Preface

Summary

I was inspired to collect Prof. Rocher's writings on Hindu law and Dharmaśāstra in the process of finding and gathering certain of his articles for use in a course on Hindu law. It became apparent that Rocher's fundamental writings were obscured by virtue of their dispersion in a variety of Festschrifts and less popular journals -in contrast to the regularly reprinted editions of works by Lingat and Derrett, perhaps the two other great Western scholars of Hindu law in the mid-to-late 20th century. It was also true that Rocher's ideas had not received adequate attention in the most recent work in the field. To my mind, this was very unfortunate and I felt the problems could best be rectified by making Rocher's works available in a more centralized and readily available format. I hope that this final collection, an incomplete, but more than representative assemblage of Rocher's Kleine Schriften, will make the publication of work on Hindu law without an appreciation of Rocher's contributions more and more difficult. The most interesting reward of re-reading Roch-er's works and cataloging his ideas has been the challenge they pose to my own writing on the subject, which I had thought was already heavily informed by Rocher's direct and indirect influence on my training.

I have been superbly assisted in the preparation of this collection by three fine graduate students from my department, Torrey Goad, Jeremy Holiday, and John Stavrellis who together completed the laborious task of re-keying all of the included articles from their original contexts. I am especially grateful for Mr. Goad's meticulous attention to diacritical and tabular details.