History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v4.c63.t2.508

v4.c63.t2.508

eminent Jurists and Judges as Sir William Jones, Sir Thomas Strange and others. For example, Sir Thomas Strange in 'Hindu Law' (1830) vol. I observes (at p. 311), "sufficient be it to observe that Hindu pleading was noticed with commendation by Sir William Jones and that, with some trifling exceptions, the Hindu doctrine of evidence is, for the most part, distinguished nearly as much as our own, by the excellent sense that determines the competency and designates the choice of witnesses with the manner of examining and the credit to be given them; as well as by the solemn earnestness with which the obligation of truth is urged and inculcated; insomuch that less cannot be said of this part of their law than that it will be read by every English lawyer with a mixture of admiration and delight, as it may be studied by him to advantage. Even the *pious perjury* which it has been supposed to sanction1605a being resolvable after all into no greater liberty than what our juries (not indeed with perfect approbation) have long been allowed to take, where the life of a prisoner on trial before them is at stake; credit is to be given to the pregnant brevity of the Hindu oath viz. 'what you know...declare at large and with truth' (Manu VIII. 80); as also to the noble warning, with which the subject as detailed by Manu is ushered in, that 'either the court must not be entered by judges, parties and witnesses or law and truth must be openly declared' (Manu VIII. 13)." The medieval digests made a very near approach to the modern ideal of equality of all men before the law. How even in the 20th century the much vaunted equality before the law of all people in England is far from being achieved and how it often proves quite illusory where the poor or the labouring classes are concerned is well brought out in a book entitled 'Justice in England' by a Barrister published by Victor Gollancz in 1938, especially in chapters I and VI. The Hindu jurists evolved tolerably clear and sound ideas about contracts, debts, deposits and pledges, sales, mortgages and gifts of immovable properties, developed a system of joint family rights and liabilities and laid down a peculiar law of inheritance and succession to males and females. The Hindu system of inheritance and succession pursues a middle course. It does not distribute the estate of a deceased person simultaneously among several heirs as under the Mahomedan Law (where the widow, the father, mother, sons and daughters of a man take the estate together if they are all alive at the time). Nor did the Hindu system confine the descent to a single person among a group of heirs of the same degree and sex as in the English system before 1926 (where the eldest son succeeded to the real estate of an intestate person).