Manusmriti Is Not the Sum Total of Hindu Civilisation

 

The controversy over Manusmriti is not really about Manusmriti. It is about the politics of interpreting Indian civilisation.

Whenever Rahul Gandhi invokes Manusmriti to demonstrate the supposed foundations of Indian patriarchy, the immediate question ought to be: by what standard are civilisations being judged?

If patriarchy is the charge, the inquiry cannot begin and end with Hindu society.

Christian Europe had centuries of institutional patriarchy. Women were denied political rights, excluded from positions of authority and subjected to social and religious restrictions.

The witch-hunts remain among the darkest reminders of this history. Women were prosecuted, tortured and executed in Christian Europe in the name of religious and social order.

Women received voting rights in much of Europe only in the 20th century. Yet nobody today argues that Christianity must permanently carry the burden of European patriarchy as its defining civilisational characteristic.

Islam presents another equally complex history.

Islamic civilisation produced scholarship, law and institutions concerning women. But it also developed patriarchal interpretations governing marriage, inheritance, guardianship, divorce and women's social autonomy.

These interpretations have differed across schools and societies and remain contested even today. But no serious person would say that Islam can be reduced to patriarchy.

No serious person should therefore reduce Hindu civilisation to Manusmriti.

This is the central intellectual problem with the contemporary use of Manuvaad. Manusmriti is an ancient text. Manuvaad, as deployed in modern political discourse, is a political construction.

The two are routinely collapsed so that criticism of particular verses becomes an indictment of an entire civilisation.

History is considerably more complicated. The colonial encounter itself contributed to making Manusmriti central to Western constructions of “Hindu law”.

Sir William Jones translated the text at a time when European scholars were searching for equivalents to the legal systems they already understood—canon law in Christianity and Sharia in Islam.

But Indian civilisation did not function as a civilisation governed by one universally accepted book. It was a civilisation of competing schools, customs, philosophies and traditions. And its conception of the feminine cannot be understood merely through Manu.

What civilisation produces Ardhanarishvara—the masculine and feminine represented as one? What civilisation places Shakti, the feminine principle, at the centre of its religious imagination? 

Durga, Kali, Lakshmi and Saraswati are not marginal figures. They represent power, knowledge, prosperity and divine energy.

This does not prove that Indian society was free of patriarchy. It wasn't. But neither does the existence of patriarchy prove that patriarchy is the essence of Indian civilisation.

That distinction is crucial.

A civilisation must be judged in its totality, not by selecting its most inconvenient texts. The same intellectual standard must apply everywhere.

If a troubling passage from Manusmriti is treated as proof of the character of Hindu civilisation, comparable historical practices and patriarchal interpretations in Christianity and Islam must also be examined.

Otherwise, what is being practised is not comparative history but selective prosecution.

There is another confusion in the contemporary argument. To say that a woman belongs to herself is perfectly legitimate. But to suggest that every relationship between a woman and her father, husband, brother or son is therefore an instrument of oppression is another proposition altogether.

Protection is not ownership. Responsibility is not domination. Family is not automatically patriarchy.

A father protecting his daughter need not mean that he owns her. A husband caring for his wife need not mean that he denies her autonomy. A son caring for his mother is hardly evidence of female subjugation.

The Indian family has historically been built not merely around individual rights but around reciprocal obligations.

At different stages of life, parents depend upon children, children upon parents, husbands upon wives and wives upon husbands.

Such interdependence can certainly become oppressive when it is converted into control.

But to assume that dependence itself is oppression is to impose one ideological vocabulary upon every human relationship.

The answer, therefore, is not to defend every word ever written in Manusmriti.

Nor is it to deny India's history of discrimination against women.

The answer is intellectual honesty.

If Manusmriti is to be interrogated, interrogate it. If Indian patriarchy is to be examined, examine it.

But apply the same standard to Christianity, Islam and every other civilisation.

The real question is not whether India had patriarchy. Of course it did.

The real question is whether patriarchy is the defining essence of Indian civilisation.

That proposition cannot be established by quoting one ancient text, just as Christianity cannot be defined by witch-hunts or Islam by its most restrictive interpretations of women's rights.

The danger in the present debate is that an ancient text is being transformed into a political weapon and a complex civilisation into a single accusation.

India's past deserves criticism where criticism is warranted. But it also deserves the same historical fairness that we routinely extend to other civilisations.

Otherwise, the Manusmriti debate ceases to be about women's freedom and becomes an exercise in the selective prosecution of Indian civilisation.