VYAWAŞTRIA?!DARPANA r“ 315 SECTION VI. ON MAINTENANCE. Although the law, as current in Bengal, ordains that that relative, who, by presentation of oblations confers the greatest benefit on the decoased proprietor, is entitled to inherit his estate, yet so anxiously careful has the law been that there shall exist no ultimate distress in the dependant members of his family, while means exist to prevent it, that is, it declares such persons to be entitled to maintenance out of his estate.* - Persons entitled to maintenance are of two classes:–I. those whom the deceased proprietor was bound to support, (and who with a few exceptions are included in the series of heirs). II. those who would have succeeded together with the inheritor, had they been free from that fault or defect for which one is excluded from inheritance, or had they not been barred by custom. The claims of the first class of dependant members of the family of the deceased proprietor are grounded on the humane provisions of the law promulgated by MANU and some others. Thus:— “ MANU declared that a mother and father, in their old age, a virtuous wife, and an infant son must be maintained even by the commission of a laundred offences.” - “The support of persons who should be maintained is the approved means of attaining heaven, but hell is the man's portion if they suffers.” MANU. “He who bestows gifts (on strangers with a view to worldly fame) while he suffers his family to live in distress, though he has power to support them, touches his lips with honey, but swallows poison : such virtue is counterfeit.” MANU.
- Maintenance by a man of his dependants is with the Hindus a primary duty. They hold, that he must be just before he is generous, his charity beginning at home; and that even sacrifice is mockery, if to the injury of those whom he is bound to maintain. Nor of his duty in this respect are his children the objects, co-extensive as it is with his family, whatever be its number, as consisting of other relutions and connoxions, including (it may be) illegitimate offspring. It extends (according to MANU and Ja’any AvaLKYa) to the outcast, if not to the adulterous wife, not to inention such as are excluded from the inheritance, whether through their fault or their misfortune; all being entitled to be maintained with food and raiment. A benevolent injunction, existing at no time ever to the same extent under our own law; which professes little of the kind. since the time that it has been competent with us for a man to dispose by will of the whole of his property, real and porsonal, without regard to the natural claims of wife and issue, to say nothing of more distant ties; a latitude, not approvod by the author of the Commentaries, (Blackstone) who, in noticing the power of the parent so to disinherit his children, thought it had not been amiss, if he had been bound to leave them at least a necessary subsistence ; or, as tho same sentiment has been expressed, in their peculiar manner, by the highest Hindu authorities, “who leaves his family naked and unfod, may taste honey at first, but shall afterwards find it poison.”
+ This text is not to be found in the printed copy of MANU's Institutes: it is however cited hore on the authority of Ji'Mutava'uana and SRI'ERISHNA TARKA'LANKA Ba, which is much respected.
