Vyavahāramālā

Vyavahāramālā is a treatise in Sanskrit on jurisprudence and legal practices composed by an unknown scholar from Kerala sometime during the 16th-17th centuries CE. This was the standard reference for legal practices in the kingly courts of the erstwhile kingdoms of Travancore and Cochin till the adoption of modern legal practices under the supervision and guidance of John Munro (1778 – 1858) who had served as Resident and Diwan of the States of Travancore and Cochin between 1810 and 1819. However, Munro's reforms did not make Vyavahāramālā completely obsolete. Munro used it to develop an Anglo-Indian code of law for the Travancore kingdom called Caṭṭavariyōla and established a hierarchy of courts and the rules for presenting cases in those courts.

Vyavahāramālā is a digest of rules on legal procedure extracted from the well-known ancient Smṛti called Parāśarasmṛiti. Based on the selection and organization of the verses collected in the Vyavahāramālā one could see that is a it is a collection of verses on law and legal procedure based on the Vyavahāranirṇaya of Varadaraja. It is a work consisting of 1234 verses and the main part is divided into 19 chapters called prakaraṇa-s. Before starting the prakaraṇa-s, the author has dealt with some general requirements of legal procedures like qualities of the judge, the layout of the court, etc. The first eleven prakaraṇa-s deal with civil laws, the next five prakaraṇa-s deal with criminal laws, the seventeenth prakaraṇa discusses laws relating to partition of property, the eighteenth one deals with some further aspects of criminal laws and the final prakaraṇa is devoted miscellaneous topics not touched upon in the previous chapters.