A Brief History of Dharmasastra.

• Author: Lariviere, Richard W.

A Brief History of Dhamasastra. By S. C. BANERJI. New Delhi: ABHINAV PUBLICATIONS, 1999. Pp. ix + 400. Rs 500.

Prof. S. C. Banerji is one of India's senior Indological scholars. He has been making contributions to the world's store of knowledge for more than fifty years. This book is clearly a work of synthesis by a master of the field of dharmasastra Banerji gives us his views and conclusions on matters that he has investigated for many years. In the course of doing so, the author is not inclined to tarry over background materials. He jumps directly into a topic--often a topic of considerable controversy among scholars--and bluntly gives his views on the matter.

The book leaves me with four impressions: this is not a book for scholars looking for an overview of dharmasastra; it is not a book for those not already deeply familiar with the field; the presentation of the material is fragmented, reading at times like a compilation of notecards; and the treatment of topics is very uneven. For example, the chapter entitled "Purana and Smrti" is three and a half pages long, more than twice the length of the chapter entitled "Tantra and Smrti." Both of these chapters are so general as to be of little interest to an audience that is equipped to benefit from the far more interesting material found in, say, the chapter entitled "Interrelation Among Different Schools of Navya-smrti." In this chapter we get the full force of Banerji's experience and mastery of the sources. But the reader must be ready to deal with sequential paragraphs plunked down next to each other which begin (p. 139): "on the interpretation of the in Laghuharita's text, viz. Sraddhavighne, etc. Govindarananda differs from the Sraddha-cintamani." And the next paragraph which begins, "Raghunandana rejects the Maithila view that, in Sapindana there should be first deva-krtya, the preta-krtya, followed by pitr-krtya." These topics are found in close proximity because they deal with sraddha, but there is no explanation of the background to the debate, no context for the topic of either paragraph, or why the two topics are juxtaposed, or what the consequences to the history of ideas might have been...