History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v4.c63.498

v4.c63.498

⁶⁴² The general rule was that women were not to be killed on any account. Vide H. of Dh. vol. II, pp. 575, 593-94. Certain offences were exceptions. Even as to them Vas. XXI. 10 and Yāj. I. 72 suggest another and very mild alternative viz. abandonment (*tyāga*), when a woman conceives from intercourse with a man of lower varṇa or when a woman was guilty of killing her husband or foetus. Acc. to the Mit. on Yāj. III. 268 the king appears to have had to undergo some expiation for ordering the death of a guilty woman. In the 18th century the famous judge of the Peshwa's court, Rāmśāstri Prabhune, ordered a woman guilty of a brāhmaṇa's murder to undergo only the expiation of circumambulating the holy shrine and hill of Tryambakeśvara near Nasik ('Selections from Peshwa's Daftar', vol. 43 No. 156 pp. 121-122). Under sec. 382 of the Indian Criminal Procedure Code 'If a woman sentenced to death is found to be pregnant, the High Court shall order the execution of the sentence to be postponed and may, if it thinks fit, commute the sentence to transportation for life'.