Los temas incluyen la lectura y clasificacion de textos antiguos, en la que destaca la perspectiva historica de los Vedas, el Ramayana, el Mahabharata, los Puranas, los
Dharmashastras, y se incluyen ademas discusiones sobre textos budistas y jainistas.
His consciousness reveals a chaotic mix of incommensurate, even opposed, notions derived from the discourse of vamashramadharma in the
Dharmashastras, the Upanishadic guna theory, (9) and the principles of karma, (10) all tendentiously assimilated to uphold a dualist Madhva metaphysics (99).
The dharmashastras deal with both religious as well as legal duty.
Kirkwood's (1989) identification of "truthfulness as a standard," can be traced to the Dharmashastras.
While the
dharmashastras, which are the Hindu religious laws, were being codified, Muslim laws were also transmogrified from a law that applied in both the public and the private realms--indeed, a legal system--into a law that operated only in the private sphere of family.
60) According to the Brahmanical texts that they were reading, such as the Rig-Veda and
Dharmashastras, Orientalist scholars found a religious model which posited a static social order established on Bharata since time immemorial.
Hindu marriage is said to be derived from laws interpreted in the
Dharmashastras which in turn have their roots in the 3000-year-old hyms called Vedas and Smritis.
Further, in the Hindu tradition, the
Dharmashastras (the Treatises on Dharma) express the ideas that women are lower in the social order than men and that this is a result of negative karmic circumstances.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, both European and Indian scholars have been deeply involved in the study of caste, class, and race in India, but have relied on ancient normative literature, such as the
dharmashastras and older religious texts, to substantiate their theories of the origins and growth of caste.
Spivak's turn to the Hindu
dharmashastras in "Can the Subaltern Speak?
This irony can possibly be explained by the historical fact that the Hindu personal code, derived from the
dharmashastras, has never gained the foundational value for the Hindu community that the sharia has gained for the Muslim community.
Nowhere is the term "Hindu" ever mentioned in any scriptural work now revered by Hindus, not even in the normative and canonical texts of Brahmanism like the
Dharmashastras.
