Opinion | Manu And Moral Presentism: The Safest Book To Hate In India

The real test of progress is not how loudly we condemn a book that nobody follows, but whether we are willing to question ideas that continue to influence the lives of people today

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In his Annihilation of Caste, Dr BR Ambedkar says the Manusmriti prescribes pouring molten lead into the ears of a Shudra who hears the Veda. Ambedkar writes: “The Manusmriti prescribes such heavy sentences as cutting off the tongue, or pouring of molten lead in the ears, of the Shudra who recites or hears the Veda." [Annihilation of Caste, 16:7]

Among the many charges levelled against the Manusmriti, this is one of the most frequently cited and most damning: that it prescribes pouring molten lead into the ears of a Shudra who hears the Veda. How brutal! How primitive! One might even think that stoning the offender to death would have been the more humane alternative. After all, stoning is not primitive; it is still prescribed and practised in some places for certain offences considered immoral.

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But there is a problem with this charge: the Manusmriti does not mention it. Dr Ambedkar was mistaken. Nowhere in the Manusmriti is such a punishment prescribed for such an offence. Interestingly, one of the more recent editions of Annihilation of Caste, edited and annotated by S Anand, with an introduction by Arundhati Roy, acknowledges this discrepancy in a footnote, though without explicitly stating that Ambedkar himself was mistaken. The footnote says, “Such verses do not figure in the Manusmriti", as if the Manusmriti has fallen short, rather than Ambedkar having gotten it wrong.

Ever since Ambedkar attacked the Manusmriti, the text has come to be seen across India as a symbol of all that is vicious in Hindu society. But this perception overlooks a basic fact: the Manusmriti is not a sacred text, nor does it govern the day-to-day life of a Hindu, not even that of a Brahmin. It is just one text among many in the vast corpus of Hindu Dharma literature, a tradition that spans the Apastamba and Gautama Dharmasutras to the Yajnavalkya and Vishnu Smritis. Occasionally these texts are cited to justify a particular practice or position in a religious context. But the corpus is so vast and varied that one can find scriptural support for almost anything, as well as for its opposite.

Today, no Smriti, not the Manusmriti, not any other, dictates how a Hindu lives, Brahmin or otherwise. These texts do not govern the daily life of even the most conservative modern Hindu. To treat them as the Hindu equivalent of a universally binding religious code is not just wrong; it is a fundamental misreading of their place in the tradition.

But there is a readymade answer to this argument. Since the Manusmriti-charade has been going on for so long, anyone who follows the debate is familiar with the arguments, the comebacks, and the comebacks to those comebacks.

“We are not saying that the Manusmriti is a binding text," the critic of the Manusmriti would say. “What we are saying is that the Manusmriti shaped India’s casteist social backwardness. Its ideas seeped into the culture, even if nobody cites the text today. It therefore stands as a symbol of the viciousness and societal ugliness of Hinduism."

The reality is that there was never, in the entire history of Hinduism, a single Smriti followed by all its sects and communities, Brahmin or non-Brahmin. There was no single tradition, no single set of rituals, no single code of law. The Namboothiris, the Brahmins of Kerala, for instance, claim their code of conduct is shaped by the........

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