Manusmriti's Contested Teachings Challenge Contemporary Interpretations of Sanatan Dharma

Ancient India produced a rich body of religio-legal literature known as the dharmashastras. These texts codified rules of conduct, social obligation, and ritual procedure for communities across the subcontinent. The most influential of these is the Manava Dharmashastra, commonly called Manusmriti. It belongs to the category of smriti, texts transmitted through human memory, as distinct from shruti, the directly revealed Vedic corpus. The dharmashastras recognised four sources of dharma: shruti, smriti, sadachara (right conduct of the learned), and atmanastushti (one's own conscience). Crucially, the authors of these texts understood them as contextually applicable guides, not eternal and unchanging codes.

The labelling of ancient Indian law as 'Hindu law' was a colonial construction. British administrators needed a codified legal framework to govern Indian subjects in personal matters. They commissioned translations of Sanskrit texts, most notably William Jones's 1794 translation of Manusmriti, to serve as the authoritative basis for what they called 'Hindu personal law'. This process was not neutral. Translators worked from their own cultural assumptions, often reading patriarchal subordination into Sanskrit expressions that carried a wider range of meaning. A frequently cited verse assigns protective responsibility to a woman's father, husband, and sons at successive life stages. The contested Sanskrit phrase swatantrayamarhati was rendered by Jones as 'undeserving of independence'. An alternative reading, grounded in the verse's own use of raksha (protection) three times, renders it as 'never to be left unprotected'. The semantic richness of Sanskrit and the sophisticated hermeneutical rules of the Mimamsa tradition were largely bypassed by colonial translators.

This colonial framing had lasting consequences for social reform. Movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries directly challenged the authority attributed to Manusmriti. Jyotirao Phule's Satya Shodhak Samaj, founded in Maharashtra, organised an anti-caste movement that rejected Brahminical textual authority, including the prescriptions attributed to Manu. Later, Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker's Self-Respect Movement in Tamil Nadu explicitly targeted Manusmriti as a symbol of caste and gender oppression, famously burning copies of the text in public. B.R. Ambedkar similarly burned Manusmriti in 1927 at Mahad as a symbolic act of resistance against caste hierarchy. These movements understood Manusmriti not as a neutral ancient text but as a living instrument of social control, and their critique shaped the constitutional values of equality and non-discrimination that independent India adopted.