For a number of years I have been working on a new translation, to be followed by a first critical edition, of Jīmūtavāhana's Dāyabhāga, the twelfth-century nibandha which the British authorities in Calcutta heralded as the principal Sanskrit text on inheritance for the Bengal School of Hindu Law. The Dāyabhāga has been translated only once, in 1810 (together with the section on inheritance of Vijñāneśvara's commentary on the YDh, the Mitākṣarā), by Henry Thomas Colebrooke. Colebrooke's translation has been often reprinted but has never been replaced.

The new translation has been close to completion for some time, except, first, for a few specific and well circumscribed passages in which Jīmūtavāhana's reasoning is not yet sufficiently clear, and, second, on account of some general problems which make me wonder whether anyone so far has understood Jīmūtavāhana as he wished to be understood. It is one of these general problems which I want to address in the following pages.

One important way in which Jīmūtavāhana and, as a result, the Bengal School of Hindu law under British rule and in Independent India until 1956 differed from Hindu law elsewhere in India, was that, for the author of the Dāyabhāga, the head of the joint family has absolute power over joint family property. No one else, not even his sons, has any right of ownership as long as he is alive. They cannot sell it, gift it, or dispose of it in any form, without their father's permission.