . Nevertheless, some textual genres—most philosophical traditions, Tantric literature, and vernacular devotional texts, for example—stayed largely independent and rarely found expression as part of a Dharmaśāstra.
Alongside Purāṇa texts, we should mention the regular use of Dharmaśāstra concepts, rules, and sayings in the didactic story literature of ancient and medieval India. The famous Pañcatantra employs many principles of dharma in its fables intended to instruct dullard princes (Sternbach 1965–7). Story literature such as the Kathāsaritsāgara and historical works such as Rājataraṅgaṇī similarly weave rules of dharma and categories of Dharmaśāstra into their plots, often exploiting the gap between norm and practice to create intrigue and plot twists. Like the Epics, these stories yield some insight into the contemporary consciousness of its authors about religion and law, as well as how the received norms of Dharmaśāstra influenced the flux of real life (Davis and Nemec 2016 ).
Medieval sectarian traditions often adopted the form of Dharmaśāstra to propound rules relating to their religious regimens and rules of conduct. During the medieval period, for example, one dramatic and important shift in Hindu thought played out over the nature of and rites for ascetic renunciation of the world. Philosophical and sectarian divisions about renunciation generated new Dharmaśāstra treatises that recast renunciation as a form of dharma , not a rejection of it (Olivelle 1986 , 1987-8, 1995a ). Further, as early as the sixth or seventh century ce , authors of Śaiva Pāśupata sects created a corpus of normative texts under the heading of Śivadharma. The contents of the corpus provide liturgical and behavioral prescriptions for devotees but take the form of and call themselves “śāstra” (Bonazzoli 1993; Magnone 2005). Familiar topics, including gifts, ritual offerings, karma’s effects, purification, and expiation, are presented in a style close to and often echoing Dharmaśāstra. The Śivadharma texts, therefore, “explicitly recast classical Dharmaśāstric ideas in accordance with their own theological and liturgical commitments” (Lubin: n.d.). Parts of the Viṣṇudharmottarapurāṇa too read like a recasting of Dharmaśāstra for the new religious world and new theological outlook of the Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātras (Inden 2006 : 167). As noted for other genres, the power of Dharmaśāstra here came down to a cultural expectation that a complete religious tradition needed a Dharmaśāstra-like text to bolster its normative and social claims. The substance of such imitative genres differed dramatically, but every tradition needed a dharma to be spelled out in one way or another.
Moving from the texts of various expert traditions, we should now explore the reception of Dharmaśāstra in epigraphical and transactional writings from premodern India. While modern scholars and colonial lawyers have created the habit of citing Dharmaśāstra texts by chapter and verse, the truth is that the dharma texts were not often cited in this way outside of expert traditions in Sanskrit. The modern habit thus sets up false hopes when reading other historical sources that we should expect the rules of Dharmaśāstra to be cited to justify or prove ethical positions, legal verdicts, or religious practices. Instead, we get brief allusions, partially congruent concepts, and ornamental invocations, leading us to think that Dharmaśāstra did not have great influence because it was not cited the way we cite it today.
We should remember that Dharmaśāstra developed at the same time as other types of writing did and it often codified norms that existed outside of it rather than prescriptively imposing norms on practice. It is usually impossible to tell whether a particular rule is the cause of or the effect of a cultural norm observable in inscriptions, archival materials, and transactional records. It is part of the nature of Dharmaśāstra as a genre to erase its social and historical origins, even though comparison with other historical materials can frequently suggest times and motivations for specific innovations. The dates and names found in inscriptions and documents give us both a better chronology of the development of Hindu jurisprudence and a way to situate the reception of Dharmaśāstra in particular times and places (Michaels 2010c ). Both are essential to any responsible history of this tradition, as it affected the history of Hinduism.
One way to corroborate the relevance of rules of Dharmaśāstra is to find epigraphical sources that propagate the same or similar rules. Even if direct reliance is not mentioned, we can still speak of a shared culture of religious law. In 1426, Brahmins of the Paḍaivīṭu province in Vijayanagara promulgated a “statutory reform of marriage practices” that required marriage of the kanyādāna (gift of the bride) variety, and specifically prohibiting marriage that involved either bride-price or dowry (Lubin 2015 : 247–8). This inscription is a rare case of implementing a norm of religious law that is clearly specified in dharma texts. Public expiations for legal offenses are recorded in early modern Kerala following dharma rules for penance (Davis 2004 : 93–4). Similarly, practices of “restorative ordeals,” voluntary expiations undertaken to regain one’s reputation, show a reliance on Dharmaśāstra principles (Brick 2010 ). Famously, land grants, especially religious donations to temples and Brahmin communities, in many parts of India, incorporated verbatim Dharmaśāstra warnings to future rulers not to interfere with the grant (Jolly 1913 ; Sircar 1965a : 170–201). Finally, we also find epigraphical examples of caste status and privilege being determined by reference to dharma texts and invocations of the five “great sins” (mahāpātaka ) of Dharmaśāstra (Veluthat 1993 : 159–61). From this sort of historical evidence, we may safely conclude that Dharmaśāstra exerted considerable influence on locally administered systems of religious law.
I end this section by mentioning documents associated with Hindu monasteries (maṭha ), temples, and Brahmin councils of various names (sabhā, dharmādhikaraṇa, samaya, saṅketa, svarūpa , etc). For at least the last 600 years, these Brahmin authorities have received inquiries and requests from laypeople, rulers, and fellow Brahmins about how to adjudicate problems or resolve conflicts that have arisen in their lives or communities. The request may be simple: is a Hindu allowed to marry someone of the same gotra or not? Or, it may be more complex: if a member of a certain, matrilineal caste makes a gift to his son or other relative, is he required to have the consent of his sister’s son, his rightful heir? In every case, however, some doubt about religious law prompts a question to a recognized, authoritative body, which then responds to the question. The process involved is familiar from other systems of religious law in which responsa , formal legal opinions on doubtful matters, form important sources of law making (Davis 2014 ). The fact that Brahmin authorities delivered their opinions with reference to Dharmaśāstra makes these responsa the most direct way that this tradition influenced the wider public. It is difficult to tell exactly how old responsa practices were in Hindu traditions, especially since many or most may have occurred orally. References to Brahmin councils called pariṣad appear in early dharma texts and suggest the possibility that religious law was promulgated primarily through networks of councils and the answers they provided to inquiries and dilemmas posed by their constituencies.
The epigraphical and documentary evidence for the influence of Dharmaśāstra remains an open field for further research, in spite of the recent efforts cited above to explore these historical sources. Nonetheless, even the work accomplished so far demonstrates that Dharmaśāstra touched many areas of cultural life in classical and medieval India. In particular, the names, dates, and places in such sources help us create suitable historical frameworks for the history of Hinduism. In short, these sources disrupt any timeless image of Hinduism and bring Hinduism down to the ground of real people in real moments.
In the late 1700s, the early Orientalists imposed a model derived from the history of Roman law on to the Sanskrit texts they encountered and then commissioned as part of their decision to administer native law. Between 529 and 534 ce , at the direction of the Roman emperor Justinian, the jurist Tribonian and a large team created a comprehensive statement of Roman law, “a fair and everlasting monument,” in Gibbon’s phrase, that was divided into three parts known as the Code, the Institutes, and the Digest (Humfress 2005 : 161). It was, therefore, both an homage and a majestic claim to have named the first three English translations of Dharmaśāstra the Code of Gentoo Laws (Halhed 1776 ) the Institutes of Hindu Law (Jones 1794), and A Digest of Hindu Law (Colebrooke 1801 ). This pretentious inauguration of the colonial appropriation Dharmaśāstra set in motion a gradual but deliberate decline in the need for and the value of traditional study of the texts. In spite of its intention to do exactly the opposite, the colonial government dismantled traditional Hindu law and jurisprudence. First, it reduced Dharmaśāstra to a handful of practical legal topics. Second, it adjudicated Hindu law in colonial courts that followed English procedure. Third, it systematically modified the textual law known to the British with English law according to the doctrine of “justice, equity, and good conscience” (Derrett 1962b ).
Understood on the model of ecclesiastical law in England, Dharmaśāstra was mined for its “religious law,” and the rest was ignored (Lariviere 1989b : 758–60). Only those legal portions of the traditional texts that dealt with topics pertaining narrowly to family law (inheritance and marriage) and religious matters (especially caste) were accepted as “Hindu law.” Huge areas of law and nearly all ritual matters in Dharmaśāstra were excluded. Crime, contract, procedure, state administration, and commerce, for example, were all eliminated. Colonial Hindu law thus received Dharmaśāstra on its own terms and in such a way as to sever the connection it had to traditional pandit culture.
The story of how Dharmaśāstra was identified and then promulgated by the colonial government as “Hindu law” looks strange more than 200 years later (see R. Rocher 2010 ). In 1772, fifteen years after the Battle of Plassey, a government run by a corporation, the East India Company, and headed by its first Governor-General Warren Hastings made the decision to implement laws of the Hindus and Muslims that, in their understanding, “continued, unchanged from remotest antiquity” (see Cohn 1996 : 26–9). On the Hindu side, the source of those “unchanged” laws was to be the Dharmaśāstra, though only its “religious” portions. In this way, it was thought, Indians could be governed by their own essential principles of law and religion, albeit in English law courts with British judges and staff who had little or no knowledge of India’s history, culture, or languages.
Whatever the intentions were, the effect of this policy was to initiate a gradual, but deliberate takeover of both India’s legal system and its religious practices. The religious matters ceded to “Hindu law,” inheritance, marriage, adoption, and caste, were “safe” in the sense that the British had few moral qualms about letting Hindus follow their existing practices in these areas. In many other areas of religious life, however, the colonial government felt entitled to reform practices such as widow burning, widow remarriage, child marriage, idolatrous rites, temple administration, and religious endowments (Davis and Lubin 2015). In fact, the whole setup of colonial governance in terms of religious toleration forced Indians “to frame protest against state interference in the language of religious rights,” and it implies that “far from a contradiction in terms, the secular state invariably interferes with religion” (Adcock 2013: 24). What would be tolerated as religious practice and what would be reformed or abolished as repugnant to natural principles were determinations that the state authorities made.
The reception of Dharmaśāstra as “Hindu law” under Hastings’ Judicial Plan (Desika Char 1983 ) and the subsequent translations of Sanskrit dharma texts into English legal codes facilitated justifications of early colonial rule as benevolent and protective. More importantly, the selective dharma corpus used by the British became a convenient representation of who “Hindus” were and what their religion was. In short, the colonial state’s first official image of Hinduism was the one presented in early translations of Dharmaśāstra. First impressions being hard to dislodge, the Brahmanical and dharma -centric view of Hinduism quickly settled into the background of studies and views of Hinduism for at least the next hundred and, some would say, two hundred years.
Basic ideas of religious life in Dharmaśāstra became cornerstones of the ideal “Hindu” life. Hindus had four castes and four stages of life. They performed five great sacrifices in their domestic worship. Brahmins were the undisputed leaders of Hindu communities. The lowest caste, the Śūdras, served the “twice-born” castes as their only religious duty, while Brahmins obsessively worried about how many clumps of earth to use when ritually and hygienically cleaning themselves. These and other stereotypes emerged from the pages of freshly translated dharma texts, laying a firm foundation for the Brahmanical view of Hinduism both in scholarly and administrative circles. Even worse, actual Hindus had to contend legally and religiously with this standard of Hinduism, which shaped the terms of their own efforts to define and determine the course of Hindu institutions and practices.
The legal protection and promulgation of Dharmaśāstra were bolstered by the simultaneous appointment of “native law officers,” to assist the colonial courts both with their knowledge of the texts and their ability to interpret the litigants’ pleas in local languages. The earliest translators and judges, however, harbored deeply prejudiced suspicions about the character and corruptibility of these Indian assistants to the courts. Though the court pandits remained intact until 1864, from the beginning, the British tried to diminish their involvement in the determination of the law and even in the determination of the facts. As case law developed and more dharma texts became available, textual representations of Hinduism in legal circles replaced conversation and engagement with actual Hindus almost completely. Thus, the colonial legal image of Hinduism became a cornerstone of the wider Orientalist image of Hinduism in Said’s sense (1979 ).
By the mid-nineteenth century, while the reception of Dharmaśāstra in legal circles had been focused on medieval commentaries concerning inheritance, marriage, and adoption, scholarly interest in the texts as sources of historical and cultural knowledge grew. Stenzler’s translation (1849 ) of the Laws of Yājñavalkya was the first full translation of a root-text besides Manu, soon to be followed by Bühler’s translation of the Dharmasūtras (1879–82) and Jolly’s translations of the dharma texts of Viṣṇu (1880 ), Nārada, and Bṛhaspati (1889 ), in the Sacred Books of the East series. The Indological penchant for origins and ancient ritual slowly displaced the practical interest in Dharmaśāstra. Increasing academic work on the full range of dharma topics revealed the large gap between ancient text and contemporary practice, to the point where severe critics of the promulgation of Dharmaśāstra as Hindu law emerged in the third quarter of the nineteenth century (Goldstücker 1871 ; Nelson 1877 ). Instead, colonial policy shifted toward custom as the practical source of law for Hindus and others, provoking large projects to collect customary laws in various parts of India (Tupper 1881, Moore 1905).
One final burst of interest in Dharmaśāstra during the colonial period arose in the first quarter of the twentieth century, led by Indian scholars who had both traditional Sanskrit education and training in English law. The research and translations of scholars such as Kane, Gharpure, Jha, Laxmanshastri Joshi, Mandlik, Sankararama Sastri, and many others gave studies of Dharmaśāstra a renewed scope and breadth. It should not diminish the fact that this work remains essential—indeed, unsurpassable in many ways—for modern scholarship to say that it was generally motivated by nationalist aspirations and hopes that a sophisticated, modern Hindu law might be developed for the new nation. On the one hand, these scholars held genuine respect for English law and were habituated to its procedures and institutions. On the other, they felt a pride in the wide-ranging, elaborate legal thought of Dharmaśāstra and its potential as a basis for modern law. Just prior to Independence, therefore, intense debates took place over the advisability of preserving Hindu and Muslim law as separate systems of personal law versus a uniform civil code (UCC) for all Indians. The former plan won the day, but the Constitution of India (1950) included a directive for the state to create a UCC that to this day has not been followed (see Narula 2010 ).
In the preceding section, I gave the purposeful impression that the transmission of Dharmaśāstra was given over to British administrators, European scholars, and Indian lawyers. It is important to see how the official presence and reception of this tradition moved into state and university domains. We must remember, however, that traditional scholarship and transmission of the texts continued, although to a diminishing extent. A few new texts were produced, and a few outstanding teachers remained. Some ideas and expectations from Dharmaśāstra had become part of the “cultural DNA” for certain Hindu communities and a lingering presence of traditional pandits gave yet some life to a tradition being strangled by state and university institutions (Derrett 1957a ). In a meaningful way, civil society retained a principled commitment to Dharmaśāstra, even if the commitment was largely symbolic and not grounded in direct knowledge of the texts (Dhavan 1992 ). The vanishing community of Dharmaśāstra pandits, however, no longer influenced public discourse around Hinduism.
The Hindu Code Bills of the 1950s solidified a nominal presence for dharma ideals in the form of statutory norms that had some weak connection to Dharmaśāstra. The legislation really continued the colonial system of personal law, but its codified form obviated once and for all any real need to consult Dharmaśāstra directly (Williams 2006 ). Being a legal Hindu was now defined in English through these statutes and the case law that built upon them. As a result, the official reception of Dharmaśāstra by the state effectively ended with the passage of these bills. A few important additional reform bills only confirmed that, in Derrett’s words, “for practical purposes, Hindu law died on the 27 May 1976” (1978: vii).
Judicial opinions in contemporary India will occasionally refer to arguments made in Dharmaśāstra or principles derived from Mīmāṃsā. In every case, I have seen, however, the legal basis for the decision rests upon statute or precedent, not upon the appeal to traditional Hindu law rules or interpretations. In India’s current legal system, therefore, the older texts provide corroborative support, though most references are ornamental flourishes on a decision made on other grounds.
Dharmaśāstra remains an important symbol of Hindu society and identity, at least for upper-class and upper-caste segments of the population. Many Brahmin families, and some others, continue to consult dharma texts and family traditions based on them to conduct their domestic rites. That said, whatever importance Dharmaśāstra has today (and for many Hindus it is not much at all) depends on the image of this tradition as a repository of Hindu wisdom and normative standards. Parallel systems of religious law retain a living class of experts who continue to produce new work that keeps their traditions alive, even when they are folded into state legal systems—rabbis who know and debate Halakhah; mufti s and kadi s who interpret the Quran and Hadith; canon lawyers who work to understand and enforce the law of the Church. The experts of Hindu law, the Brahmin pandits who know and debate Dharmaśāstra, have all but disappeared. Hindu law, as preserved in a heavily abridged form in India’s legislative and judicial systems, lacks a thriving independent class of experts to provide dynamism and fresh ideas that draw upon the traditional system. As mentioned and lamented in the introduction to this volume, the most active group studying Dharmaśāstra today, therefore, is the small community of university-based scholars around the world who continue to make the case that the tradition is incredibly subtle, complex, and influential. While acknowledging that the drive to push Dharmaśāstra studies into academic circles has contributed to its gradual disappearance outside of the university, we nevertheless continue to press the case that the history of Hinduism and the history of Dharmaśāstra remain inextricably linked and the two histories must be told together.