Re: Manu Smriti should be decreed as Apocryphal
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
anon246813579 <anon24...@gmail.com> posted:
>
> The Manu Smriti should be decreed as Apocryphal. To many it is
> the Law Book of the Hindus which is the most advertised. Yet few know
> that the Many Smriti is considered to be Apocryphal.
> The propaganda of the Marxists and Christians to portray the Manu
> Smriti as a valid and well followed Hindu document must be met with an
> adequate response. Hindu scholars need to come out in the open and
> teach people the apocryphal nature of the Manu Smriti. Hindus need to
> make a stand and unify themselves against constant misrepresentations
> of their religion.
> One of the key points of contention for many Hindus revolves
> around the Manu Smriti and very little is being done by the Hindus to
> educate the public about the apocryphal nature of the Manu Smriti.
> This just should not be. Hindus need to really represent themselves
> in a positive light so that they can dismantle the negativity and
> hatred that is out there against them.
>
> Om shanti.
>
> P.S.
> If you have any information or website which educates people about the
> apocryphal nature of the Manu Smriti, please post it as a reply to
> this thread.
Here is my follow-up to the above post -- this is a related article
published 9 years ago from Hinduism Today: :
Manu and the Brits
Hindu Law
Manu and the Brits
He is regarded as the father of HIndu religious law,
but did Manu intend his writ to a rigid rule book?
Madhu Kishwar declares "He did not."
Madhu Kishwar, Delhi
Hinduism Today
http://www.hinduismtoday.com
January/February 2001
Madhu Kishwar, editor of Manushi magazine and a champion of the
oppressed in India, offers an astute commentary on the persistent
objections and controversies centering on Manusmriti, or Manu Dharma
Shastra, the historical Indian text which is widely regarded as
Hinduism's most authoritative law book. Kishwar claims that the
uncontestable status given to Manusmriti was actually imposed by the
British. She goes on to suggest that Manu himself had never intended
such dogmatic and static interpretations of his wide-ranging work.
In March 25 of year 2000, copies of Manusmriti were burnt by
reformers protesting against the ill-conceived installation of the
statue of Manu in the precincts of the Rajasthan High Court. The
protesters believed that the ancient text is the defining document of
Brahmanical Hinduism, and also the key source of gender and caste
oppression in India. In the ensuing controversy, defenders of
Manusmriti projected it as a pivotal canonical source of religious
law for Hindus. In a somewhat similar fashion, Deepa Mehta's film,
Water, revived an ongoing controversy about whether those who exploit
and downgrade women are following shastric injunctions. In the course
of trying to explain why this debate amounts to a misunderstanding of
the role of the shastras in Hindu religious life, I commented in a
recent TV interview that Manusmriti (and other shastric texts) have
as much or as little authority for Hindus as have Madhusmriti (my
writings) -- or for that matter the pages of my magazine, Manushi,
for its subscribers.
This perfectly serious statement was dismissed as facetious by many
feminists. Others, claiming to speak on behalf of Hindu culture, took
my comment as an insult to the great shastrakar himself. These
diverse responses indicate that there is a serious misconception
among the modern educated elite over the actual status and role of
the shastras in our religious life and cultural traditions.
The confusion is not theirs alone; these common misrepresentations
are an unfortunate by-product of our colonial education, which we
slavishly cling to, even though it is more than five decades since we
declared our Independence. We keep defending or attacking the same
hackneyed quotations from the shastras and the epics which,
incidentally, colonizers used for the purpose of creating a new
discourse about these writings. Their inaccurate and biased
interpretations have continued to inspire major misreadings of our
religious tenets.
The Englishmen who came as traders in the 17th century were befuddled
at the vast diversity and complexity of Indian society. Having come
from a culture where many aspects of family and community affairs
came under the jurisdiction of canonical law, they looked for similar
sources of authority in India. They assumed, for example, that just
as the European marriage laws were based in part on systematic
constructions derived from church interpretations of Biblical tenets,
so must the personal laws of various Indian communities similarly
draw their legitimacy from some priestly interpretations of
fundamental religious texts.
In the late 18th century, the British began to study the ancient
shastras to develop a set of legal principles that would assist them
in adjudicating disputes within Indian civil society. In fact, they
found there was no single body of canonical law, no Hindu Pope to
legitimize a uniform legal code for all the diverse communities of
India, no Shankaracharya whose writ reigned all over the country.
Even religious interpretations of popular epics like the Ramayana
failed to fit the bill because every community and every age
exercized the freedom to recite and write its own version. We have
inherited hundreds of recognized and respected versions of this text,
and many are still being created. The flourishing of such variation
and diversity, however, did not prevent the British from searching
for a definitive canon of Hindu law.
Perhaps more egregiously, in their search the British took no steps
to understand local or jati-based customary law or the way in which
every community -- no matter how wealthy or poor -- regulated its own
internal affairs through jati or biradari panchayats (community's
council of five), without seeking permission or validation from any
higher authority. The power to introduce a new custom, or change
existing practices, rested in large part within each community. Any
individual or group respected within that community could initiate
reforms. This tradition of self-governance is what accounts for the
vast diversity of cultural practices within the subcontinent. For
example, some communities observe strict purdah (keeping face and
body covered) for women, whereas others have inherited matrilineal
family structures in which women exercize a great deal of freedom and
social clout. Some disapprove of widow remarriage, while others
attach no stigma to widowhood and allow women recourse to easy
divorce and remarriage.
The multiplicity of codes was a major reason for the wide divergence
in judgments, interpretations and reports provided by the pandits
appointed to assist British judges presiding over the newly
established colonial courts. Often the same pandits even gave
different opinions on seemingly similar matters, confounding the
judges of the East India Company. The British began to mistrust the
pandits and became impatient with having to deal with such a range of
customs that had no apparent legal authority to back them, since that
made it difficult for them to pose as genuine adjudicators of Hindu
law. The British were even more nonplussed because they had a history
of using the common law system, based on precedent. However, given
the myriad opinions of the Indian pandits, they couldn't depend on
uniform precedents to make their judgments.
Anglo-Brahaminism: In order to arrive at a definitive version of the
Indian legal system that would mainly be useful for them, the East
India Company began to recruit and train pandits for its own service.
In 1772, Warren Hastings hired a group of eleven pandits to cooperate
with the Company in the creation of a new digest of Hindu law that
would govern civil disputes in the British courts. The Sanskrit
pandits hired to translate and sanction this new interpretation of
customary laws created a curious Anglo-Brahmanical hybrid. The
resulting document, printed in London under the title A Code of
Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pandits was a made-to-order text,
in which the pandits dutifully followed the demands made by their
paymasters. Though it was the first serious attempt at codification
of Hindu law, the text was far from accurate in its references to the
original sources, or to their varied traditional interpretations.
The very idea of "Hindu" law, in fact, was as much a novelty as the
idea of a pan-Indian Hindu community. In the pre-British era, people
of this subcontinent used a whole range of markers based on region,
jati, language and sect to claim and define their identities. Hardly
anybody identified themselves as "Hindu" -- a term first introduced
by foreigners to refer to people living across the Indus River. The
British lent new zeal in bringing actual substance to the new
identity markers imposed by Europeans on the diverse non-Muslim
inhabitants of the subcontinent. The codification of their so-called
"personal laws" became an important instrument in that endeavor.
This codification still could not put an end to the conflicts of
opinion. The British mistrust of the pandits increased, along with
their frustration at the way they thought they were misleading the
court primarily by favoring the interests of their own caste, and
dealing with a spectrum of customs that were not certified by any
apparent shastric source. The resulting confusions and reports of
corruption led William Jones to work on a more definitive code of
Hindu law as a reference work for Europeans in India. Jones'
statement says it all: "I can no longer bear to be at the mercy of
our pandits who deal out Hindu law as they please, and make it at
reasonable rates, when they cannot find it ready made."
He was determined that the British should administer to the Indian
people the best shastric law that could be discovered. Jones went on
to translate Manusmriti. It became one of the most favored texts of
the British. A policy decision was taken at the highest levels in the
India Office to keep this particular document in circulation and
project it as the fountainhead of Hindu jurisprudence, for the
purpose of perpetuating the illusion that the British were merely
enforcing the shastric injunctions by which Hindus were governed
anyway, and that they had inherited the authority to administer this
law.
Thus Manusmriti came to influence Oriental studies in the West far
more profoundly than it had ever influenced the practices of any
actual living communities in pre-British India. After Jones,
Colebrook tried his hand at a similar compilation. In a few years
time, Colebrook's translations of the Mitakshara and the Dayabhaga
became the two most frequently referenced sources in court judgments.
At the same time, several Sanskrit scholars were also writing legal
treatises, but the work of European authors on shastric law was held
in higher authority than even the Sanskrit shastric works.
The British consistently promoted the myth that Hindus were governed
by their codified versions of shastric injunctions. The modern
educated elite in India, whose knowledge of India comes mainly from
English language sources, were thenceforth systematically brainwashed
into believing that the British were actually administering Hindu
personal laws through the medium of the English courts. This was part
of a larger myth-building exercize whereby the people of the
subcontinent were taught that theirs was a stagnant civilization. The
ignorant assumption of our colonial rulers, that social stability in
India was due to the supposed proclivity of its people to follow the
same old traditions, customs and laws that had allegedly remained
moribund for centuries, slowly came to acquire the force of self-
evident truth over a period of time, both for those supporting as
well as those opposing British rule.
Custom vs. Anglo-shastric law: Since then, the dynamism of customary
law has been in constant conflict with the frozen and artificial
Anglo-Shastric law. Dharmashastras, for instance, were not strictly
religious treatises. Dharma itself means the aggregate of duties and
obligations -- religious, moral, social and legal -- delineated for
every individual and collective performing a specific role in
society. For example, the obligations and duties of a person in his
role as a king (raj-dharma) are different from his obligations as a
husband or son (pati-dharma or putra-dharma). Similarly, guru-dharma
demands specific responsibilities from a teacher, just as shishya-
dharma binds students to their own set of obligations. Even war
demanded a very rigorous code -- yuddha-dharma. The list is endless
and refers mostly to secular duties.
Similarly, the smritis are collections of precepts written by the
rishis, the sages of antiquity. Smritis are presumed to be the
compositions of human authors, not Gods; these authors make it clear
that they are merely anthologizing traditions handed down to them
over generations. They did not hesitate to propose changes and
reforms in their writings. For instance, Apastamba, whose work
embodies the customs of certain regions of southern India, and who
authored one of the most respected sutras, takes care, at the end of
his work, to impress his pupils with the statement: "Some declare
that the remaining duties (which have not been taught here) must be
learned from women and men of all castes." He adds, "the knowledge
which...women possess is the completion of all study."
Neither shastras nor smritis suggest that there exists an immutable,
universal moral doctrine. Rather they emphasize that codes of
morality must be specific to time, person and place, and evolve
according to changing requirements. For example, Narada states,
"Custom is powerful and overrides the sacred law." Manusmriti itself
stresses that the business of the ruler is not to impose laws from
above but that, "A king...must inquire into the law of castes (jati),
of districts (ganapada), of guilds (shreni) and of families (kula),
and settle the peculiar law of each....Thus have the holy sages, well
knowing that law is grounded on immemorial custom, embraced as the
root of all piety good usages long established."
The authority to change or create new customs rests with not just the
biradari but also the kula, or family. Our smritikars (authors)
repeatedly stress the primacy of custom and practice over textual
axioms. Since different smritikars documented the customs of
different communities, there were substantial differences in their
approaches, perspectives and precepts. But characteristically, none
of the smritikars deny the authority of other smritikars or attempt
to prove that theirs is the supreme, most authoritative version of a
code of conduct. They acknowledge that the authority of the king and
the law are derived from the people. Most of the leading smritikars
make explicit statements to this effect. The Smriti of Yajnavalkya,
for instance, lists twenty sages as law givers. The Mitakshara
explains that the enumeration is only illustrative and Dharmasutras
of others are not excluded. Nor is the authority of any shastrakar
assigned hierarchical importance.
The smritikars were not rulers. Nor did they owe their authority to
any sovereign political or military power. The authority of the codes
they enjoined were not enforced by punitive measures. Their influence
depended solely on the voluntary internalization of such value
systems by the groups to which they addressed themselves to and
people's respect for their judgment. Actual enforcement was left in
the hands of the local communities. An oft-repeated maxim was that
reason and justice are to be accorded more regard than mere texts.
Most important of all, a dharmic code, in the rishis' view, was one
that was "agreeable to good conscience."
Gandhi is one of the few modern social reformers to have understood
this principle underlying the shastras. Therefore, he could
unhesitatingly declare: "My belief in the Hindu scriptures does not
require me to accept every word and every verse as divinely
inspired...I decline to be bound by any interpretation, however
learned it may be, if it is repugnant to reason or moral sense." He
goes on to add: "1) I believe in varnashrama of the Vedas, which in
my opinion is based on absolute equality of status, notwithstanding
passages to the contrary in the smritis and elsewhere. 2) Every word
of the printed works passing muster as shastrasâ is not, in my
opinion, a revelation. 3) The interpretation of accepted texts has
undergone evolution and is capable of indefinite evolution, even as
the human intellect and heart are. 4) Nothing in the shastras which
is manifestly contrary to universal truths and morals can stand. 5)
Nothing in the shastras which is capable of being reasoned can stand
if it is in conflict with reason."
Gandhi could present himself as a modern-day sage calling upon people
to overthrow beliefs and practices that did not conform to principles
of equality and justice -- or went against "good conscience" --
because he had inherited a tradition whereby the power to change its
own customary law rested with each community.
People in India have demonstrated time and again that they are
willing to accept changes in their customs, provided those who
propose change take the trouble to win the confidence of the
community, rather than attack or humiliate the community as hostile
outsiders. The success of the 19th century social reformers is
testimony to this inherent flexibility of Hindu communities. In
recent decades, the work of Swadhyaya in parts of western India, the
Radhasoamis in Northern India, and many other reform movements have
carried forward the same tradition.
Thus, the practice of self-governance continues to be a dynamic
tradition in India. Each caste, sub-caste and occupational grouping
continues to assert its right to regulate the inner affairs of its
own community and does not pay much attention to either ancient
textual authorities or to modern parliament-enacted laws. When an
individual or a group in India seeks to defend a particular practice,
the common statement one hears across the country is "hamari biradari
mein to yeh hi chalta hai" (This is how we do things in our
community) -- rather than quotations from the shastras. Those who
insist on attributing our social ills to the shastras repeat the
mistake of our colonial rulers. Just as a doctor can kill a patient
through wrong diagnosis and treatment of the disease -- no matter how
benign the intention -- in the same manner social reformers can wreak
havoc on the people if their understanding of social ills is flawed.
Discrimination against women or Dalits is neither inherently Hindu,
nor is it scripturally mandated. This is not to suggest that such
practices do not exist. Sadly enough, the disgraceful treatment of
Dalits and downgrading of women are among the most shameful aspects
of contemporary Indian society. But they will not disappear by
burning ancient texts because none of the Hindu scriptures have
projected themselves as commandment-giving authorities demanding
unconditional obedience from all those claiming to be Hindus.
For example, oppressive widowhood was and is practiced only in
certain castes and communities in some regions among the Hindus.
According to the 1901 census, the ban on widow remarriage applied to
only ten percent of all the communities in India. And yet, in
colonial critiques, this ban came to be projected as the universal
situation of all widows in India.
If we look closely, we will find that many of the older widows have
ended up in exploitative institutions of Varanasi and Vrindavan not
because of Manu's commands, or any other religious stipulations, or
even the dictates of some contemporary patriarch. They are there
primarily because of the failure of their community to provide secure
rights for women in the family, and many are there even because of
ill-treatment by their daughters-in-law. It is also important to
remember that of all the millions of widows, only a few thousand end
up in places like Vrindavan and Varanasi. True, many may live
oppressed lives within their own homes. But it is also true that many
others live respected lives as honored matriarchs. If all Indian
women are so subordinate, as suggested by a certain kind of feminist
literature, we would not so frequently encounter the phenomenon of
the dominating mothers-in-law who, in many homes, have the power to
make or break their children's marriages. Nor would we witness
innumerable older women putting up with humiliation and neglect
because their daughters-in-law have come to acquire such a powerful
hold over their husbands that they can make them abuse their own
mothers. Those who find this description of the situation far-fetched
should do a survey of their own families. They are likely to find
both these extremes coexisting within their own family circles, along
with instances of fairly balanced and reasonably happy equations.
We are free to rid ourselves of any text that debases women or
certain castes. Let us not imagine that Manu or any other shastrakar
is obstructing our efforts to improve the lot of women or other
oppressed groups. Despite some of the very negative and offensive
things he might have said from our point of view (which many scholars
hold to be later interpolations) Manu did have the proper sense to
pronounce that good karma was more important than biological lineage.
He also emphasized that families and societies which demean women and
make them lead miserable lives inevitably move towards destruction.
He noted that truly prosperous families are only those in which women
are honored and happy.
I believe that Manu bhai would fully endorse my writing a
Madhusmriti, no matter how much I differ with him. He would probably
rejoice in the fact that many people of today prefer Madhusmriti to
Manusmriti, because Manu, like all other smritikars, emphasized that
codes of morality are not fixed by some divine authority, but must
evolve with respect to the changing requirements of generations and
communities.
Madhu Kishwar, New Delhi, is editor of Manushi, India's leading
magazine on human issues, especially women's rights. She is an
erudite activist working effectively to raise the quality of life in
India.
For subscription rates or letters to the editor, write to:
Manushi, c/202 Lajpat Nagar 1, New Delhi, 110024 India, e-mail:
ma...@manushi.unv.enet.in or Manushi, c/o Manavi, PO Box 614,
Bloomfield, New Jersey 07003 USA.
More at:
http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=4023
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
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