What was the law like in ancient India?

Sans the Sacred

Have you been looking at the train wreck that is the twisting-turning Amber Heard-Johnny Depp legal battle – a defamation case born of a broken marriage that was thought to have been settled by law earlier -- replete with expert witnesses who offer conveniently different opinions? The courts will deal with it under modern law, but it made me think back to lawsuits in ancient India and what the rules were.

P V Kane, in his incredible work on the Dharmashastras, explains that there are four stages to a lawsuit. First, the plaintiffs make their allegations, then the defendant responds, then the appointed members deliberate, and finally the judge speaks. The defendant has four options — they can admit to the accusations, deny them altogether, plead extenuating circumstances, or point out that the same complaint was earlier defeated. Lawsuits between husband and wife, teacher and student, etc., were usually discouraged and the complainants were urged to settle matters out of court.

The Dharmashastras explain the importance of circumstantial evidence, but warn against relying excessively on it, based on the story of Mandavya from the Mahabharata. The sage Mandavya, as the epic tells us, had taken a vow of silence. A band of thieves who were fleeing the army managed to hide their booty in his hermitage. The king’s army, following the thieves, reached the hermitage. When they asked the sage where the thieves had gone, he remained absolutely silent. As they searched his hermitage and found the stolen goods, they decided he was guilty. But the man wouldn’t speak even to defend himself.

Mandavya was sentenced, along with the thieves, to death by impalement. While the thieves died upon impalement, Mandavya did not. It’s only then that he tells the King the whole story and the King apologises to him for the miscarriage of justice, but Mandavya has to live with the stake driven into his heart.

Later, the sage meets Yama, the god of death, and asks him why he had been punished so. Yama tells him that he had been punished because as a boy, he had hurt insects. Enraged at the disproportionate punishment for a wrong done as a child, Mandavya curses Yama to be born as a human (and Yama is born as Vidura).

P V Kane tells us that the rules against verbal abuse seem to have been rather strict as well. Verbal abuse was classified into three — reproachful (in cases of general insult, like calling someone stupid), obscene, and severe (in cases of false accusations). From this, it seems that defamation – which is what Depp has filed for -- would count as a case of severe abuse. Funnily enough, a penalty was levied even if the words used as abuse were true, such as calling someone convicted of theft a thief.

As for physical assault – which is what it all started with in the case of Heard and Depp -- there were different rules based on who instigated the assault. If one did not retaliate when assaulted, they were to be commended. If the one who was attacked retaliated, the one who began the assault and the one who continued it longer, as the case may be, were to be punished more severely.

The Ramayana and the Bhagavata tell us the story of King Nriga, who donated thousands of cows with gilded horns, accompanied by their calves, to brahmins. Unfortunately for Nriga, one of the cows managed to escape back into the herd and ended up being donated to another brahmin. When the two brahmins approached the king, demanding that he decide the rightful owner of the cow, Nriga prevaricated, offering each of them many other cows in turn. Both, however, refused, and wanted the same cow that had earlier been donated to them. Nriga avoided meeting them and refused to give a judgement. Then he died before deciding the case, and because of the delay he caused in administering justice, he ended up being born as a chameleon.

It was recently reported that India has just about 21 judges per a million people, and thus millions of cases lying undecided. Not the fault of the few judges we do have, of course, but imagine what the authors of the Dharmashastras would say about it!