Hindu Law and Custom (Recht und Sitte) c9.96

c9.96

Even Megasthenes (fragment 27) speaks about the Talion through amputation of that limb of the culprit who maimed the same limb of another person and the classical authors too know that hands were cut off and the hair was shaved by way of punishment (cf. LIA 3, 344). Hiuen-Thsang¹ says that in India the usually inflicted punishments are life-long imprisonment, specially in the case of rebels, mutilation of nose, ears, hands, feet, banishment and ransom, and the money equivalent frequently paid to escape punishment. Alberuni 2, 162 speaks *inter alia* of the combination of the confiscation of property with banishment and with various kinds of mutilation. Of the death sentences impaling, which is mentioned also in the Mah., Rājatar. and in the literature of fables, was in vogue for instance in Golconda even in the 17. century, ¹ in Kolhapur until the period of British rule², and the trampling down by elephants mentioned also in Mṛccha. 146 and the Jātakas (Fausböll) 1, 199 ff., was universally practised in the Mahratta states³. Moreover under Mahratta rule, specially in Central India, the following are said to have been the customary punishments: fines, flogging, imprisonment, putting in stocks, forfeiture and sale of the whole property, amputation of hands, fingers or nose and other corporeal punishments; the hands of a forger of base coins were crushed with one blow of the hammer which is apparently a symbolical punishment.⁴ Fines were particularly in vogue in Rajputana according to Tod⁵, in Mysore according to Dubois ⁶ and in Kolhapur according to the Gazetteer; among the Prāyaścittas fines still play the chief role, cf. § 37. In Nepal, besides the very frequent fines, sometimes amounting to the confiscation of the whole property, banishment and detracting punishments such as the shaving of the hair (§ 42) as well as the horrible mutilations and death-sentences of the Smṛtis are still in vogue. Imprisonment is of temporary nature inasmuch as the prisons are emptied from time to time and the prisoners are handed over to the executioner for corporeal or capital punishments¹. Detracting punishments such as Prāyaścittas ordained by the caste people, take place in India even to this day not seldom. Thus among the Bedars of Bijapur a wife excommunicated from the caste must have her hair shaved with a razor and touch a piece of red-hot coal with her tongue before she may again be accepted into her caste².