The Laws of Manu

by The Laws of Manu (retail) (epub)

  There is a similar tension in Manu’s attitude to nature (dharma, again). On the one hand, he seems to be saying that nature (dharma) is good, and, more to the point, that it is entirely in harmony with society or culture (also called dharma), and that the king must guard it. On the other hand, he says that nature, before society comes into existence, is bad, bestial (dog eat dog or, in the Indian formulation, fish eat fish, matsyanyāya), red in tooth and claw, and that the king must guard against it. This comes down to the basic tension between dharma as descriptive (which implies that nature and society are naturally harmonious, that eating and sexuality are good) and dharma as prescriptive (which implies that society must fight against nature, that eating and sexuality are dangerous). Thus dharma may sometimes be rendered as ‘law’ either in the sense of the law of gravity (dharma as nature) or in the sense of the law against slander (dharma as culture).

  Despite the relativity of dharma, its context-sensitivity paradoxically guards Manu from the dangers of true relativism. He is not ‘pro-choice’ like a modern American liberal. He believes that, in any given circumstances, there is only one thing to do. Though he himself, in his own period and culture, is violently opposed to abortion, if he were a law-giver nowadays, and were to enter our contemporary debates about abortion, one can imagine the sort of stance he would take. He would not say, ‘Every woman can choose whether or not to have an abortion’ (which would be relativistic, at least to the degree that it acknowledged different ideals for different individuals), nor would he say, ‘No woman can have an abortion’ (which would be univocal), nor would he say, ‘Every woman can choose whether or not to have an abortion’ and ‘No woman can have an abortion’ (which would be contradictory). He would probably say something like this: ‘A woman who already has three children and is over thirty can have an abortion, and a woman who has no children and is under thirty cannot have an abortion’ (a statement nuanced to the infinite varieties of the human condition). The fact that he would not cover the case of a woman over thirty with no children or that of a woman under thirty with three children would allow ample scope for the commentaries.

  Other apparent contradictions may be the result of a combination of genres. To a certain extent Manu’s text was both created and preserved orally (as is indicated, for instance, by the śloka verse form and the text’s classification as a smṛti), but to a certain extent it is, at least in its final recension if not in its original composition, a written text (as is indicated by the existence of commentaries). Some parts of the text are widely known by memory in India (the more aphoristic verses), and much of the text was situated in people; the people were the text. Yet it is unlikely that any but a professional jurist would have memorized the more technical lists.72 Some of it, therefore, is a legal code, and some of it is a moral exhortation; many people have memorized the moral exhortation, while generally only experts have known the code. In fact, there are several different (and not necessarily incompatible) codes, any one of which may be invoked to justify a particular verse and none of which can explain ‘the system’ as a whole. It is really not – code at all, except perhaps in the sense of what we call the genetic code – chains of Hindu-informational DNA responding, in ever-shifting ways, to their various social environments – an encapsulation of the whole culture in nuce.

  4. ‘Between the idea/ And the reality/

  Between the motion/ And the act/

  Falls the Shadow.’73

  ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality.’74

  It is left for us to return to the question of the actual application of Manu in Hindu life, to the gulf that yawns between the ideal encapsulation of the culture and life as it is lived. Brian K. Smith has argued that the need for āpad is an indication of the ultimate failure of Manu to provide a code of human conduct that can be realistically applied. In this view, the entire elaborate system that Manu has created is acknowledged to be one that does not work when one is faced with an emergency – emergencies being the stuff that human life, and certainly human law, is made on. More broadly speaking, the whole system of vows of restoration, in addition to the counter-structure of āpad, indicates that the system was designed primarily for people who disobeyed it. But this is neither irrational nor inconsistent: it is the assumption that underlies all systems of legal punishments and religious restorations, including our own.

  Yet, if Manu himself acknowledged the need to escape from his system, how seriously did other Hindus take it? Many a young man must have seduced, or been seduced by, his guru’s wife (a situation which must have been endemic, given both Manu’s paranoid terror of it and its likelihood in a world in which young women married old men who had young pupils). How likely was he, afterwards, to ‘sleep on a heated iron bed or embrace a red-hot metal cylinder … or cut off his penis and testicles, hold them in his two cupped hands, and set out towards the south-west region of Ruin, walking straight ahead until he dies’ (11.104–5)? Would any but the most dedicated masochist turn down the milder alternatives that Manu, as always, realistically offers: ‘Or he may carry a club shaped like a bedpost, wear rags, grow a beard, concentrate his mind, and carry out the “Painful” vow of the Lord of Creatures for a year in a deserted forest. Or, to dispel (the crime of violating) his guru’s marriage-bed, he should restrain his sense organs and carry out the “Moon-course” vow for three months, eating food fit for an oblation or barley-broth’ (11.106–7). How do we know that anyone ever did any of this? Who believed the priests? How was Manu used?

  As we have seen, Hindus themselves have always taken Manu seriously in theory. In the realm of the ideal, Manu is the cornerstone of the priestly vision of what human life should be, a vision to which Hindus have always paid lip-service and to which in many ways they still genuinely aspire. Like all textbooks (śāstras), it influenced expectations, tastes, and judgements, beneath the level of direct application of given cases. For centuries, the text succeeded simultaneously in mobilizing the insiders and convincing the outsiders that Brahmins really were superior, that status was more important than political or economic power. Even today, Manu remains the pre-eminent symbol – now a negative symbol – of the repressive caste system: it is Manu, more than any other text, that Untouchables burn in their protests.75 But whether this cultural status, positive or negative, has ever extended beyond the texts to the actual use of Manu in legal courts is another matter, which brings us back to a consideration of the European reception of the text.

  For administrators in British India, beginning with Warren Hastings, the book was significant for practical reasons. It was the British who translated dharmaśāstra as ‘laws’, because they wanted to use it as the basis of a legal system, whether or not it was in fact used in that way in India at that time. One could not actually run a country using Manu alone; that is why the Hindus (and the British) needed all the commentaries. It has, however, been argued (by Derrett and Lingat, among others) that, with the help of the commentaries, Manu was in fact used by jurists. Under the British, the text became instrumental in the construction of a complex system of jurisprudence in which ‘general law’ was supplemented by a ‘personal law’ determined by one’s religious affiliation. ‘Hindu law’, or dharmaśāstra, was applied to nearly 80 per cent of the population of colonial India in matters of marriage and divorce, legitimacy, guardianship, adoption, inheritance, religious endowments, and so on. And in present-day India, Manu remains the basis of the Hindu marriage code, as it defines itself vis-à-vis Muslim or secular (governmental) marriage law.76

  Some Orientalists have argued that it is mere ‘Orientalism’ to give Manu pride of place. They maintain that the text of Yajñavalkya or that of Mītākṣara, for instance, was more widely used in in traditional Hindu legal circles. We are now beginning to ask, and only beginning to answer, certain questions about the relationship between British legal aims and the history of Manu in Western Orientalism. Some of these questions are: Were the British right to privilege Manu? Did they do it to ad
vance their own interests, or because they found that this text was really in use? Full answers to these questions are beyond the scope of the present essay, but we have begun to answer them by considering the sources of the text and the authority of its authors.

  As an applied legal text, Manu does not deserve the status that the British accorded it. The existence of numerous alternatives to Manu in Indian civilization indicates that his was only one voice among many. In addition to the many other dharmaśāstras, there are the many commentaries, both on Manu and on the other texts, that openly debate almost every point. And then there are the alternative systems, both within Hinduism (including the bhakti devotional movements and the Tantric cults) and alongside it in the Indian subcontinent (Buddhism and Jainism in the early days, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity later, modern reform movements still later).

  Indeed, only a small part of Manu (Chapter 8 and a part of Chapter 9, which are generally regarded as late additions to the work) deals with what we would call law. The rest is a code of a very different sort, an encyclopedic organization of human knowledge according to certain ideal goals, a religious world-view. But as a document capable of actually adjudicating the day-to-day decisions that human beings have to make about such important subjects as food and sex, it could not be, and did not (if we read it carefully) claim to be, the law.

  PART III THE TRANSLATION

  The present translation was designed both to make the text accessible to a wide, generally educated audience and to offer to more specialized scholars new interpretations of many difficult verses.

  1. Why Bühler is Not Good Enough

  There are a number of translation of Manu into English,77 but only that of Georg Bühler has remained in print and easily accessible. Bühler’s translation, now a century old, is not nearly as bad as someone offering a new translation might wish it to be. It is basically very sound; he makes mistakes, but not often, and probably no more often than I will make mistakes in this translation. But there are two major problems with Bühler: first, he is unreadable; and second, he often translates the commentaries as part of the text. Let me begin by addressing the first problem.

  Bühler’s text is unreadable in part because English was not his native language, in part because he was using an impossible system of transliteration, and in part because in his laudable desire to be accurate he wrote brutal translatorese. His Victorian prose seems stilted and off-putting today, and his archaisms effectively twice remove this ancient text from the contemporary student. He tends to moralize, to add words like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ where the Sanskrit is neutral or ambiguous (at 3.63, for instance). Moreover, his squeamishness about sex – or, to be fair, the squeamishness of his time – led him not only to use misleading euphemisms but to hedge and even to misconstrue many passages dealing with sexual matters. Thus, for example, at 11.174, where Manu prohibits sex ‘in non-human females, in a man, in a menstruating woman, in something other than a vagina’, Bühler wretchedly translates, ‘a bestial crime, or an unnatural crime with a female’. Hundreds of similar instances could be adduced, and they add up to a skewing of the text at its very roots.

  His scholarly apparatus is detailed and helpful to the specialist, but his frequent and highly technical footnotes tend to confuse rather than to enlighten the non-specialist. The very weight of his scholarship makes his text far too daunting for most readers. It might be argued that readability is not an important criterion when it comes to the translation of a text that contains so much culturally specific data. But some readers might want to read the text, rather than to consult or decipher it, and it is for them that I have made this translation. After a hundred years, it is time to try again.

  The main innovations of this new translation lie in offering, for the first time, a translation of the text as a continuous narrative and a translation of the text itself, without the unacknowledged retroactive influence of the commentaries.78

  2. The Continuous Narrative

  This is the first translation to set the text in paragraphs. Manu was composed in śloka verses consisting of two unrhymed but rhythmic lines of sixteen syllables each, a simple and loose verse form roughly equivalent to blank verse in English. Most Indologists believe that there is no continual narrative in Manu, no flow of thought, merely a set of individual nuts to be cracked. Given their view of the ‘hotchpotch’ and ‘aphoristic’ nature of Manu’s text, it is not surprising that traditional Indologists have objected to the imposition of a ‘narrative’ structure (the use of paragraphs rather than discrete verses) in a translation of Manu.

  But the text can be read not only in the traditional way, point by point as a jurist reads it (which is indeed possible to do, by and large, with the extant translations), but in a new way, as a coherent sequence of thoughts (which is not possible to do with the extant translations). Inspired by the realization that the final form of the text, regardless of its diverse sources, is logically consistent, I rendered verses into paragraphs rather than discrete verses. This encourages the flow of meaning for a Western audience unaccustomed to take seriously arguments articulated and sustained in verses and aphorisms. When the verses that discuss a particular topic are grouped together in the appropriate paragraph, it is possible to see more clearly what central topic has now been taken up for discussion, what divergent opinions about the subject are taken into account by the author of this text, and what his own final decision on that subject is. In matching an Indian literary form (discrete but mutually informing verses) with its functionally equivalent Western form (continuous sentences and paragraphs), I am following the path already blazed by the late J. A. B. van Buitenen’s similar use of paragraphs in restructuring his translation of the great Indian epic, the Mahābhārata, which is also composed in ślokas.79

  There are places where the text resists this treatment, where there do seem to be individual verses only loosely connected with the apparent context, and in those places I left the text in that form. But there are also many places where Manu really seems to demand to be read in paragraphs, where a verse clearly depends directly on the preceding verse.80 In many such instances, previous translations had to scurry about supplying (in parentheses) the word for the unexpressed subject; left in paragraphs, the subject is obvious, carried forward from the preceding intrinsically connected verse, or, rather, sentence.

  The paragraph structure is intended not only to make the text more readable but to illuminate its integrity. That Manu responds well to such a treatment is demonstrated by the delightfully tongue-in-cheek narrative that Sudhir Kakar has teased out of one of Manu’s most famous misogynist diatribes, in Chapter 9:

  The first twenty-six stanzas of the chapter ‘Duties of Husband and Wife’ in The Laws of Manu, which form the cornerstone of the culture’s official view of women, can be read as a fantasy around the theme of the adult woman’s possible sexual abandon and potential infidelity. The fantasy is very much that of the Oedipal boy who imagines the mother turning away from him and towards the father … The fantasy thus starts with the wish to ‘guard’ a woman from her overwhelming sexual temptation and from the interlopers who would exploit it for their own and her pleasure. Yet guarding her by force is not realistically possible, and perhaps it is better to keep her thoroughly engaged in household work and thus fancy-free … On the other hand, even the dam of ‘busy-ness’ is really not enough to constrain her erotic turbulence and our Oedipal lover appeals to her conscience, the inner sentinel … Both the recourse to the external world and to the woman’s own superego do not prove to be sufficient as the more primitive images in the jealous and disappointed lover’s fantasy break through to the surface … Anger and retaliation now follow wherein the woman must atone for her lapse before she can again be resurrected as the pure and the needed mother. The mantra she needs to recite for the ‘expiation of her sins’ is not hers but in fact that of the son … Punished and repentant, the whore finally disappears, to be replaced by the untainted mother who, in subsequent v
erses, is praised and equated with the goddess (of fortune).81

  Many other human tragedies and comedies are encoded between the lines of this text, which the present translation hopes at least to suggest to the alert reader.

  3. Translating against the Commentaries

  Bühler’s unreadability is further exacerbated by another factor that also makes his text an inaccurate rendition of the text it purports to translate, Manu’s text; and that is the fact that he incorporates much of the commentarial tradition into the actual text. For instance, at 1.56, the text says, ‘When he has united (with that) he leaves (vimuñcati) his (former) physical form.’ Bühler, following the commentaries, says it means the very opposite: ‘it then assumes a corporeal frame’. Sir Monier Monier-Williams, here as in many other instances, picks up that meaning of the verb vimuc from Bühler and puts it into his Sanskrit–English dictionary, citing it from this one verse alone and glossing it as coming from Manu, although that meaning comes only from the commentaries. Sometimes Bühler translates the text but adds the commentary in parentheses. At 8.377, Manu refers to the violation of ‘a guarded woman of the priestly class’. Bühler, following the commentary, refers to the victim as ‘a Brahmani (not only) guarded (but the wife of an eminent man) …’. Such interpolations are not necessary for our understanding of the text, nor justified by Bühler in so much as a footnote.82