Administration and Social Life under Vijayanagar c8.38

c8.38

We have no reliable source to draw from for a detailed knowledge of the machinery of the Vijayanagar judicial administration. The inscriptions of the period refer to certain crimes committed by the people and record how they were punished. The chroniclers also are helpful only in ascertaining certain details with regard to the administration of criminal justice in the empire. We do not know exactly how civil suits involving the determination of law were decided. Civil cases seem to have largely been decided by arbitration though we hear also of special judges for deciding such cases as at the capital. On this subject the observations of Sir H. S. Maine are of some interest. He says: “Though the Brahminical written law assumes the existence of king and judge, yet at the present moment in some of the best governed semi-independent Native States, there are no institutions corresponding to our courts of justice. Disputes of a civil nature are adjusted by the elders of each village community, or occasionally when they relate to land, by the functionaries charged with the collection of the Prince’s revenue. Such criminal jurisdiction, as is found, consists in the interposition of the military power to punish breaches of the peace of more than ordinary gravity. What must be called criminal law is administered through the arm of the soldier.”²¹ But the latter part of this statement is open to question. Though it might have been true of the period in which he