Legal Consciousness in Medieval Indian Narratives

In this essay, we make a case for reading narratives from the great story collections of medieval India as evidence of legal consciousness. We attempt to redirect the largely empirical approach of legal consciousness studies toward the literary and historical analysis of Sanskrit texts. In so doing, we move beyond a legal history of India that focuses too narrowly on the texts of Sanskrit jurisprudence. We conclude that such analysis provides insight into both the literarily constructed image of law as the hegemonic domain of elite Brahmins and kings and the assumptions and awareness of law and legal procedure among ordinary people in this historical context.