Sources of Law and Society in India (A Thesis for the Degree of Doctor of Law of the Calcutta University)

With later writers however we find an increasing tendency to refer to the dicta and the examples as embodied in the Vedas for authority till we reach perhaps the culminating point in the elevation of the Veda to the position of a direct source of practical law in the writings of authors like Sabaraswaini and Kumarila Swami. [...] We shall further have to complete the legal dicta themselves by furnishing their presuppositions from a study of them with reference to their environments—the social and legal institutions of the times the ideas of the people the Social Ends and ideals and in short the entire culture of the time to which the dictum belonged. [...] The village is only one of such societies ; the family the caste the izula the community governed by the authority of a common college of learned men that united by the authority of the Guru are some of the societies which go to build up the greater society which given a political constitution would make a state. [...] The Vaisya was the name not of a caste but of the entire body of respectable classes who are differentiated from the privileged classes on the one hand and the servile class on the other (h). [...] While in the earlier Smritis the duty of the king to regard these various societies is imperative in Mann and Yajnvalkya it almost sinks to a recommendation and a matter of grace except of course in the matter of the religious societies represented by the Brahman and the Parishad.