Navya-Nyāya and the Maithila and Gauḍa Schools of Jurisprudence

Abstract

This chapter examines two schools of Jurisprudence that emerged in eastern India between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries CE: that of Mithilā (Maithila/Miśra) and Bengal (Gauḍa). These schools of jurisprudence, in contrast to the school of thought that developed around Vijñāneśvara’s Ṛjumitākṣarā, were neither strictly academic nor pan-Indian. Rather, they were deeply regional (in interest, influence, and self-identification), isolated almost completely from Vijñāneśvara’s Mitākṣarā and its Mīmāṃsā-derived theories of ownership, highly competitive (particularly in Bengal), and influenced by Navya-Nyāya philosophical debates about ownership. The core legal and philosophical ideas analysed are ownership-by-the-death-of-the-previous-owner (uparamasvatva) and ownership as a śāstric (śāstraikasamadhigamya) phenomenon respectively.