About the Book: A Companion to Dharmasastra
This work highlights the dharmasastra essentials by listing the major authors
with their biographies, titles and their dates of composition, published
editions and commentaries. It shows how dharmasastra works have influenced the
Indian way of life.
Dharmashastra is not just a corpus of scriptural texts. It is rather a genre, in
its own right, of writings comprising prescriptive codes of righteous conduct in
different spheres: whether familial, societal, ritualistic, legal, or even
political. For the first time, this book offers a quintessential view of the
dharmashastra (smriti) literature. Which today, along with its digests and
commentaries, looks like a vast reservoir