Between 1930 and 1962, the eminent Sanskritist and lawyer Pandurang Vaman Kane (pronounced KAH-nay) produced a five-volume monograph entitled History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law), published by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, India. This work of over 6,500 pages provides much more than a narrow focus on law or the special genre of Sanskrit literature devoted to religious and legal duties, the Dharmaśāstra. It contains rather something close to an intellectual history of Hinduism, from its origins in the Vedic texts to contemporary debates about the “reform” of Hinduism in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kane understood his task as presenting the broadest possible survey of the role legal, religious, and ethical thought in the history of Hinduism, with regular incursions into other religious traditions as well. A modern scholar of Dharmaśāstra, Richard Lariviere, is fond of saying, “We all make our living from Kane’s footnotes.” Indeed, Kane’s work has become a constant source of reference and orientation in South Asian studies of law, religion, ritual, literature, history, and more. It is a work that has perhaps literally launched a thousand dissertations because it is so easy to refer a student or a colleague to the appropriate section of Kane as a way to get their bearings in relation to hundreds of topics in the fields of Hindu studies or Indian social and intellectual history....
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