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Hindu law, as a historical term, refers to the code of laws applied to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs in British India. [1] [2] [3] Hindu law, in modern scholarship, also refers to the legal theory, jurisprudence and philosophical reflections on the nature of law discovered in ancient and medieval era Indian texts. [4]
Classical Hindu law is a category of Hindu law in traditional Hinduism, taken to begin with the transmittance of the Vedas [citation needed] and ending in 1772 with the adoption of "A Plan for the Administration of Justice in Bengal" by the Bengal government.
Customary law within the context of Hindu law is defined as akin to the community norm of a particular region. This form of law encompasses laws that are actually applied to daily life, as opposed to theological laws canonized in texts which are accessible for only a small proportion of the population. [3]
The root texts of ancient Hindu jurisprudence and law are the Dharma-sūtras. These express that Shruti, Smṛti and Acara are sources of jurisprudence and law. [30] The precedence of these sources is declared in the opening verses of each of the known, surviving Dharma-sūtras. For example, [30]
The [British] colonial administration began the codification of Hindu and Muslim laws in 1772 and continued through the next century, with emphasis on certain texts as the authentic "sources" of the law and custom of Hindus and Muslims, which in fact devalued and retarded those dynamic social systems.
Dharmaśāstra became influential in modern colonial India history, when they were formulated by early British colonial administrators to be the law of the land for all non-Muslims (Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs) in the Indian subcontinent, after Sharia set by Emperor Aurangzeb, was already accepted as the law for Muslims in colonial India.
The first three sources of law are rooted in the vedas, whereas atmatusti is not. It is because of this that atmatusti, as a fourth source, is not recognized by most scholars due to the lack of legitimacy. Only Manu and Yājñavalkya refer to atmatusti as the fourth source of dharma within the Hindu Law tradition.
Because of the social implication revolving around the importance of the household and the community in the creation and administration of law, Hindu law jurisprudentially subordinated state law to the law of castes and life-stages (varnasramadharma). [3] In this manner, each caste and life-stage was responsible for highly localized occupations.