Reflections on Work, Servitude, and Slavery in Medieval India
Donald Davis has been teaching at U.T. Austin since 2013, having worked previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Michigan, and Bucknell University. His primary research concerns the interaction of law and religion in medieval India. From one side, he looks at the historical evidence for law and legal practice in inscriptions, temple archives, and other dated documents as a way to contextualize the law in earlier periods of Indian history. From the other side, he studies the Dharmaśāstra tradition as a system of religious law and jurisprudence, apart from historical questions.
His book, “The Spirit of Hindu Law” (2010), provides a conceptual overview of the Hindu perspective on law and how it can relate to modern questions of policy, ethics, and religion. He has a continuing interest in Malayalam language and literature, and published “The Train that Had Wings” (2005), a collection of translated short stories by the Malayalam writer M. Mukundan.
Most recently, Davis published “The Dharma of Business: Commercial Law in Medieval India” (Penguin, 2017), a study of commerce-related titles of law in medieval Hindu law texts and is a co-editor (with Patrick Olivelle) of a volume for the Oxford History of Hinduism entitled “Hindu Law: A New History of Dharmaśāstra” (OUP, 2018).
His current research broadens his interest in the practice of Hindu law in historical perspective, using materials beyond the Dharmaśāstra texts and from many parts of medieval India. At the same time, he is beginning work on a translation of the Mitākṣarā of Vijñāneśvara, a twelfth-century commentary and compendium on dharma.
(Parents Dining Room)