Rev.: Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence, by Christopher Fleming, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021
23/11/2022
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 59, 4
p. 544-546
Christopher Fleming’s Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence is a rich and insightful study of ownership and inheritance in precolonial and colonial India. Fleming effortlessly reveals the intertextuality within the Sanskrit knowledge systems of Dharmaśāstra, Mīmāṃsāśāstra and Nyāyaśāstra. By studying ownership and inheritance in these different scholarly contexts and their responses to one another, a central contribution of the book is an exposition of the scholarly networks through which ideas on ownership and inheritance move and are subsequently used and transformed in precolonial and colonial India by Sanskrit intellectuals.