- Conclusion
In the foregoing pages most of the classical works and the most prominent writers on Dharmaśāstra during a period of about twenty-five centuries have been passed in review. The number of authors and works on dharmaśāstra is legion. All these numberless authors and works were actuated by the most laudable motives of regulating the Aryan society in all matters, civil, religious and moral, and of securing for the members of that society happiness in this world and the next. They laid the greatest emphasis on the duties of every man as a member of the whole Aryan society, as a member of the particular class to which he belonged and very little emphasis on the privileges of men. They created great solidarity and cohesion among the several classes of the Aryan society in India in spite of their conflicting interests and inclinations and enabled Hindu society to hold its own against successive aggre ssions of foreign invaders. They preserved Hindu culture and literature in the midst of alien cultures and in spite of bigoted foreign domination. There is no doubt that the authors on dharmaśāstra in their desire to evolve order out of chaos and to adjust and harmonise the varying practices of people with the dicta of ancient sages were guilty of the faults of raising hair-splitting arguments, divisions and sub-divisions and also of thinking that religious rites and formularies were the be-all and end-all of human existence. But living as, most of the later writers did, in the midst of aggressive and violently unsympathetic cultures and rulers and possessing no powerful central government that sympathised with their ideals, they were driven more and more to revolve within their own narrow grooves and could not see far in order to regulate society in a free and buoyant spirit. In spite of
1536
Vide Vinayak v, Lakshmibai, 1 Bom, H.C. R. 117 at p. 124.Brief Note on Works from Kamarupa
981
these defects, the work done by the writers on dharmaśāstra should excite our admiration and entitles them to the regard of all those that are interested in the study of the vicissitudes of Hindu society for thousands of years,