Dharma-shastra, ancient Indian body of jurisprudence that is the basis, subject to legislative modification, of the family law of Hindus living in territories both within and outside India (e.g., Pakistan, Malaysia, East Africa). Dharma-shastra is primarily concerned not with legal administration, though courts and their procedures are dealt with comprehensively, but with the right course of conduct in every dilemma. Some basic principles of Dharma-shastra are known to most Hindus brought up in a traditional environment. Those include the propositions that duties are more significant than rights, that women are under perpetual guardianship of their closest male relatives, and that the king (i.e., the state) must protect the subjects from all harm, moral as well as material.
The Dharma-shastra literature, written in Sanskrit, exceeds 5,000 titles. It can be divided into three categories: (1) sutras (terse maxims), (2) smritis (shorter or longer treatises in stanzas), and (3) nibandhas (digests of smriti verses from various quarters) and vrittis (commentaries upon individual continuous smritis). The nibandhas and vrittis, juridical works intended for legal advisers, exhibit considerable skill in harmonizing divergent sutras and smritis.
The techniques of Dharma-shastra are mainly to state the ancient text, maxim, or stanza; to explain its meaning, where obscure; and to reconcile divergent traditions, if necessary by use of the traditional science of interpretation (Mimamsa). Where possible, Dharma-shastra permits custom to be enforced, if it can be ascertained and if its terms do not conflict with the principles of Brahmans (members of the priestly class). However, Dharma-shastra provides only the basic principles of the law. The actual administration of law, the equivalent of case law, was historically carried out by local councils of elders called Panchayats.
Ancient Hindu jurisprudence was introduced to Western scholars by Sir William Jones, an 18th-century British Orientalist and jurist. Many who followed him—e.g., Sir Henry Maine (1822–88)—believed Dharma-shastra was a kind of priestcraft, intended to keep the lower castes, the Shudras and Dalits (formerly untouchables), under the control of the higher castes. The close study of Dharma-shastra sources by German and Italian scholars, principally Johann Georg Bühler, Julius Jolly, and Giuseppe Mazzarella, showed its psychological and sociological potential. British administrators then attempted to use Dharma-shastra in actual legal adjudications, as Hindus had not historically done.
Dharma-shastra is equal in age to Jewish law (or older, if its roots do indeed go back to the Vedas, the earliest scriptures of Hinduism) and has greater continuity and longevity than Roman law. The British colonial administration in India affected the system of Hindu law by applying the traditional rules in a hard-and-fast way and by introducing the concept of precedent. Rapid social change, following foreign rule, required many adjustments to India’s body of Hindu law. There was, for example, no provision in the Dharma-shastra for the development of judicial divorce or for the allotting of equal shares to daughters along with sons in their fathers’ estate at his death. Instead of inventing new texts, legislators altered the system of Indian law that was administered in the courts, first piecemeal and later, in 1955–56, comprehensively. Gradually, as judges lost familiarity with Sanskrit, the ancient texts began to be replaced with contemporary, cosmopolitan juridical and social concepts.