The Laws of Manu

by The Laws of Manu (retail) (epub)

  The non-violent principles regulating the ideal personal diet as well as the ideal social order, on the one hand, and the violent principles determining the actual course of nature, on the other, became antitheses. Nature and culture were disjoined. In place of a ‘natural’ legitimation for cultural practices like diet and the positioning of the social classes according to relative domination of others was substituted an ideal that transcended, and contradicted, the nasty world of saṃsāra.

  Most importantly, the introduction of vegetarianism and non-violence – by those who turned their backs on the social world and denied any insuperable relationship between human potentiality and natural limitations – may very well have been regarded as opportune by a class of priests and intellectuals whose ritual (or ‘symbolic’) base for social supremacy might appear a bit shaky in the Vedic world of (‘non-symbolic’) martial values. The superiority that the priests assumed, on what might have been regarded by others as dubious grounds, in the Vedic struggle of eaters and food may have been consolidated only in post-Vedic times by rewriting the rules of the game. Priestly social precedence, otherwise put, may have become virtually indisputable only with the introduction of non-violence as the criterion for ‘purity’ and as the paradigmatic practice for social standing.

  To the degree that imitation of the priest’s pattern of life is operative as a form of upward mobility in caste society,51 vegetarianism and non-violence became generalized ideals. And as such, they clearly presented a problem to those whose livelihoods depended on killing (warriors, of course, but also, for example, farmers whose ploughs destroyed lower life-forms). Beginning in Manu (10.63), non-violence is usually listed among other qualities that comprise universal (sāmānya) dharma, applicable to all regardless of class or caste.52 Those castes who follow occupations entailing relatively little violence towards other beings and who practise vegetarianism were, generally and theoretically speaking, ranked higher than those who do not.

  When priestly authors praised the pursuit of svadharma or class-nuanced duty, it could only be regarded as a cynical sop thrown to inferiorized social groups. Kṛṣṇa’s declaration to the warrior Arjuna in the Gītā that ‘it is better to do your own duty poorly than another’s well’ (a paraphrase of Manu 10.97) failed to mention the fact that Arjuna’s own duty would forever doom him to relative inferiority vis-à-vis priests whose svadharma just happened to conform with the universal dharma that dictated non-violence. Here is the ‘Catch 22’ of the Vedic philosophy of resemblance that Manu perpetuates and reworks: the hierarchically superior prototype is also the generalizable archetype – the svadharma of priests is nothing but the ‘general’ dharma applicable, until contradicted, to all others. And it is precisely in the contradiction that hierarchical inferiority becomes inevitable: the violent ruler is relegated to a place of ‘incompletion’ vis-à-vis the non-violent prototype, the priest.

  Nevertheless maintaining their high position in the caste hierarchy, second only to the priests, the warriors and rulers become categorically anomalous in light of their carnivorous bent and occupational commitment to violence. Henceforth, as Dumont and others have noted, ‘purity’ (defined in large part by how near one’s mode of life approximated the ideal of non-violence) and power, manifest respectively in the figures of the priest and the ruler, were established as alternative and contradictory principles, with the former taking precedence over the latter in the theoretical hierarchical scheme of things. Power was not entirely banished from society – for the very good reason that it could not be – but was, again, inferiorized in relation to priestly ideals.

  Some things, however, never change. For although the infusion of an ethic of non-violence into the social order rendered the rulers theoretically inferior to the priests (just as the priests’ monopoly on ritual technology had done in the Veda), in real life things are different. As Dumont puts it, ‘In theory, power is ultimately subordinate to priesthood, whereas in fact priesthood submits to power.’53

  Manu presents one of the finest examples in Indian literature of the insoluble contradiction between religious ideals (like non-violence) and secular reality (which always entails violence). As a text on dharma, it is by definition caught in the universal paradox between ‘what should be’ and ‘what is’ – for dharma strives to be both descriptive and prescriptive.54 Attempting to prescribe an order of things guided by ideals that called upon humans to transcend the human condition (e.g., eat without killing), while at the same time presuming to be descriptive, realistic, and wise about actual human affairs, Manu is caught on the horns of a dilemma. The priests may have thought it advantageous to throw in their lot with the renouncers, and indeed by doing so shored up considerably their claims to predominance by renegotiating the terms of social rank. The price, however, was the formulation of a social system whose principles were at war with themselves, and a religious system which constantly threatened to become irrelevant to the world in which most people lived, married, eked out a living, grew old, and died – and killed, at every juncture.

  The ‘conflict of tradition’ such a new order entailed55 had many reflexes. These included a crisis in the role of the Brahmin as ‘priest’ (fulfilling his social function only at the risk of ‘pollution’ through contact with others), an absence of true legitimation for political rule, and a paradoxical conception of dharma, the ‘principles of life’. The fulfilment of the prescriptive side of dharma was mostly impossible; and the descriptive aspects of the ‘principles of life’ were necessarily constituted as one large set of ‘emergencies’. Manu, like all texts caught in such a web, is left with unrealizable ideals, on the one hand, and applicable rules for a reality that has been relegated to a status in extremis. Manu is not so much a text on dharma as it is on āpad dharma – the principles of life led in a perpetual state of crisis.

  5. The Authority of the Veda in Manu

  One of the most important strategic moves made in Manu and other texts was a full equation of priestly authority and Vedic authority, of ‘God’ and the priestly ‘forefathers’, of revelation and tradition. Not only did it have the effect of further bolstering the claims of the priesthood to social supremacy; it also made possible perpetual revelation via the mouths of the class mythically envisioned as the mouth of the creator. Interpretation and revelation were wholly conflated in the person of the ‘learned priest’. Thus the distinction between transcendent revelation (śruti) and the traditional teachings of human wise-men (smṛti) – a distinction that Indology has made so much of – is meaningless when it comes to the question of authority.

  In Manu, the Veda is regarded as both immanent and transcendent. Both aspects of Veda are generated out of the brahman, but the transcendent Veda is ‘secret’ (Manu 11.265-6). One is reminded here of the opening line of the Tao Te Ching: ‘The tao that can be named is not the real tao.’ The eternal Veda is thus said to exist outside of time altogether; alternatively, it is portrayed as having been created at the very dawn of time. Manu includes in his list of things that are known ‘from the Veda alone’ the three worlds (earth, atmosphere, and sky), the past, present, and future, sound, touch, colour, taste, and smell – and the four social classes (Manu 12.97–8). The pride of place of the priestly class in the social structure is authorized by the Veda and continually reinforced by the subsequent teachings of the priests. For the dicta of the priests are, inevitably, grounded in the Veda: ‘By his very birth a priest is a deity even for the gods and the only authority for people in this world, for the Veda is the foundation in this matter’ (Manu 11.85).

  The Veda was established quite early on as unquestionable revelation, the source of all knowledge, and as the canonical touchstone for all subsequent ‘orthodox’ truth claims. Correlatively, the Vedic sacrifice became the paradigm of all praxis in post-Vedic Hindu traditions.56 In texts like Manu, the absolute authority of both Vedic knowledge and Vedic practice was brokered by a priestly class who borrowed from the ‘prestige of origins’ that the Veda
and the sacrifice represented even while they embraced anti-Vedic pacifistic principles. In the dharma texts, priests are set apart from all others in that they officiate at sacrifices (as well as offer them, as others of the ‘twice-born’ are still supposed to do) and teach (as well as learn) the Veda, which is all about those sacrifices. Thus, in addition to precedence claimed in terms of ‘purity’ based on non-violence, the priests continued to claim it on the grounds of their expertise in the knowledge and performance of an intrinsically violent ritual that was often explicitly directed towards aggressive ends.57

  The paradox did not escape the attention of the priests. In texts like Manu, the priests did their best to reconcile the two contradictory rationales for their own social superiority. One of the methods devised to do so was to turn on the fog machine: ‘Killing in a sacrifice is not killing … The violence to those that move and those that do not move which is sanctioned by the Veda – that is known as non-violence’ (Manu 5.39, 44).58 Sacrifice, in effect, is here revealed to be the ultimate form of non-violence, just as in an early time, under different contingencies, it had been represented as the ultimate form of violence.

  Another means for transforming the bellicose sacrifice was to redirect its purpose. Instead of a weapon deployed against the hated other (one’s ‘enemy’, one’s ‘food’), certain sacrifices were reconstituted as expiations for the inevitable violence of the householder’s everyday life. Manu 3.68–9, on the five ‘great sacrifices’ of the householder, provides a prime example of such an expedient. As Madeleine Biardeau has written about this passage, ‘The main point of the religious activity of the Brahmins amounts to a series of expiations.’59 The canonical sacrifice here takes on radically different significances in the light of new contingencies. More to the point, the priestly class could in this way maintain the older basis for social precedence (superior ‘fire power’, so to say, by virtue of monopoly over the sacrifice) while shoring up their social status – especially over and against the rulers – with the exact opposite principle (superior ‘purity’ by virtue of non-violence).

  Vedism and Hinduism meet in Manu. And from the outsider’s point of view, the confluence entails insoluble contradictions and frenzied attempts to overcome them. The Veda and the Vedic sacrifice were largely irrelevant and to some extent embarrassing to a later group of religious leaders with a different agenda. At the same time, the Veda and the sacrifice, qua canon and canonical practice, could not be ignored.

  This situation is hardly unique to Indian religions. Saddled with a canonical set of texts written thousands of years ago in the Near East, Christians have ever since had to overcome similar embarrassments and irrelevancies – most recently, for example, the fact that Jesus was not a woman or an androgyne; that he was not well versed in Marxism; and that he did not declare his opinion one way or another on abortion, prayer in the public schools, or virtually any other contemporary social issue. This has not stopped Christians from imagining that the New Testament does indeed speak to these concerns, any more than Hindus have forgone stating that non-violence is somehow Vedic.

  The history of religions is the history of the ways humans have redeployed the authority of a ‘timeless’ canon to justify ever new and changing doctrines and practices. Manu is one such moment in the history of Indian religion and, given its influence on later reconstructions, it is a moment worth pondering.

  PART II: THE STRUCTURE AND MEANING OF THE TEXT

  1. The Coherence of Manu

  The Laws of Manu encompasses contradictions that may indeed be ultimately ‘insoluble’,60 but not necessarily irreconcilable, nor are its attempts to reconcile them necessarily ‘frenzied’. Given the historical background, it is not surprising that Manu expresses a number of different views on many basic points. Different parts of the text were added at different periods (the portions dealing with legal cases are generally regarded as the latest) and, in the recension that we have, some topics are split up and treated in several different places, or in what seem to us to be the wrong places. Manu could have used a good editor to smooth over the awkward spots where two different texts have obviously been juxtaposed. But to grant that a text composed in increments over several centuries often betrays its chequered past, despite its constant attempts to integrate each new view, is not to grant that it is a profoundly and naively ambivalent text blind to its own inherent contradictions.

  Many scholars believe that the text of Manu is a hotchpotch of inconsistency like Nietzsche’s hotchpotch Chandala, a ‘confused’ half-caste (saṃkīrṇa). This attitude has been characterized by followers of Edward Said as ‘Orientalist’; it is based upon an arrogant Western assumption that ‘Orientals’ are radically alien even in their basic cognitive processes, that, unlike us, they do not recognize or understand contradictions when they encounter or generate them. Such an assumption ignores the fact that most great religious traditions, including our own, are the result of historical conflations and express insoluble contradictions. Thus we are now at pains to resolve a traditional cultural abhorrence of abortion with a new awareness of its possible justification in certain circumstances; the ambivalence and inconsistency of our present legal decisions on this issue reflect these tensions. The refusal to grant equal respect to Manu’s inconsistencies is an example of the wrong sort of ‘Orientalism’. We must of course grant that, historically, both a Vedic tradition of sacrifice and violence and a later tradition of vegetarianism and non-violence were brought together in the final redaction of Manu. But we must also give Manu credit for synthesizing those traditions and structuring them in such a way as to illuminate his own interpretation of their interrelationship.61

  On the one hand, it may be argued that all people, everywhere, argue their essential paradoxes through what Gilbert Ryle has called ‘litigations between lines of thought’.62 Arguments about coherence, about authority and legitimation, about the rationality of irrational (divine) decrees, such as are applied to Manu, are also made with regard to Western texts; this is not an ‘Oriental’ problem. On the other hand, one might argue that the Hindus have devised particularly creative ways to deal with ambiguity and paradox, ways from which we might learn.63 And this argument does not necessarily imply any pejorative ‘Orientalism’.

  A. K. Ramanujan has argued against the allegations of ‘inconsistency’ in Manu and other Indian texts. He goes on to say,

  One has only to read Manu after a bit of Kant to be struck by the former’s extraordinary lack of universality. He seems to have no clear notion of a universal human nature from which one can deduce ethical decrees … To be moral, for Manu, is to particularize – to ask who did what, to whom and when. Shaw’s comment, ‘Do not do unto others as you would have they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same’ will be closer to Manu’s view, except he would substitute ‘natures or classes’ for ‘tastes’.

  We can, therefore, find consistency in Manu only when we realize that his laws (such as 7.41 and 8.267, which Ramanujan cites), like all aspects of dharma, are ‘context-sensitive’. When one takes this into consideration, as well as the relative factors of dharma appropriate to each stage of life, each station or class, each given nature, and the dharma of extremity,

  each addition is really a subtraction from any universal law. There is not much left of an absolute or common (sādhāraṇa) dharma which the texts speak of, if at all, as a last and not as a first resort. They seem to say, if you fit no contexts or conditions, which is unlikely, fall back on the universal.64

  Thus the fragmented history and form of the text do not preclude an integrated world-view. The text encompasses as much as possible; its goal is not applicability but totality, like the culture itself. The repeated themes and lists are inherited pieces of the bricolage of ancient Indian culture, scraps that can be woven into a patchwork, but that patchwork is, in the end, a whole blanket, a security blanket for the civilization. The Laws of Manu is no more a motley of law-codes than T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a m
otley of quotes from the Upaniṣads and The Golden Bough. It is an integrated work made up in part from pieces of other works, a coherent resolution of contradictory Vedic and post-Vedic world-views.

  Yet we would do well to remember that there are orders, degrees, gradations of rationality and coherence. Inconsistency and contradiction are characteristic of most great religious texts, including Manu; but incoherence, or the failure to come to terms with one’s inconsistencies and contradictions, is another matter. All texts set out, in one way or another, to weed out incoherence, which tends nevertheless, like the jungle, to crawl back into the tidy gardens of the mind. It is at such fissures that we can often locate ideology, which has been called ‘the most important form of intellectual incoherence or violence’.65 Manu’s encompassing agenda is often most blatantly apparent precisely at the junctures (parvans, he would call them) of previously warring, now uneasily reconciled, world-views.

  But this agenda is not merely political; Edward Said was wrong when he said it was all politics. Some of it is politics, and we are grateful to Said for raising our consciousness of this uncomfortable fact; but some of it is not politics, and here he has put us on the wrong scent. Brahmins (like all the rest of us) have at least two agendas; they do have a political agenda, but they also have an intellectual agenda. The Laws of Manu may well have been inspired in part by the desire to establish Brahmin status over physical force (Kṣatriyas) and economic power (Vaiśyas), but it was also inspired by the desire to solve the human, intellectual, psychological, logical problems of killing and eating, making love and dying.