The Charier of Visnusena.

• Author: Mchugh, James

The Charier of Visnusena. Translation and Study by HARALD WIESE and SADANANDA DAS. Studia Indologica Universitatis Halensis, vol. 11. Halle an der Saale: UNIVERSITATSVERLAG HALLE-WITTEN-BERO, 2019. Pp. 166.[euro] 59.

Dating from around 600 CE, the Sanskrit Charter of Visnusena, inscribed on two now-lost copper plates, is a remarkable record of the legal practices of a community of workers and merchants from western India. Since it was first published by Sircar in 1953-54, the specialized terminology of the Charier has often proved quite difficult to interpret. Several scholars have studied the document and attempted translations. Now an interesting pairing of scholars--economist Harald Wiese and Sanskritist Sadananda Das--have collated all previous translations and studies, adding their own commentary and a tentative new translation in a book produced in consultation with a number of scholars, including Timothy Lubin, who also recently translated the Charier in an article in this journal ("Writing and the Recognition of Customary Law in Premodern India and Java," JAOS 135 [2015]: 225-59). The result is an unusually useful sourcebook and original study of the Charter that will be of value to both epigraphists and others who, though interested in the content of the Charier, are not specialists in the study of inscriptions or Indian legal history.

In the introduction Wiese and Das present a brief survey of some Sanskrit legal terminology as relevant to some features of the language of the inscription itself. Here, as throughout, the authors draw on a range of recent philological scholarship in epigraphy and Indian law, such that this is a most up-to-date presentation of this material (including an extensive, equally current, bibliography). The remainder of the book presents the Charter itself, with each line or statute presented as transliterated text (Wiese and Das's emended transcription), followed by discussion, all previous translations, and ending with the authors' new translation (in some cases, two possible new translations). In the conclusion the authors present a suggested table of contents of the statutes in the text, comparing this with previous analyses. There follows a detailed examination of the date, location, and dynasty of the inscription, referring to other inscriptional evidence. In the reflective part of the conclusion, there are short, lucid comments on what we can learn from the Charter when contrasted to the classical...