Hindu Law and Custom (Recht und Sitte) c7.731

c7.731

The later jurists have developed a vast law of adoption out of the simple but somewhat vague rules of the Smṛtis¹ and there is a mass of monographs on it—Dattakacandrikā, Dattakadarpana, Dattakadīdhiti, Dattakamīmāṃsā, Dattakakalpalatā, Dattakaumudī, Siddhāntamañjarī, Dattārka etc. Dattakacandrikā and Dattakamīmāṃsā of these works have been translated and these translations along with the occasional remarks on adoption in works on the law of inheritance such as the Mit. and the Dāyabhāga are the principal works on which the verdicts given at the English courts and the English text-books on adoption are based. With reference to the latter, particularly to the very exhaustive and instructive treatise of Sir R. West², I should like only to remark that many of the hazardous theories which the court practice Erroneous views in the modern law of adoption. is now laboriously and gradually trying to strip off, would never have originated if from the beginning also other works had been consulted than those mentioned above. This may be said e. g. of the theory that the ceremonies accompanying a legal adoption mentioned in the Smrtis are quite indispensable and that it is generally inadmissible to adopt grown-up or nearly grown-up persons or the son of the daughter or of the sister and in general of such a person whose mother the adoptive father could have married and also the theory that any particular stipulation between the parents of both sides is inadmissible in the case of a Dvyāmuṣyāyaṇa adoption, etc¹. Modern customary law too, about which a few notices will follow, shows that these rules of the Smrtis are to be taken more as advices than as laws.