Hindu Administrative Institutions c10.s1.19

c10.s1.19

Passing on to the consideration of the actual law in operation we meet more with civil justice than with criminal, ordinarily in the classical period of Hindu India. There is not much of the positive law in Vedic literature in general and this assumed definite shape, or became embodied in the codes of law or the *Dharmaśāstras*. Thus we find much of the positive law in these *smṛti* texts. There is no warrant for the theory that there was any elaborate judicial organization in the Vedic period or rather there was no need for it, the people living in scattered tracts and in groups, each group being self-contained and independent. Here the elders of that group took cognizance of the cases arising among the members of the group, and punishment was awarded according to the nature of the offence by the group elders in accordance with local usages or customs. Even here we cannot deny that the Vedic Indians had a conception of differentiation of the law as civil and criminal. Macdonell and Keith, after enumerating a few crimes such as slaying of an embryo (*bhrūṇa*), homicide, murder of a Brahman, and treachery, remark thus: ‘There is no trace of organized communal justice vested either in the king or in the people. There still seems to have prevailed the system of wergeld (vaira) which indicates that criminal justice remained in the hands of those who were wronged.¹ The system of money-compensation for murder is examined by R. Roth in a contribution entitled ‘wergelim Veda’ to the *Zeitschrift der Deuschen Morgenländischen gesellschaft*.² Surely it marks a stage when the criminal powers vested in the sovereign were rather weak and the latter was, perhaps, not sufficiently armed to award severe punishment.