History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v7.c93.432

v7.c93.432

There is a great deal of difference between the interpretation of statutes and the Mīmāṁsā rules of interpretation. In the first place, statutes are man-made, they express the will of the enacting authority, have mostly secular purposes, may be amended or even repealed and have to be expounded according to the intent of those that made them. But the Mīmāṁsā is concerned with the Veda that is deemed eternal and self-existent (and not man-made), that deals with religious matters, cannot be amended or repealed and is to be expounded according to the intent of the Vedic words. Therefore, though some rules of the interpretation of Vedic texts evolved by the Pūrvamīmāṁsā are identical with or resemble the rules of the interpretation of statutes developed in such works as Maxwell's on 'interpretation of statutes', the author will not enter into any detailed treatment showing the parallelisms between Mīmāṁsā rules and Maxwell's rules. This task was attempted over fifty years ago by Mr. Kishorilal Sarkar in his Tagore Law Lectures published in 1909. It would appear ungracious on the part of the present author to offer criticisms against a predecessor in the same field who wrote more than half a century ago when Mīmāṁsā studies by modern educated Indians were in their infancy. But the author cannot help stating that Mr. Sarkar was obsesed by the notion that he must show somehow or other that Jaimini's rules of interpretation were not inferior to those of Maxwell's and agreed closely with him. For this purpose he relies often on far-fetched analogies and employs obscure explanations. In several cases it appears that he had not been able to grasp correctly what Jaimini and Śabara meant.²⁰⁹⁵