Hindu law was always a religious, rather than a political, project, rooted in a sense of immutable tradition. Behind it was the idea of cosmological order as enshrined in the wisdom of the ancient, obscure revelations of the Vedas. The duty of all humans was to maintain that order by complying with the rules of the dharma, which specified how they should behave, and it was this that the brahmins worked out in their legal texts. Simple and often mundane statements about duties and the consequences of events and activities created an order of rules and categories which, like the Mesopotamian
...more
