From Ambedkar to Rahul Gandhi: Is criticising Manusmṛti an attack on Indian civilisation?

Rahul Gandhi’s recent address at the student convention in Pune called for smash the patriarchy; he urged women to 'be loud, be proud and fight' to reclaim their space in society. Because it came from the Leader of the Opposition, many expected it to be hailed as a feminist turn in Indian politics. However, sadly and unfortunately, that was not the case. Instead, the leaders of the ruling party and the national media focused on his remarks about Manusmṛti, a major legal text from ancient India, and labelled him anti-Hindu and anti-Indian. A Supreme Court lawyer even filed a defamation complaint. Rahul Gandhi actually quoted verse 9.3 of Manusmṛti and condemned it. The verse, as translated by Patrick Olivelle, is: 'Her father guards her in her childhood, her husband guards her in her youth, and her sons guard her in her old age; a woman is not qualified to act independently.' Rejecting this shloka, Rahul Gandhi reminded the women in the audience in his speech, 'You belong to nobody except yourself.' Two days after the event, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, one of the prominent faces of Hindutva politics in India, claimed that, by criticising Manusmṛti, Rahul Gandhi insulted ‘Indian tradition and heritage.’ Yogi Adityanath advised him, 'If you want to understand Manu, you should read the Atharvaveda, Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, and Matsya Purāṇa.' This leads us to a fundamental question: since when has criticising Manusmṛti been forbidden in Indian tradition, and, more importantly, what exactly is the status of this text that sparked all the debates?

Manusmṛti, or Manu’s code of law, perhaps the most famous and influential dharmaśāstra, a legal treatise, was written around the second century CE. Translator and eminent scholar Patrick Olivelle notes, 'The fame of Manu did not diminish through the next fifteen centuries right up to the time when the administration of law was taken over by the colonial power Britain.' Now, in Vedic literature, categorically, Manusmṛti is considered a Smṛti, which means ‘remembered’ and passed down as normative texts, as opposed to Śruti, which is ‘heard.’ The four Vedas, for example, are Śruti, whereas dharmaśāstras and epics are all Smṛti. According to the Mīmāṃsā tradition, one of the six āstika schools of Indian philosophy, Śruti texts are apauruṣeya, meaning ‘not of human origin,’ and essentially authorless; therefore, their authority lies beyond criticism. But Manusmṛti is pauruṣeya, authored by Manu; Manu himself upholds this classification in verse 2.10, as Ganganath Jha translates it: 'The Veda should be known as the revealed word,’ and the Dharmaśāstra as the 'recollections'. However, Mīmāṃsā doctrine was not universal either. Nyāya, for example, does not consider the Vedas to be authorless but contends that Īśvara, or God, is the author. At the same time, the materialist school Cārvāka rejects the authority of the Vedas altogether. Nevertheless, in most Indian philosophical traditions, Manusmṛti, as a Smṛti text mediated through a human author, can be interpreted, contested and challenged. They do not restrict criticism of the laws. And Rahul Gandhi is by no means the first Indian politician to question the authority of Manusmṛti.

Almost a hundred years ago, on December 25, 1927, in Mahad, Babasaheb Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar—who would later become India's first Minister of Law and Justice and the chairman of the drafting committee of the Indian Constitution—publicly burned Manusmṛti. He stated that it was the root of patriarchy and caste-based inequalities in India. Ambedkar’s criticism of Manu’s laws was argumentative and scholarly, not merely symbolic. Besides exposing how Manu’s codes legitimised caste hierarchy, in his essay The Woman and the Counter-Revolution, Babasaheb turned to the history of gender discrimination in India and held Manu accountable:

Babasaheb listed the codes that legally subjugated and disempowered women. One of those codes, verse 5.147, echoes the verse quoted by Rahul Gandhi: 'Even in their own homes, a female—whether she is a child, a young woman, or an old lady—should never carry out any task independently' (translated by Patrick Olivelle). In another verse, 2.213, Manu describes the moral character of women: 'It is the very nature of women here to corrupt men. On that account, prudent men are never off guard in the presence of alluring young women' (translated by Patrick Olivelle). The women’s position can be contrasted with what is expected of a man in a marriage in verse 5.154: 'Though he may be bereft of virtue, given to lust, and totally devoid of good qualities, a good woman should always worship her husband like a god' (translated by Patrick Olivelle). In a related essay, 'The Rise and Fall of the Hindu Woman: Who Was Responsible for It?', Babasaheb argued that Manu’s laws concerning women, including her exclusion from the right to study the Vedas (verse 10.18), were 'both an insult and an injury to the women of India'. In the context of Manu’s injunctions, he asked: 'Can anybody doubt that it was Manu who was responsible for the degradation of women in India?' Babasaheb argued that Brahminical patriarchy, though it existed as a social practice long before Manu, became state law only after Manusmṛti. Nor was Ambedkar against every Smṛti text. Ambedkar, in fact, compared women’s position in the Manusmṛti with a slightly older manual of governance, Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra. Where Manu’s laws prohibit women from remarrying (see verses 9:46, 5.157, and 5:162), Kautilya’s codes were more lenient towards women in divorce; Babasaheb writes,

He also refers to other Indian grammar texts, from Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī to Patañjali’s Mahâbhâshya, to show that before Manu, women studied and taught the Vedas and were respected. Therefore, Babasaheb’s criticism of Manusmṛti is not about its Hindu authorship but stems from a longstanding Indian tradition that permits the critique of Smṛti texts. Indian intellectual history bears traces of that tradition. Rāmānuja rejected the principles of Advaita Vedānta; Vedāntins quarrelled with one another; Buddhists challenged Brahminical schools of thought; Śaṅkara was polemical in his time. The point is that critiquing Manusmṛti cannot be equated to criticising the entire Indian civilisation, which surpasses any single text. The question we should ask is: on what grounds does Manusmṛti suddenly deserve safeguarding from criticism today? Who grants Manu this immunity? It is evident that Rahul Gandhi’s remarks against Manusmṛti at the ‘Chhatron ki Goonj’ event were far from new; instead, he was following in Babasaheb’s footsteps and was within his rights in his approach to the text.

There is another peculiar demand which is being surfaced across social media: why does Rahul Gandhi not criticise other religious texts, such as the Qur’an or Hadith literature, while talking about patriarchy? It is a clear logical fallacy. Why must criticising one text lead to condemning all other texts? Manu’s codes are either justified or not, based on their own criteria. Quoting patriarchal verses from other religions does not resolve Ambedkar or Rahul Gandhi’s criticism of Manu. For Hindutva politicians, this allegation should sound ironic. If the Hindutva worldview excludes texts originally written in Arabic from Indian culture, then why do they care when an Indian politician omits those texts while discussing patriarchy in India in his speech? Of course, no one is saying that Rahul Gandhi’s feminism cannot be scrutinised. It should also be evaluated to what extent Manu’s codes contribute to present-day gender discrimination in India. But Yogi Adityanath’s charge that Rahul Gandhi insulted the Indian heritage ignores the fact that inheriting a text within the Indian tradition allows one to argue and contest its propositions. If Manusmṛti is part of Indian tradition, so is Rahul Gandhi’s criticism and Ambedkar’s reading and burning of the text.