Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy wants all newly graduating lawyers to have an understanding on Mimamsa—an ancient Hindu school of legal thought.
“In the next term of BJP 2019-2024 the government must require all newly graduating advocates to pass a question paper on Mimamsa School of legal logic,” Swamy tweeted on Tuesday.
Mimamsa is one of the six systems of Indian philosophy and has deeply influenced the formulation of Hindu law. Mimamsa principles were the traditional system of interpretation of legal texts.
The Supreme Court had earlier lamented how the traditional Indian reasoning and logic of legalese have been ignored over the years.
“MIP (Mimamsa Principles of Interpretation) which were our traditional principles of interpretation for over 2,500 years, but are unfortunately ignored in our Courts of law today. It is deeply regrettable that in our Courts of law, lawyers quote Maxwell and Craies but nobody refers to the MPI. Most lawyers would not have even heard of their existence,” a top court bench of then justices Markandey Katju and A.K. Ganguly had observed in 2009.
The top court had said that most of the Mimamsa principles are rational and scientific and can be utilised in the legal field.
“Our ancient thinkers had created a system of interpretation called the Mimamsa Rules of Interpretation, which appears to have been totally suppressed by the British, evidently because they wanted to create an impression that Indians are a race of fools and savages with no worthwhile intellectual achievement to their credit,” Justice Katju later said in a Facebook post in 2014.
The original works on Mimamsa are in Sanskrit, however, Justice Katju recommended Prof. Kishori Lal Sarkar's The Mimamsa Rules of Interpretation as a good English introduction.
In his book, Legal and Constitutional History of India, senior advocate and Rajya Sbah MP Rama Jois writes: “Leading Smriti writers and commentators of the Smritis fully utilised the fundamental rules of Mimamsa laid down by Jaimini for clarifying and expounding the several complicated provisions of law. Therefore, Mimamsa, though originated in interpreting the rules governing principles of religious acts, came to occupy an important position in the ancient legal system of this country.”
