There is an old joke about a philosophy professor who sets out to prove, with impeccable logic, that he is the best professor in the world. He leads a student step by step through a chain of unquestioned loyalties.

“Which is the best country in the world?" he asks. The student answers, of course, that it is their country. “And the best state in it?" The student replies that it is their state. “And the best town in that state?" It is their town. “The best college in that town?" It is their college. “And which is the best subject taught in that college?" the professor asks. “Philosophy", the very subject the professor teaches, the student answers.

The final question is who teaches philosophy best in the college, and the answer is hardly a mystery: it is the same professor who has been asking the questions all along. The proof is now complete. By carefully choosing the premises and designing the questions, the professor arrives at the conclusion that he is the best professor in the world.

A similar mode of reasoning appears in the opening chapter of the Manusmriti, where Manu sets out to establish the pre-eminence of Brahmins who are Vedic savants. The text constructs a hierarchical sequence that moves from living beings to humans, from humans to Brahmins, and from Brahmins to the learned, the resolute, the active, and finally to those learned in the Vedas.

The logic mirrors that of the anecdote: once the hierarchy is accepted, the conclusion follows seamlessly. By defining value through a series of nested distinctions, the text arrives at its intended endpoint—the supremacy of the Vedic Brahmin—not as an assertion, but as the apparent outcome of an orderly classificatory process.

The text says: “Among creatures, living beings are the best; among living beings, those who subsist by intelligence; among those who subsist by intelligence, human beings; and among human beings, Brahmins—so the tradition declares. Among Brahmins, the learned are the best; among the learned, those who have made the resolve; among those who have made the resolve, the doers; and among doers, the Vedic savants."

As mentioned in the previous part of this essay, the world as envisaged by the Manusmriti is Brahmin-centric, in which whatever exists on earth belongs to the Brahmin, and it is only by the kindness of the Brahmin that others are able to eat. From the very beginning of the text, from the first chapter itself, it is amply clear who the target audience is. The text is written for Brahmins.

In the same chapter, the Smriti further says: “[This text] should be studied diligently and taught to his pupils properly by a learned Brahmin, and by no one else. When a Brahmin who keeps to his vows studies this treatise, he is never sullied by faults arising from mental, oral, or physical activities; he purifies those alongside whom he eats, as also seven generations of his lineage before him and seven after him. […]" Echoing the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda, the Manusmriti also says that the Brahmin was produced from the mouth of the Purusha, and the Shudra from the feet.

There is absolutely nothing surprising in the fact that, in a text written two thousand years ago and aimed at a specific group of people, that group is described as pre-eminent among human beings. In Deuteronomy, the Lord tells the Jews that “God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth," and Jews, to this day, consider themselves the chosen people. Similar claims of “pre-eminence" can be found in the Quran with regard to Muslims as well.

A critique might say that Manusmriti is different. What makes Manusmriti, or the varna system as mentioned in the Smritis or the Rig Veda, different, he would argue, is the fact........

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