Religion is a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements. There are mainly four religion. There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide. About 84% of the world's population is affiliated with Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or some form of folk religion. The religiously unaffiliated demographic includes those who do not identify with any particular religion, atheists, and agnostics. While the religiously unaffiliated have grown globally, many of the religiously unaffiliated still have various religious beliefs. Law and religion is the interdisciplinary study of relationships between law, especially public law, and religion. Vogue Magazine reports that during the late 1900, a new law and religion approach emerged that progressively built its own contribution to religious studies.
Hinduism is said to be oldest religion and it's the way to live. This religion have four vedas as their law and holy books like Geeta, Mahabharata, Ramayana e.t.c. as precedent. Hindu law refers to the system of personal laws (marriage, adoption, inheritance, etc.), traditionally derived from Hindu texts and traditions, that shaped the social practice of Hindu communities. In Vedic times, Hindu law was the legal system described and imagined in Dharmaśāstra texts. Classical Hindu law, brings the realm of legal practice together with the scholastic tradition of Dharmaśāstra by defining Hindu law as a usable label for myriad localized legal systems of classical and medieval India that were influenced by and in turn influenced the Dharmaśāstra tradition. Such local laws never conformed completely to the ideals of Dharmaśāstra, but both substantive and procedural laws of the tradition did impact the practical law, though largely indirectly. It is worth emphasizing that Sanskrit contains no word that precisely corresponds to law or religion and that, therefore, the label "Hindu Law" is a modern convenience used to describe this tradition. In modern India, Hindu law is still a part of the law of India established by the Constitution of India (1950).
There is frustratingly little evidence for the practice of law in India prior to about the eighteenth century in India. In some regions, such as Maharashtra, a kind of hybrid Hindu and Islamic legal system was fashioned under the Maratha kings.(Gune 1953). In other places, such as South India, temples were intimately involved in the administration of law (Davis 2004). What is almost completely lacking for classical and medieval India are the records of courts. In lieu of such records, other kinds of evidence for legal practice must be used to piece together an outline of classical Hindu law in practice. Such evidence includes prominently the numerous inscriptions from this period that record a variety of legal transactions, gifts, contracts, decrees, etc. associated with political rulers, temples, corporate groups and others.
However, the following might be said about Hindu law in premodern India: there was no formal hierarchy of courts; every court probably functioned as both a court of first instance and also as a court of appeal. Criminal cases were tried by a ruler's court or by panchayats, local tribunals, and punishments were meted out there. There was no separate sphere of personal law. A wide divergence of regional laws likely prevailed.
Many aspects of law likely under the jurisdiciton of castes or other corporate groups such as merchant guilds, military groups, traders, and religious orders. Practices and disputes regarding marriage were left to the caste panchayats, either structured or unstructured. Some castes permitted divorce and remarriage, others did not. Almost all the castes allowed polygamy. Almost all the castes outlawed and discouraged 'inter-caste' marriages. Similarly, breaches of caste rules were punished by the caste panchayats.
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