Indian Legal Literature

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->When entering west Europe they initially had letters of protection from the King of Hungary. This privileged situation did not last long as amazement at their way of life commonly led to hostilities. <b>The Gypsy way of life still leads to hostilities from the people of their host nations. Europeans regard "private property" as sacrosanct, whereas gypsies do not have a word for "possess", which gives rise to two incompatible ways of life and a continual problem of gypsies being regarded as "thieves" from the European's view.
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In each host nation gypsies appear to take on the religion, names and language of their hosts, but within the Rom they maintain their Rom language, names, music, customs and Indian looks. This tight community has meant that after some six hundred years there is still a large population of gypsies not integrated or assimilated with Romanians. link<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Such a view has another consequence. A<b>gain, unlike Western theories, our ethical systems do not recognize that some organism could possibly have obligations to humankind as a whole.</b> Each organ-ism assumes some specific obligations toward other organisms within the community morally relevant to it. Outside of such a morally relevant community, one cannot formulate specific obligations. Where such is the case, there all these “others” are really not ‘selves’ from the point of view of the one who has no specific obligations towards them. They remain at the limit of one’s horizon as vaguely intuited presences, so to speak. This circumstance sheds light, I believe, on the peculiar indifference that people show towards poverty and suffering of fellow-human beings in Asia.

<b>There is some vague parallel to be drawn between this notion of morality and the ‘situational ethics’ (or even casuistry), which is popular in some parts of the European culture. </b>Contrast and critique of it fall outside the scope of this paper.


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There is no way we could represent our notion of morality in a computer program, unless it be in the form of some complex induction rules. But we are not inducing any rule whatsoever from the stories which depict moral actions or moral orders. We are not reasoning the way it requires to be represented, if written as a program: “A did X in situation Z; my situation is analogous in some relevant details; therefore, provisionally, I ought to do X as well.”. We could not be doing any such thing, if we learn through mimesis. You could, of course, represent our ways of being moral as thought it was an application of an inductive rule or even a set of them. This will tell you what your notion of the moral is, but not what we do when we act morally.<b> (This is one of the reasons why, I believe, our notions of being moral differs both from situational ethics and from casuistry.).</b>
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A “higher socio-economic formation” is not necessary to realize this absurdity that Marx refers to; another world-model, a different one, will do just as fine. The American-Indians just could not com-prehend that the European settlers would want to buy land from them. “How could we sell what is not ours to sell, or yours to buy? How do you sell a Cheetah or its speed?” they asked in one of the most moving and memorable documents ever composed (It is called the “Speech of Seattle”). The idea is equally absurd to the world models of the Asian Indians as well. The difference between these two Indian communities is their degree of adaptation to the European demands: one adapted and survived; the other did not and was wiped out. One did not understand, but acted as though it did; the other failed to simulate, and paid the price for it.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->