Explaining what made ancient Greek law unusual, Michael Gagarin observes
that most premodern legal cultures “wrote extensive sets (or codes) of laws for
academic purposes or propaganda but these were not intended to be accessible
to most members of the community and had relatively little effect on the actual
operation of the legal system.” This article addresses the implications of writing
for customary or regional law in South and Southeast Asia. The textual tradition
of Dharmaśāstra (“Hindu law”), which canonizes a particular model of Brahmin
customary norms, can certainly be called a “scholarly” exercise, and it was also
intended as propaganda for the Brahmanical cosmopolitan world order. But it also
formulated a procedural principle to recognize the general validity of other, even
divergent, customary norms, though for the most part such rules remained lex
non scripta. On the other hand, inscriptions provide evidence that writing was
used for diverse legal purposes and offers glimpses of actual legal practice. In
these records, customary laws are sometimes laid down as statutes by decree of
a ruler or community body, or are simply invoked as long-established customary
rules. But even when Dharmaśāstra texts are not directly cited, their influence over
the longue durée is discernable in the persistence of śāstric legal categories and
terms of art. This influence is even more evident in Java, where legal codes on
the Dharmaśāstra model were composed in Javanese, and where the inscriptions
came to exhibit a closer connection with śāstric discourse than is found in India.