Four Verses and Mores

What is it about the Manusmiriti that makes it a lightning rod for the ignorant and the malevolent alike? As is usually the case, the answer lies in little knowledge.

- ABHINAV AGARWAL

The Manusmriti is, as the name literally says, a Smriti text in the corpus of Hindu literature, and also one of its most maligned texts. Nithin Sridhar's book, “Chatuh Shloki Manusmriti", dwells on the first four verses of the text as a gateway to understanding the text, clears some of the misconceptions around it, and also places it in the larger context of dharma.

At a high level of classification, Hindu texts can be divided into Shruti texts, which hold divine truths heard and realized by sages and compiled into the Vedas; and Smriti texts, which are "remembered" texts, and secondary in authority to the Shrutis. The Manusmriti falls in this latter category of Smriti texts. Verse 2.10 of the Manusmriti, "śrutistu vedo vijñeyo dharmašāstram tu vai smrtih", itself states that the Veda are Shruti and the Dharmashaastra Smriti. Which brings us to the question is the Manusmriti then a Dharmashaastra?

The term Manusmriti for the text is of somewhat later origin, since earlier references to it call it Mānava-Dharmašāstra, which therefore classifies it as a Dharmashaastra. It is also somewhat inapt to translate it as the Laws of Manu, since neither "dharma" nor "shaastra" can be translated as "law"; but this is how colonial Britishers translated it, and since it was among the very first Sanskrit texts translated into English by the colonials (specifically, by William Jones), they ended up force fitting the injunctions in the text into equivalent legal categories in English law; and because they ended up translating "dharmashastra" as "law", the term has stuck.