Dr. Prabhakar Apte has a Master's degree in Law, in addition to his Ph.D in Sanskrit. He got the first rank in the University in Hindu law. His area of interest is Franco-Hindu jurisprudence, a term he coined. “Duncan Derrett, an authority on Hindu law, wrote a book titled ‘Essays in Classical and Modern Hindu Law: Anglo-Hindu Legal Problems.' My coinage was inspired by Derrett's title,” he says.
Apte describes how even those who converted to Christianity continued to be governed by Hindu law, in French administered Pondicherry. The case of Kanakaraya Mudaliar, a dubash in Pondicherry is an interesting one. Kanakaraya had converted to Christianity, and he died leaving his wife and his childless, widowed daughter-in- law. When the question of deciding who should inherit Kanakaraya's property came up in 1748, Dupleix decided the case combining Mitakshara law and the concept of ‘legitim' from French jurisprudence. Legitim means balance of justice. Balancing the interests of the two women was what Dupleix had to achieve. The two women were given life interest in the property, and after their lifetime the properties were to go to Kanakaraya's brother Tanappa Mudaliar.
In South India, Mitakshara law was applicable to the Hindus. The standard law book was ‘Smriti Chandrika.' Dupleix used the ‘Smriti Chandrika' in his decision. In Mitakshara coparcenary, which contains male members of four generations, a woman would only be given life interest in her husband's property, and after her death, the property would go to her husband's family. That was the principle Dupleix followed in the Kanakaraya Mudaliar case.
While studying French jurisprudence in Pondicherry, Apte even met the seventh generation descendant of Tanappa Mudaliar. His name is Jaganoudiagou, and this Apte explains is a corruption of 'Jnana' and 'tyaga'!
In the early 1800s, a committee was appointed by the French Government to go into the cases decided according to the Hindu law. The members of the committee would advise the Judge and help in deciding cases. A collection of all such cases was made by Leo Storg, the Chief Justice of Pondicherry, and published in 1895. Leo Storg's report, has a list of 100 Dharma Sastra texts, which the French used in adjudication of cases. Till 1982, when the Indian Succession Act was introduced in Pondicherry, Christians in Pondicherry were governed by Hindu law. “I managed to locate Storg's report in a library in Paris. The best reference material for a study of Franco-Hindu jurisprudence can be found in Paris.”
Apte draws a distinction in the approach towards the use of Hindu law by the Portuguese, the French and the British. The Portuguese rulers allowed Hindus to decide personal cases. However, if Hindus came before Portuguese courts, they would be governed by Portuguese law. The British tried to introduce their jurisprudence into Hindu laws. The restitution of conjugal rights is one such introduction. In Hindu law, there is no provision for such restitution, but this feature introduced by the British has been incorporated into the Hindu Marriage Act. In general, French jurists were more appreciative of Dharma Sastras than the British.
A mammoth project
Apte was also editor of the Sanskrit dictionary project of Deccan College, Pune, for 20 years. “This dictionary is based on historical principles,” says Apte. For the project, words were collected from a total of 1500 works, ranging from the Vedas to Sanskrit works of the 19th century.
Words have undergone changes in meaning over time and the dictionary aims to record the different meanings that a word has acquired. The word ‘atma' in Vedic times, meant ‘body!' In the ‘Upanishads,' ‘atma' means soul. So this is a historical development, and such changes are to be recorded in the dictionary.
“The dictionary was originally titled ‘Dictionary of Sanskrit on Historical Principles.' But later one of the professors involved in the project added the word ‘encyclopaedic' to the title,” says Apte. “So now it's called ‘Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Sanskrit on Historical Principles.'”
Why encyclopaedic? “The same word can mean different things. The word ‘vimana,' for example, means a flying machine, in aeronautics. In temple architecture, it means the superstructure over the garba griha. In Ayurveda, there is a section called ‘vimana,' which deals with the quantification of doses,” explains Apte. So the data collected had to be organised vertically on the basis of historical principles, and horizontally too, the latter giving it an encyclopaedic dimension.
The more than one crore references are all put on slips of paper, which are stored in a scriptorium. The project was planned by Prof. S. M. Katre, former Professor of Indo-European Philology and Director of the Institute. Work began in 1948, and publishing began in 1976. Each page has 60 entries. Seven thousand pages have been printed so far. “But we have not got beyond the letter ‘a',” says Apte.
The dictionary has a lot of quotations and will be useful to researchers and to those who give religious discourses. “For the word ‘agni', we selected 500 citations, from a possible 5,000. The total number of meanings and nuances for the word ‘agni,' has exceeded 100,” says Apte.
Apte's knowledge of many languages leads to an interesting discussion on how sometimes the same word means different things in different languages. ‘Avasara', in Sanskrit and in Marathi means leisure. In Tamil it means ‘hurry', and in Telugu it means ‘urgency.'
