Dayabhaga

(“division of inheritance”) Pivotal legal
text, written by the Bengali scholar
Jimutavahana (early twelfth century).
As its name would indicate, the
Dayabhaga was concerned with matters
of inheritance, partition, and the division of property, and it eventually
became the primary legal code for the
entire Bengal cultural region. The inheritance pattern in the Dayabhaga stresses
succession, which is very different from
the predominant Hindu pattern of survivorship. Survivorship vests all surviving males in the male line with equal
shares of the family property, but gives
no inheritance to women. Under this
arrangement, the death of a male heir
automatically increases the share of all
the other surviving males, whereas their
share decreases when another male is
born. Under the succession model in the
Dayabhaga, sons do not become shareholders of the family property at birth,
but upon the death of their father. If a
son happens to die before his father, the
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son’s heirs (including his wife and
daughters) become inheritors, not in
their own right, but as representatives of
the deceased heir. Under the Dayabhaga,
widows and daughters can thus have a
share in family property, and they are
allowed to act as agents in their own
right. In theory this arrangement seems
far more advantageous to women, but
in fact it had some gruesome consequences. When the British first settled
in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, they were horrified by the prevalence of sati, the rite in which a widow
would be burned on her husband’s
funeral pyre. It seems that sati was not
nearly so common in many other parts
of India, and one theory is that this rite
was the family’s way to ensure that
their daughter-in-law—who was an
outsider to the family—would not be
able to gain control over any of their
ancestral property.