- Lived:
- birth and death unrecorded — the working life is fixed by his patron, the emperor Vikramāditya VI (r. 1076–1126), at Kalyāṇa (Basavakalyan, in Karnataka's Bidar district), capital of the Western Chalukya empire
- Field:
- law — dharmaśāstra commentator; author of the Mitākṣarā, the most consequential law-book in Indian history
- The Big Idea:
- A son owns a share of the family's ancestral property from the moment he is born — and a commentary built around that one doctrine decided who owned what across most of India for the next nine hundred years.
- In their words:
- "It is a settled point, that property in the paternal or ancestral estate is by birth." (the Mitākṣarā, in H. T. Colebrooke's 1810 translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- In 2005 the Parliament of India passed an amendment whose operative words are "in a Hindu joint family governed by the Mitakshara law" — a twelfth-century book, cited by name, still being amended by a twenty-first-century legislature. Nobody so obscure has ever governed so many for so long.