History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v4.c63.t2.985

v4.c63.t2.985

¹⁸⁸⁶ An attempt at a systematical collection of the Kalivarjya texts and elucidation thereof was made by me in a paper submitted to the 8th All India Oriental Conference held at Mysore in December 1935. The paper was published in the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 12 pp. 1-18 (New Series), 1936. Recently (1943) Mr. Batuknath Bhattacharya has published a book which contains a full treatment of Kalivarjyas. He states in the preface that it is 'an exact reprint of the thesis for Jogendrachandra Ghose Research Prize in Comparative Indian Law for 1933', that the subject is 'comparatively fresh and unexplored' and that the treatment is on lines marked out by the writer himself. He claims that his work is 'original as a whole except one section on secondary sons'. He does not state exactly in what year the thesis for a prize of 1933 was submitted to the Calcutta University. Presumably a thesis for a prize of 1933 should have been submitted in 1934 or 1935 at the latest. No satisfactory explanation is given why the thesis was published in 1943, so long after the year of the prize, nor does he mention my paper published so far back as 1936. It appears from quotations in the book as printed that it was probably retouched, if not actually written, after 1937. For example, on p. 76 he quotes a passage from the Smṛtimuktāphala (section on Varṇāśrama p. 201), which was published by Principal J. R. Gharpure only in 1937 in Devanāgarī. If the original thesis was written or revised in or after 1937 my paper published in 1936 should have been mentioned. Mr. Batuknath Bhattacharya in his paper 'the sources of dharma and their comparative authority' published in the Proceedings of the 10th Oriental Conference at Tirupati held in 1940 refers to my paper on Kalivarjyas (p. 160) as 'brief and compact'. This shows that he knew my paper years before he published his work in 1943. The claim of the subject being 'unexplored' and the thesis being 'original' is hardly admissible.