History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v4.c63.646.2

v4.c63.646.2

the rights to property are co-extensive with the liability to perform śrāddha and to pay off debts (which is quite logical and reasonable), that the texts relating to the same subject matter must be harmonized and reconciled as far as it is reasonably possible⁷⁴⁴ to do (*ekavākyatā-nyāya*), that apparently conflicting texts are to be assigned their appropriate spheres (*viṣayavyavasthā*), and that a direct conflict (and so an option) is to be presumed only if no other recourse is open, the Mitākṣarā and other commentators put forward the interpretation that the texts stating that the great-grandson is not liable to pay the great-grandfather's debt apply only to cases where the great-grandson inherits no ancestral property, but that he is *liable* if he takes ancestral property. Dr. Jolly in his note on Nār. IV. 6 (in S. B. E. vol. 33 p. 44) remarks: "the doctrine, viz. the liability to pay debts contracted by an ancestor extends to the great-grandson, is opposed to the teaching of such an eminent authority as *Vijñāneśvara, who maintains in the Mitākṣarā that the great-grandson*⁷⁴⁵ *is not liable for debts contracted by his great-grandfather, and conversely that he does not inherit his property*. He makes similar remarks in his Tagore Law Lectures for 1885 (on 'adoption, partition' &c. p. 171). Dr. Jolly is under some misapprehension since the Mit.