Indian Antiquary Vol 24

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 72

68
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[MARCH, 1895.
He connects it with the ancient worsbip of trees and plants, which recording to him are represented in this case by the hair, and refers us to the prophetic ship Argo and the oaks of Dodona. The late Mr. Wilken, 62 who gave very ingenious explanations of most of these ancient usages, and who also wrote a dissertation on the practice of offering up the hair, more correctly looked on it as possibly a symbolic sacrifice, a kind of ransom for the individual whose hair was cut off. On another practice of the domestic ritual, "the Serpent-offering," Dr. Winternitz does not go beyond India, but compares the past with the present and shews how the same customs or others very similar have been preserved down to our own days. Lastly, a native medical man in the British service, Mr. Gupta, has made a study of ancient Hindu law, from the social and sanitary point of view. A very different branch of learning, which we should certainly not have to mention in this connexion in the case of any other country, the ars amatoria, is in India one of the recognized parts of the Smriti. Like the rest it again goes back to a sutra very closely allied both in form and matter with the dharma and grikya sitros, with which it has several chapters in common, sometimes nearly identical in terms, vis., those which deal with the conditions and forms of marriage. So far, it is a sústra quite as much as the others, proclaiming, as they do, the dharma. Otherwise the book is inconceivably filthy, bnt replete with curious details for the history of manners and customs. It has been edited with the commentary of Yasodhara, by the late Pandit Durgaprasada, for private circulation only, although apart from this purely formal announcement, it does not contain a word of English,65 It has been also translated into French (a previous English translation is anonymous) from some source, probably a modern version got in India, but certainly not from the Sansksit text, which it does not follow, even in its arrangement.58 It can be of no value as an archæological document, and as the author has seen fit to add all sorts of dirt gathered from Western literature, it must be classed simply among books of pornography.
From these ancient sitras and other similar writings the entire legal literature has taken its rise.- in the first place the dharmasástras properly so called, then the commentaries on these, and the more systematic trentises which explnin some particular department or which extend over the whole field of law, and compare the authorities, and discuss the pros and cons in single cases, and settle the differences of opinion according to the rules of the dialectic of the Mimarisa. Our thanks are due to M. Strehly for giving as a new translation in French of the Code of Manu, 57 that of Loiseleur-Deslongchamps, the only good one, which dates from 1833, being long out of print and approenrable. The bibliography, which M. Strehly hns given, is insufficient it should either have been left out altogether or treated more fully, and there are a few slight oversights in the preface which might be removed, but the translation itself, in which the author has used the help of the best authorities, is executed with care, and is trustworthy. The notes, which are drawn up with much judgment, give all information necessary for a reader who may be unfamiliar with things Indian. The collection of extracts from the principal commentaries on Manu, which Prof. Jolly had began in the Bibliotheca Indica, had to be stopped after the third part, 68 these texts having meanwhile been published in extenso, but not
This untiring and careful worker, whose works on the populations of the Indian Arohipelago, bave been mentioned more than once in these Reports, died Ang. 27th, 1891, at the age of forty-four.
M. Winternit: Der Sarpabali, in altindischer Schlangencult in the Mitteilungen of the Anthropological Society of Vienna, Vol. XVIII. (1838).
" B. P. Gupta, Surgeon. Major, Sanitary and Social Rules in the Sastras in the Calcutta Review, July 1889.
Sri Vatryayana-praņitam Kimasútram, Yalodhara-virachitayd Jayumangaldkhyayd kryá samstam, Bombay, 1891.
56 Théologie hindoue. Le Kanadoutra, règles de l'amour de Vatryâyana (moralo dos brahmance) traduit par E. Lamairesc, Paris, 1891. I do not know the translation of the Prom Sagar by the same author, and cannot tell which of the numerous versions of this recast of the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purina it reproduces,
BT G. Strehly, Minana dharmosostra. Les lois de Manou, traduites du sanskrit, Paris, 1893, forming Vol. II. of the Bibliothèque d'études des Annales du Musée Guimet.
# Julius Jolly, Manufkasangr ha, being a series of copiou extracts from six unpublished Commentaries of the Code of Marx, Caloutta, 1885-90.