INSTITUTES

OF

HINDU LAW:

OR,

THE ORDINANCES OF MENU,

ACCORDING TO THE

GLOSS OF CULLÚCA,

COMPRISING THE

INDIAN SYSTEM OF DUTIES,

RELIGIOUS AND CIVIL. ·

· VERBALLY TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL SANSCRIT. *

WITH

A PREFACE,

BY SIR WILLIAM JONES.

THE PREFACE.

IT is a maxim in the fcience of legislation and government, that Laws are of no avail without manners, or, to explain the fentence more fully, that the best intended legislative provisions would have no beneficial effect even at firft, and none at all in a short course of time, unless they were congenial to the difpofition and habits, to the religious prejudices, and approved immemorial usages, of the people, for whom they were enacted; efpecially if that people univerfally and fincerely believed, that all their ancient ufages and established rules of conduct had the fanction of an actual revelation from heaven: the legislature of Britain having shown, in compliance with this maxim, an intention to leave the natives of these Indian provinces in poffeffion of their own Laws, at least on the titles of contracts and inheritances, we may humbly prefume, that all future provisions, for the administration of justice and government in India, will be con formable, as far as the natives are affected

by them, to the manners and opinions of the natives themselves; an object, which cannot poffibly be attained, until those manners and opinions can be fully and accurately known. Thefe confiderations, and a few others more immediately within my province, were my principal motives for wishing to know, and have induced me at length to publish, that system of duties, religious and civil, and of law in all its branches, which the Hindus firmly believe to have been promulged in the beginning of time by MENU, fon or grandson of BRAHMA', or, in plain language, the firft of created beings, and not the oldest only, but the holiest, of legislators; a system fo comprehensive and fo minutely exact, that it may be confidered as the Inftitutes of Hindu Law, preparatory to the copious Digeft, which has lately been compiled by Pandits of eminent learning, and introductory perhaps to a Code, which may supply the many natural defects in the old jurifprudence of this country, and, without any deviation from its principles, accommodate it juftly to the improvements of a commercial age.

We are loft in an inextricable labyrinth of imaginary aftronomical cycles, Yugas, Mabáyugas, Calpas, and Menwantaras, in attempting to calculate the time, when the firft MENU, according to the Bráhmens, governed this world,