IN HER SURVEY Crime and Punishment in Ancient India, Sukla Das highlights the occurrence—in religious texts, literary material, and legal digests—of the use of branding and mutilation of the face and body to punish specific misdemeanors, including theft, the sexual violation of women, female adultery, defamation, and assault. Moreover, mutilation (including blinding of the eyes) might also be prescribed instead of the death penalty for acts of treason, and was considered a lenient alternative to death. Such penalties, the rhetoric surrounding their use, and the circumstances in which they were prescribed sound very familiar to a historian of early medieval Europe, where the language and targets of such precepts were similar to those set out in the Indian material. Yet drawing a comparison between the two regions, or even suggesting that their similarities constitute a “legal encounter,” is fraught with methodological problems. First, there is a clear chronological mismatch between the development of the prevailing legal norms of India and Europe; second, neither region can be treated as an undifferentiated whole; third, there is an important qualitative difference between “legal” texts in Europe and India; and finally, even if points of similarity and difference are identified in the texts, these represent not so much a dialogue as a shared recognition that the human body has always been an effective target for coercive and corrective practices. All of this leads to an inevitable conclusion that the corresponding passages in Hindu and Western European texts should not surprise us at all.

Yet the apparent incommensurability of the two regions in the period before 1200 CE has not deterred historians from demanding and attempting comparative work. Susan Reynolds, for example, recently has called specifically for more comparative research on the laws of medieval Europe and India, and set out some questions surrounding the relationships between the royal authority and the law, the role of legal professionals, and the process of justice. This essay, whilst not addressing all of those broader issues directly, will first highlight the problems of comparison across time and place, before examining in detail a specific element of the legal culture of both regions, the use of corporal punishment.