The relationship between persons is one of two traditionally conceived forms of human interaction governed by law. The other is the relationship of persons and things, to be considered in Chapter 4. Together, we might use the Hindu jurisprudential views of these two legally recognized forms of human interaction with the world as a kind of summary of the substantive law in the Hindu tradition. In particular, it is in these interactions that we will find the most visible connections of law, theology, and ordinary life that undergird the legal imagination in Hinduism and, as I have argued, in all legal systems.

Various types of relationship exist between people and these can all be reified or instantiated by the law. Think only of the historical significance and tragedy of laws pertaining to masters and slaves. Other ordinary relationships, too – between parents and children (more often father and sons), husband and wife, between classmates or business partners, or even between individuals and corporations – occupy a huge and central place in every legal system. The law promotes or prohibits these relationships according to certain fundamental views of human nature and life itself that are literally written into the text of the law. Famously, the nineteenth-century legal historian Henry Sumner Maine argued that the historical progress of law may be described as “a movement from Status to Contract.”