The Law of Manu

A bonfire was lit on the ground at Mahad, in the Konkan of western Maharashtra, on 25 December 1927. Onto it, before a crowd of men and women the higher castes had refused the right to drink from a public tank, a copy of the Manusmriti (the Law-Book of Manu) was placed and burned. The man who led the protest was B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit jurist trained at Columbia and the London School of Economics, and the resolution to burn the book had been moved, as the record notes, by a Brahmin associate.

That a single law-book could be set alight as a political act tells you something. No other text in the tradition has been treated quite this way. This chapter asks one question. How did one idealized Brahmanical text, a vision of how society ought to be ordered, come to be treated as “the law of the Hindus,” and how should we read a book the tradition reveres, that contradicts itself on its own pages, that Ambedkar burned, and that the British froze into colonial law?

The book itself

Its proper name is the Manava-Dharmashastra, “the Dharmashastra of Manu,” more commonly the Manusmriti. A Dharmashastra is a Brahmanical treatise on dharma, the moral and social order, and the Manusmriti is the most influential one of all. It belongs to the category of smriti, “that which is remembered,” the human-authored tradition, as distinct from shruti, “that which is heard,” the revealed Vedas. The earlier Dharmasutras seeded this literature; the Manusmriti is its towering result.

The numbers are exact. The text runs to 2,685 verses, called shlokas, arranged in twelve chapters, called adhyayas. Not all of it is held to be of one piece. Patrick Olivelle, in Manu’s Code of Law (2005), notes that some scholars regard only about 1,214 of those 2,685 verses as the original core, the rest being later accretion.

Who wrote it. Tradition assigns it to Manu, the mythical progenitor of humanity, the first man and the first lawgiver, which is to say it assigns it to no datable person at all. Historians read it as the work of skilled Brahmanical editors. Olivelle argues, from the symmetry of its structure, that it may be the work of a single gifted individual; most scholars read it as composite, built up over time by many hands. The two readings have never been reconciled.

The dating is a detective’s exercise. The composition and redaction fall somewhere between the 2nd century BCE and the 3rd century CE. Olivelle narrows the redaction to roughly the 2nd or 3rd century CE, and his evidence is numismatic: the fines the text prescribes are reckoned in gold coins of a kind that points to that later window. A law-book, dated by the money in its penalties.

What it claims to govern

The scope is total, which is part of its ambition. It lays out varnashrama-dharma, duty ordered by class, varna, and by life-stage, ashrama. It maps the four purusharthas, the legitimate human aims of dharma (duty), artha (wealth), kama (desire) and moksha (liberation). It walks a man through the four ashramas: brahmacharya, the student; grihastha, the householder; vanaprastha, the forest-dweller; sannyasa, the renouncer.

Beyond that frame it descends into detail. There are rules of conduct, achara. There is civil and criminal law, vyavahara, with its catalogue of disputes and penalties. There is penance, prayashchitta, the price of expiation. There is karma and rebirth, and a cosmology to seat it all in. As smriti on dharma, this is the text the tradition reaches for when it wants the matter settled in writing. The distinction between shruti and smriti is what gives the book both its authority and its limit.

One caveat governs everything that follows, and the chapter is anchored on it. The Manusmriti is a normative text. It describes how society ought to be ordered, in the eyes of its Brahmanical authors. It is not a description of how society actually worked. Olivelle insists on this. So does Donald R. Davis Jr., whose The Spirit of Hindu Law (2010) shows that Hindu law in practice operated through local, procedural, multi-textual norms and through custom, achara, rather than through any single statute book. Read it, then, as a blueprint of an ideal order. It is no photograph of how people actually lived.

The text against itself

Nowhere is the gap between blueprint and life sharper than on the question of women, and here the most honest thing is to let the book speak in its own contradictory voice. The translations are G. Bühler’s, from The Laws of Manu, Sacred Books of the East volume 25 (Oxford, 1886), which is in the public domain.

The text honours women. Manu 3.56 reads, in Bühler: “Where women are honoured, there the gods are pleased; but where they are not honoured, no sacred rite yields rewards.” The verse is often quoted alone, as proof of high status.

Read on. Manu 5.148: “In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent.” And the same doctrine, restated four chapters later, Manu 9.3: “Her father protects (her) in childhood, her husband protects (her) in youth, and her sons protect (her) in old age; a woman is never fit for independence.”

These verses sit inside one book. The honour and the denial are not from rival texts to be set against each other; they are pages apart in the same code. That fact has split readers for a century. The traditionalist reading holds that 5.148 and 9.3 describe protection, not subordination, and that the honour verses of 3.55 to 3.59 prove women’s elevated place. The critical reading, voiced by Ambedkar, by Wendy Doniger, and by a body of feminist scholarship, holds that the protective frame is itself the subordination, a doctrine of perpetual male guardianship dressed as care.

We will not adjudicate between them. The finding is simpler and harder. The text contradicts itself, and the contradiction is the thing to be read, not resolved.

The other wound

The book’s treatment of the shudra, the lowest of the four varnas, and of those below the varna order entirely, is the second contested core, and it is the one that brought the fire to Mahad.

The text assigns the shudra a single duty. At Manu 1.91 it makes the serving of the higher varnas the shudra’s appointed lot. The penal verses are harsher still. The clustered rulings around Manu 8.270 to 8.272 and 8.413 to 8.414, in Bühler’s rendering, scale punishment and worth by birth, binding the shudra to the bottom of the order. We quote sparingly here, by deliberate restraint. The text says these things; it says them plainly; we attribute them to it and do not soften them.

Here the two receptions stand furthest apart and are most fiercely named. To some within the tradition the book is revered scriptural foundation, authoritative smriti. To Ambedkar and to Dalit thought it is the ideological charter of caste oppression, the written root of untouchability. Both readings exist. Both are held with conviction. The chapter records the division and leaves it standing, because the division is real.

The fire and after

Return to Mahad. The Satyagraha there in December 1927 had begun as a campaign for the simple right of Dalits to draw water from the public Chavdar tank, a right the higher castes violently denied. On the 25th, the burning of the Manusmriti was the conference’s deliberate symbolic act. The resolution to commit the book to the flames was moved by Ambedkar’s Brahmin associate Gangadhar Nilkanth Sahasrabuddhe and seconded by the Dalit leader P. N. Rajbhoj. A Brahmin proposing the fire, a Dalit seconding it. The day is remembered as Manusmriti Dahan Din, the day of the burning of Manu.

It was a critique from below, and from within the country’s own reform movement. It was not the first time the book had been handled from outside the tradition’s own terms. That had happened a century and a third earlier, and in a very different spirit.

The Justinian of India

In 1794 Sir William Jones, the Calcutta judge and Orientalist, published the first full English translation of the book as Institutes of Hindu Law: or, the Ordinances of Menu. Jones died in Calcutta that same year, 1794, the year his Manu appeared. He had a stated aim. He wanted, in his own phrase, to make Manu “the Justinian of India,” a single authoritative code on the Roman model.

The ambition fitted a need. The British East India Company, charged from 1772 with administering “Hindu law” in its courts, wanted one authoritative law-book it could cite, and Manu was made to serve as that primary textual source. The consequence is what the scholarship now stresses, and Olivelle and Davis both press the point. The Company gave one normative Brahmanical text a uniform, outsized legal authority it had never uniformly held in pre-colonial practice. A legal world that had been plural, regionally varied, processual, and frequently governed by local custom was flattened toward a single code. Anglo-Hindu law was, in part, the Manusmriti read as a statute it was never written to be.

The fire at Mahad and the printing press at Calcutta were aimed at the same object from opposite ends. One sought to enthrone the book as the law of a people. The other burned it for having been enthroned.

Tradition and record

So we come to the volume’s last reckoning, and to the two accounts that have run through every chapter of this library.

Tradition reveres Manu as the foundational lawgiver and the Manusmriti as authoritative smriti on dharma. The historical record reads the same book as one extremely influential normative text among many smritis, idealized rather than descriptive, regionally variable and routinely overridden in practice by custom, achara, sharply critiqued from within the tradition’s own reception and from below by Ambedkar, and handed an artificially inflated, codified authority by colonial law. The fuller account is kept in the reference shelf for the Manusmriti, where the verse loci and editions are gathered.

Both accounts describe the same 2,685 verses. They do not describe the same book.

That is where this library closes. We have walked the Vedas down to their limbs, the auxiliary sciences and the law-books that grew around the revealed word, and we end at the one text that was reverenced, contradicted, burned, and codified, all four. It asks to be read whole, with its honour and its harm on the same page, attributed and not flattened.

The unwritten library was never a single book. It was an argument about how to live, carried in many voices that did not always agree. Manu’s is one voice in it, loud and unfinished.