Die Lekhapaddhati-Lekhapancasika: Briefe und Urkunden im mittelalterlichen Gujarat; Text, Ubersetzung, Kommentar: Glossar (Sanskrit-Deutsch-Englisch).

• Author: Heim, Steven
• Position: Book review

Die Lekhapaddhati-Lekhapancasika: Briefe und Urkunden im mittelalterlichen Gujarat; Text, Ubersetzung, Kommentar: Glossar (Sanskrit-Deutsch-Englisch). By INGO STRAUCH. Monographien zur indischen Archaologie, Kunst und Philologie, vol. 16. Berlin: DIETRICH REIMER VERLAG, 2002. Pp. 526.

The Lekhapaddhati, also known as the Lekhapancasika, is a guidebook for the composition of written documents. The guidebook contains sample documents that include private letters to family and friends, as well as public documents on such topics as an imperial decree, a non-aggression treaty, a letter of safe passage, a declaration of property confiscation, a variety of rental, deed, mortgage, and loan contracts, certification of slave ownership, an ostracism announcement, inheritance, and divorce. The documents are composed in the vernacular Sanskrit common to the thirteenth-fifteenth centuries in the Gujarat region.

Ingo Strauch provides a new edition of the guidebook, substantially improving the previous edition by Dalal and Shrigondekar (1925), and the first complete translation. Strauch introduces the work with a review of sources on personal letters and legal documents in premodern South Asia, with...