The Laws of Manu Read online

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  These two epigrams suggest two very different views of The Laws of Manu, the first from inside the tradition, acknowledging the complexity of its moral judgements, and the second from the outside, arguing for the duplicity of its presentation of those judgements. These two views lead to two very different assessments of the coherence or contradiction in Manu’s position on certain central religious issues, particularly on the paradox of killing and eating, and both are invaluable for our understanding of the text.

  Manu’s ambivalence on these and other dilemmas is reflected in the evaluation of his work made by the two authors of this introduction, one of whom will argue for an irreconcilable tension between two divergent world-views in Manu while the other will argue for their integration. It is our hope that these two different evaluations will prove to be, like the two historical currents in the text that they attempt to comprehend, not mutually contradictory but symbiotic and coherent. The reader is left free to choose, both between the different strains in Manu, as expressed in the translation, and between the two different scholarly assessments of the relationship between those strains, as expressed in this introduction to the translation.

  Part I will situate the text in Indian religious and social history and delineate its sources and its subsequent impact; it will demonstrate the historical origin of a tension between what may be regarded as mutually contradictory world-views in the work.3 Part II will argue, on the contrary, that the text succeeds in fusing these views; it will attempt to demonstrate the coherence of the text through an explication of the structure and meaning of the work as a whole. The third part of the introduction will explain the approach to the text taken in this new translation, an approach based on the assumption that the text presents a coherent sequence of logically integrated thoughts.4

  PART I THE HISTORY OF THE TEXT

  1. The Importance of The Laws of Manu

  A work of encyclopedic scope, The Laws of Manu (in Sanskrit, the Mānavadharmaśāstra or Manusmṛti, and informally known as Manu) 5 consists of 2,685 verses on topics as apparently varied – but actually intimately interrelated in Hindu thought – as the social obligations and duties of the various castes and of individuals in different stages of life; the proper way for a righteous king to rule, and to punish transgressors in his kingdom; the appropriate social relations between men and women of different castes, and of husbands and wives in the privacy of the home; birth, death, and taxes; cosmogony, karma, and rebirth; ritual practices; error and restoration or redemption; and such details of everyday life as the procedure for settling traffic accidents, adjudicating disputes with boatmen, and the penance for sexual improprieties with one’s teacher’s wife.

  The text is, in sum, an encompassing representation of life in the world – how it is, and how it should be lived.6 It is about dharma, which subsumes the English concepts of ‘religion’, ‘duty’, ‘law’, ‘right’, ‘justice’, ‘practice’, and ‘principle’. Probably composed sometime around the beginning of the Common Era or slightly earlier, Manu is a pivotal text of the dominant form of Hinduism as it emerged historically and at least in part in reaction to its religious and ideological predecessors and competitors. More compendiously than any other text, it provides a direct line to the most influential construction of the Hindu religion and Indic society as a whole. No modern study of Hindu family life, psychology, concepts of the body, sex, relationships between humans and animals, attitudes to money and material possessions, politics, law, caste, purification and pollution, ritual, social practice and ideals, and world-renunciation and worldly goals, can ignore Manu.

  The title of the work poses a problem, in part because the text is known by two different names: Manusmṛti and Mānavadharmaśāstra. The first title omits the key term dharma, while the second title includes it. Moreover, smṛti designates a traditional sacred text, in contrast with śruti, revelation (i.e. the Veda), while śāstra can be translated as ‘laws’, but also by ‘teaching’ or ‘science’ or ‘treatise’ or ‘text’ (though these last two terms give a mistaken impression of a written text: śāstra and smṛti are often orally transmitted). The most common translation of the title, ‘laws’, skews it towards what the British hoped to make of it: a tool with which to rule the Hindoo. A broader title like ‘teaching’ would better suggest what the text is, beyond its function as the basis of a legal tradition: a book of philosophy, a religious book that grounds the law in a complex world-view that is the point of the work.

  Though it is certain that the text is the culmination of the work of several authors and a considerable amount of popular wisdom, it is attributed to someone named Manu, and calling it ‘Manu’s’ laws distinguishes it from, for instance, Gautama’s laws, or Yajñavalkya’s laws. But these are all mythological or legendary figures. ‘Manu’ means ‘the wise one’, and Manu is the name of a king (an interesting attribution, given the priestly bias of Manu’s text) who is the mythological ancestor of the human race, the Indian Adam. Thus mānava (‘descended from Manu’) is a common word for ‘human’ (which, in terms of the lexical meaning of Manu as ‘wise’, might also be the Sanskrit equivalent of Homo Sapiens). The title therefore conceals a pun: mānava, ‘of Manu’, also means ‘of the human race’.

  By the early centuries of the Common Era, Manu had become, and remained, the standard source of authority in the orthodox tradition for that centrepiece of Hinduism, varṇāśrama-dharma (social and religious duties tied to class and stage of life). Over the course of the centuries, the text attracted nine complete commentaries, attesting to its crucial significance within the tradition, and it is cited in other ancient Indian texts far more frequently than any other dharmaśāstra (it has been estimated that between a third and a half of Manu is in the Mahābhārata, though it is not certain which was the source and which the borrower). Whether this status extended beyond the texts to the actual use of Manu in legal courts is another matter, to which we will return at the end of Part II.

  2. The History of the Text in Europe: the British and Nietzsche

  In the tradition of Western scholarship, ‘there is no work that has had such great fame and has for centuries been considered to be so authoritative as the Mānavadharmaśāstra’.7 Manu was among the first Sanskrit works to be translated into any European language. The earliest translation of the text, published in Calcutta in 1794, was that of Sir William Jones, one of the founding fathers of modern Indology; the statue of Jones in St Paul’s Cathedral in London holds a volume of Manu in its hand. Jones’s English translation was then translated into German and published by J. Chr. Hüttner in Weimar in 1797. The rapid appearance of subsequent translations in French,8 German,9 Portuguese,10 and Russian11 (see the bibliography), and the inclusion of the text in the monumental Sacred Books of the East series edited by F. Max Müller,12 are testimonials to the historical and religious importance that European Orientalists conferred on the work. According to J. Duncan M. Derrett, the text ‘constitutes India’s greatest achievement in the field of jurisprudence’.13 In the field of comparative law, the text continues to attract the attention of Westerners who, like Derrett, regard this work as ‘one of the world’s premier compositions in ancient law, more valuable in every sense than Hammurabi and able to hold its own in comparison to the covenant and Priestly codes of Moses’.14

  Manu’s fame in Europe went beyond the bounds of Indology. Friedrich Nietzsche sang Manu’s praises,15 and his extraordinary interpretation of the text is worth citing at some length:

  Here the proposed task is to breed no fewer than four races simultaneously: a priestly, a warrior, and a trading and farming race, and finally a menial race, the Sudras. Here we are manifestly no longer among animal-tamers: a species of human being a hundred times more gentle and rational is presupposed even to conceive the plan of such a breeding. One draws a breath of relief when coming out of the Christian sick-house and dungeon atmosphere into this healthier, higher, wider world. How paltry the ‘New Testam
ent’ is compared with Manu, how ill it smells! But this organization too needed to be dreadful – this time in struggle not with the beast but with its antithesis, with the non-bred human being, the hotchpotch human being, the Chandala. And again it had no means of making him weak and harmless other than making him sick.16

  It is interesting to note the animal imagery that Nietzsche, like Manu, uses to discuss the human condition, and his approval of Manu’s treatment of the Chandala, the ‘Fierce’ Untouchable who is the antithesis of the Superman.

  Nietzsche continues to use Manu as a stick with which to beat Christianity, which he characterizes as ‘the victory of Chandala values, … the undying Chandala revenge as the religion of love’.17 As he puts it: ‘One catches the unholiness of the Christian means in flagrante when one compares the Christian purpose with the purpose of the Manu Law-book.’18 And this is how he compares them:

  Christianity’s [purposes are] … bad ends: the poisoning, slandering, denying of life, contempt for the body, the denigration and self-violation of man through the concept of sin – consequently its means too are bad. It is with an opposite feeling that I read the Law-book of Manu, an incomparably spiritual and superior work, so much as to name which in the same breath as the Bible would be a sin against the spirit. One sees immediately that it has a real philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an ill-smelling Jewish acidity compounded of rabbinism and superstition … All the things upon which Christianity vents its abysmal vulgarity, procreation, for example, woman, marriage, are here treated seriously, with reverence, with love and trust.19

  It would, I think, be hard to find a Christian statement revealing greater ‘contempt for the body’ than this one in Manu: ‘[A man] should abandon this foul-smelling, tormented, impermanent dwelling-place of living beings, filled with urine and excrement, pervaded by old age and sorrow, infested by sickness, and polluted by passion, with bones for beams, sinews for cords, flesh and blood for plaster, and skin for the roof’ (6.76–7). And it is hard to see the ‘reverence, love and trust’ towards women in such passages in Manu as this one:

  Good looks do not matter to them, nor do they care about youth; ‘A man!’ they say, and enjoy sex with him, whether he is good-looking or ugly. By running after men like whores, by their fickle minds, and by their natural lack of affection these women are unfaithful to their husbands even when they are zealously guarded here. Knowing that their very own nature is like this, as it was born at the creation by the Lord of Creatures, a man should make the utmost effort to guard them. The bed and the seat, jewellery, lust, anger, crookedness, a malicious nature, and bad conduct are what Manu assigned to women. (9.14–17)

  Yet Manu’s affection for women is a theme that Nietzsche dwells upon:

  I know of no book in which so many tender and kind remarks are addressed to woman as in the Law-book of Manu; these old greybeards and saints have a way of being polite to women which has perhaps never been surpassed. ‘A woman’s mouth’ it says in one place – ‘a girl’s breast, a child’s prayer, the smoke of the sacrifice, are always pure.’ Another passage: ‘There is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow of a cow, air, water, fire and a girl’s breath.’ A final passage – perhaps also a holy lie –: ‘All the openings of the body above the navel are pure, all below impure. Only in the case of a girl is the whole body pure.’20

  Manu is actually saying something rather different, and indeed talking about a very different sort of ‘purity’, more precisely the absence of pollution:

  A woman’s mouth is always unpolluted, as is a bird that knocks down a fruit; a calf is unpolluted while the milk is flowing, and a dog is unpolluted when it catches a wild animal. Manu has said that the meat of an animal killed by dogs or killed by carnivores or by aliens such as ‘Fierce’ Untouchables is unpolluted. The orifices of the body above the navel are all pure, but those below are impure, as are the defilements that slip out of the body. Flies, drops of water, a shadow, a cow, a horse, the rays of the sun, dust, earth, the wind, and fire are pure to touch. (5.130–33)

  So much for Nietzsche’s understanding of Manu.

  3. The Vedic Background: Food and Eaters

  Manu, like virtually all other religious texts, masks its true authorship and indeed must do so in order to posit effectively its own claims to transcendentally based and absolute truth. For religious discourse is always – and necessarily, if disingenuously – represented as anonymous (or as the direct or indirect ‘word of God’, or the dictates of Manu, the ‘first man’, either of which comes to the same thing). Questions and answers that are neither posed nor given by the religious, however, need not be left mute by scholars of religion. Among the first and most important of these is ‘Says who?’ This may alternatively be phrased as ‘To whose advantage?’ or ‘In whose interests?’

  Another set of questions concern the ‘why’ of the text. Why was Manu composed? What possible exigencies would call forth a textual response, or counter-proposal, of this sort? And what audience is presupposed? Whom was the text intended to reach and influence? Finally, perhaps the most important query and one intimately connected to the question of authorship and interest is the ‘how’ of the text. How do the human authors of Manu establish their text as ‘objective truth’?

  The Laws of Manu, like all other works we have from the ancient period in India, was composed by members of the social class (varṇa) called Brahmins or ‘priests’. Indeed, the text is not only by priests but to a large extent for priests. The subject of the rules of dharma laid out here is often the householder priest; sometimes this is declared explicitly (e.g. the whole of Chapter 4; see 3.286 and 4.259) and even more often it is assumed implicitly.

  Like most other texts written by the priests, Manu assumes that the priest is the paradigmatic human being, the most complete and perfect representative of the species, a metonym for the ‘real human’. As the ‘technicians of the sacred’, the priests created entire cosmic systems of astonishing complexity and impressive comprehensiveness, embedding within a conceptual structure that encompassed the universe as a whole their self-appointed role as the minds and mouths of ancient India.

  This endeavour – which was already and continues to be successful – began thousands of years ago and long before Manu. For most of the first millennium B.C.E., the reigning ideology in ancient India appears to have been that dictated by the Veda and its textual appendages. The Veda is the collective name for certain texts produced by one or another of the many ritual schools. These works are focussed on the theory and practice of the fire sacrifice (yajña), the operation of which the priests monopolized. The ideology that informs the ritual persists – albeit in modified form and reset within new contexts – in later texts like Manu.

  It is somewhat puzzling, however, that the world-view that informs the priestly ritual seems to be governed by values more often associated with a warrior class. In the Veda, self-aggrandisement and dominance were unabashedly embraced and unashamedly displayed – in the ‘religious’ sphere of ritual no less than in more ‘secular’ domains.21 Violence and power in the social realm – that is, violence and power exercised over another – were celebrated on their own terms, or rather, were represented as part and parcel of the natural order of things.

  The Vedic ideology once described by Sylvian Lévi as ‘brutal’ and ‘materialistic’22 is nowhere more revealingly manifest than in the leitmotif of ‘food’ and ‘eaters’ running throughout the Veda.23 As one text succinctly puts it, ‘The eater of food and food indeed are everything here,’24 and what might appear as a culinary metaphor was really meant as a descriptive account of the natural and social world organized into a hierarchically ordered food chain.

  The nutritional chain exactly describes the order of the species. At the top of the Vedic ‘natural’ world were supernatural (sic) entities who feed on sacrificial oblations that were explicitly represented as substitutes for the human sacrificers who are next in line on the menu.25 Humans eat animals,
the next lowest life-form; animals eat plants,26 who, in turn, ‘eat’ rain or ‘the waters’ from which all food is ultimately generated.27

  ‘What we in Europe, in the classical period, called “the chain of being”,’ observes Francis Zimmermann, ‘is presented in India as a sequence of foods.’28 Nature in the Veda was regarded as a hierarchically ordered set of Chinese boxes, or better, Indian stomachs. And the social world, no less than the natural, is one of rulers and ruled, consumers and consumed, exploiters and exploited, the strong and the weak. No text puts the case of continuity between nature and culture more starkly than the post-Vedic text translated here: ‘Those that do not move are the food of those that move,’ declares Manu, ‘and those that have no fangs are food for those with fangs; those that have no hands are food for those with hands; and cowards are the food of the brave’ (Manu 5.29).

  Eating and killing were regarded as two sides of the same coin. But eating was also frankly envisioned as the perpetual re-enactment of the defeat and subjugation of one’s rival. Food was not neutral, and feeding was not regarded as a regrettable but necessary sacrifice of the other for one’s own survival. One’s cuisine was one’s adversary. Eating was the triumphant overcoming of the natural and social enemy, of those one hates and is hated by:

  For the gods then made food of whoever hated them, and of whomever they hated, and put them into him [Agni, the fire]. With that they pleased him, and that became his food, and he burned up the evil of the gods. And in like manner does the sacrificer now make food of whoever hates him, and of whomever he hates, and put them into him [Agni]. With that one pleases him, and that becomes his food, and he burns up the sacrificer’s evil.29