Śānkarasmṛti (Laghudharmaprakrāśikā)

Śānkarasmṛti (Laghudharmaprakrāśikā) is treatise in Sanskrit dealing with the customs and traditions of the people of medieval Kerala. The work calls itself Laghudharmaprakrāśikā and the term Śānkarasmṛti is not mentioned anywhere in the work. However at the end of every chapter there is a colophon which begins with the words sāṅkare dharmaśāstre which probably gave rise to the tradition of referring to the work as Śānkarasmṛti.

The work is originally supposed to contain thirty-six chapters, but only the first twelve chapters have been unearthed. Thus in that sense, the currently available manuscripts of the work are incomplete. The work is about the traditions and customs of Kerala at the time the work was composed. Many of these customs called Keraḷācāra-s are peculiar to Kerala and are not seen among people in other parts of India. At several places in the text, the author of Śānkarasmṛti invokes a certain work titled Bhārgavasmṛiti as the authority for his pronouncements. But unfortunately the work Bhārgavasmṛiti has not so far seen the light of the day, and moreover, in the whole corpus Sanskrit literature, except in Śānkarasmṛti, there is no mention of a work titled Bhārgavasmṛiti. It is believed that Bhārgavasmṛiti must have been a fictitious invention of the author of Śānkarasmṛti.a

Authorship

Traditional scholarship assigns the authorship of Śānkarasmṛti to Adi Shankaracharya, the great philosopher and the most renowned exponent of Advaita Vedanta, who hailed from Kerala.