Page 100 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

The Indian Legal System 75

of rape and drowning a woman or mutilating her body for having
committed abortion, and a similar punishment would be directed
towards people who assisted a woman in obtaining an abortion. Other
shastris proposed less extreme punishments: in the case of rape and
abortion they would stand for heavy fines instead of killing, castration
or drowning. By demonstrating the multiple reinterpretation of sacred
Hindu texts by scholars and government officials, Wagle has added im-
portant evidence that the ‘Hindu tradition’ cannot be apprehended as
a monolithic category.
Historian and anthropologist Anne Waters (1998) concludes simi-
larly in her study based on published extracts from the Peshwa Daftar.
4
Her study presents ‘a view of a pre-colonial state of considerable
complexity, a state that may best be characterized by the flexibility
and pragmatism of its judgements’ (ibid.: 3). The different examples
selected by Waters do not constitute a representative sample. They are,
instead, an initial attempt at reconstructing women’s experience with
the legal system of that period from available materials.
According to the examples she provides, the court decisions look
very different than the standard academic perception of ‘traditional
law’, which is supposed to be guided by the Sanskritic law of colonial
India’s Orientalist writings. On the contrary, the courts were more con-
cerned with the pragmatic of social problems rather than with following
textual prescriptions (ibid.: 12). The decisions were also a mix of legal
prescription and custom. This was the result in a murder case. Moro
Shimpi murdered his wife, alleging that she committed adultery (Gune
1953: 365). The husband admitted the crime and was fined Rs 2,000.
But it was customary that when the marriage did not last because of
the fault of the bride, the groom was entitled to recuperate the wealth
or property he had given at the time of the wedding (bride price). So he
was entitled to reclaim the Rs 300 he had given as bride price, although
his accusation of infidelity could be seen with scepticism.
Although both Wagle’s and Waters’ evidence demonstrate that
there were great differences between the sanction prescribed by the
shastric texts and the kotwal’s contextualized punishments, historian
Uma Chakravarti (1995) estimates that the Peshwa’s increasing recourse
to Brahmanic interpretations led to the expansion of Brahmanical
gender ideology. Her review of the kotwal’s papers illustrates that
the sentences against Brahman women were more severe than for