Classical law of India/ by Robert Lingat;translated by J. Duncan M. Derrett

At the end of the Second World War the Indian subcontinent found itself equipped (or perhaps. better. encumbered) with three main types of Hindu law. In matters of family law and some other topics of which the most prominent was the law governing religious endowments and charities. almost all Hindus amounting to a population of about four hundred millions were governed by a system professedly derived from the dharma-sastra. the "science of righteousness". the ancient indigenous holy law of India. (There were a few exceptions among the Hindus chiefly those who. in British India. had married under the Special Marriage Act. and those who, in French India, had "renounced" their religious law in favour of the civil law of France.) In the forms in which it was administered it was called "Hindu law". In the area known as British India, which was ruled by Britain through the Viceroy. this "Hindu law" had developed under the aegis of Common Law and Equity, modified occasionally by statutes, not all of which were clearly understood or put into practice by the public at large. into a system known since the 1920's by the pejorative but accurate name of "Anglo-Hindu law". The courts constantly referred themselves to the dharma-sastra texts, but subject to a method which had been gradually devised during British rule. They also referred to previous decisions of the High Courts and the Privy Council. The result often coincided with what indigenous Hindu jurists of a century before might have recommended, and often did not.

In the French possessions another system was in force, which can be called "Franco-Hindu law". Characteristically, the French took considerable interest in the system, intellectually as well as practically, and there is a respectable bibliography, in which the name of L. Sorg figures prominently and honourably. In the Portuguese territories the legislation of Portugal made a substantial but uneven impact upon the indigenous laws. The tangled web of law (not unmarked by Goans who had adjusted themselves to the resulting chaos) awaited the skilled and authoritative treatment of the celebrated Portuguese jurist. Luis da Cunha Gonçalves, himself born in Goa. To this day Franco-Hindu law and Luso-Hindu law, as we must call the personal law in force in the former Portuguese possessions, must be taken into account by any scholar and by any would-be reformer.