We often see it happen again and again. This is something many of us don’t know enough about and therefore even though we don’t feel it is the right thing to be done,we still just let it slip by.
I too had many doubts regarding what is Manu-Smriti and why is it so hated by a particular group of people and that too so much so that they can’t get the satisfaction by burning it once and they have to keep doing it every year.
Now, I am from a family where we don’t shy away from our culture and heritage and therefore I think I had heard about pretty much all the main important scriptures which were useful and were important guide in leading our life. I had heard about the Ramayana, Bhagavad-Gita (and Mahabharata, obviously!), the Vedas, the Upanishadas and even some of the Puranas like Vishnu Purana etc. and I promise I had never even heard about Manu-Smriti.
I was curious. I wanted to know more about Manu-Smriti. I searched about it. I found out that it was a book on suggestions about life and various Do and Don’t and was written by Manu. Hmm. I have heard this name before. Yes, I remembered. It is the name of Lord Sraddhadeva Manu who was called the progenitor of humanity after the whole world was taken by water,you know the “Prelude” or “Great Flood” and he along with the help of Saptrishis and under the guidance of the Matsaya avatar of Lord Vishnu had helped preserve various species of flora and fauna and led to the new journey of humanity. But, I also noticed the term Manvantara there. What is Manvantara?Well, I read more and found out that Manvantara is the collection of the many cycles of Chatur-Yugas( Satya-Treta-Dwapar-Kali) and is actually a unit of time and indirectly an extension of the concepts of timelessness and the cyclic changes prominent in Hindu cosmology and philosophy. Every Manvantara has a new Manu and each Manu is the progenitor of that Manvantara and has the responsibility to carry the Manvantara forward after the prelude. An interesting detail is that if you go by the units given for the calculation of time according to the Hindu Cosmology, there will be more than a million year difference between the time when Manu-Smriti was composed by the Manu of this Manvantara and the time when a particular group started ridiculing it for their propaganda machine.
Now, coming back to the topic of Manu-Smriti, we have come to know who and what is Manu. But, what is Smriti? You must be thinking how foolish I am to ask such a question. We all know that Smriti is the Sanskrit/Hindi term for what has been remembered. Precisely the meaning and what Manu Smriti actually symbolizes which takes me to the next point.
There are 2 types of scriptures in the broader scope of Sanaatana Dharma and therefore it is important to understand what are those types of scriptures. These are Shruti and Smriti. What is the difference? First and foremost, the literal definition. Shruti is what has been conveyed while Smriti is what has been remembered. So what? Well, it is a pretty big deal actually. There can be a huge difference in between what may have been conveyed and what is remembered now as several generation of distortions might have taken place. If you consider the time difference according to Hindu cosmology as mentioned, then the difference must be really staggering. So, why Shrutis don’t get corrupted as easily as the Smritis? Well, it is so because the Shrutis, most importantly the Vedas are remembered by reciting the sounds in the shlokas. This makes it almost impossible to random changes that happens to Smritis over generation. We can see the proof even now. Visit places like Varanasi where even today the students are still taught to recite the sounds and remember the scriptures exactly without any changes. Many scholars agree that Vedas are written in such a way that it can be remembered easily by repititive reciting of the sounds in the shlokas if done properly. Fascinating, isn’t it?
We can now understand that why Shrutis are given authority over Smritis when there is a conflict between what they convey on a particular topic. It is also clear that Smritis can not be considered that authorative. But it raises a question, again. Why and how did Manu-Smriti became such a controversial book? Well, this is actually not much surprising. British were behind this, just like many other things. British rule came with their fixed, rigid concepts of a main “Holy Book” which was to be considered eternal law by the follwers. They tried to implement the same thing in India despite noticing the diversity and despite seeing that Hindus are not the people of book and don’t solely rely on books for their understanding of Dharma. Also, Dharma cannot in any way be translated to religion or mazhab, its literal meaning is the natural way or law. It is something which comes from Rtam(along with the concept of Karma!), the order of universe itself. So, Hindus relied and still rely more on experience than on theoretical knowledge and whatever they think is wrong/not natural/adharma needs to be cross-examined and corrected. Hindus or those who understand Sanaatana Dharma believe and experience every being to have aatman, which is part of parmaatman or the ultimate reality and therefore the capability to identify what is wrong(unnatural/adharma) & right(natural/dharma) respectively is ingrained in us and we don’t need a prophet or a guideline manual to set us on right path. Hindus were and still are free to question whatever has been written in the many scriptures, not judt for the sake of debate or satisfaction of ego but for the sake of attaining a higher goal of spirituality. Even when referring to scriptures, Hindus never rely only on one book/scripture to understand anything, but there are tens and hundreds of books to cover the broader aspect of life and to clear the context in which everything has been said. Even then, it is ultimately the experience of the person which is considered more reliable than all the scriptures. Scriptures are only meant to be a guiding hands rather than chains binding the person. Even Lord Krishna said to Arjuna at the end of Bhagvad-Gita that I have told you everything, but it is still upto you to do what you want. It is actually encouraged in the Yogic Traditions to rely more on experience rather than becoming a blind follower of any book. Therefore, the concept of fixing a book as a law book for Hindus was a disaster in itself. British weren’t satisfied. They did even more of a disaster by making a Smriti the law book, that too the one which already had more than 20 versions and was one of the oldest Smriti in existence. It will be a quite interesting question as to which version of Manu-Smriti are these people burning every year and which version was chosen by the British as the main codebook/lawbook for lifestyle of the Hindus.
There has been many concerns raised on the translated versions of Manu-Smriti by the western scholars in the early 18th and 19th century where it is clear that they have misinterpreted and misunderstood many parts of the Manu-Smriti (and other scriptures as well) with their half-baked knowledge and which suites their own bias to fix and appropriate everything in accordance to the structure of the remnants of ancient and mideval western society and western lifestyle.
We can see how Manu-Smriti has been put to use against us first by the British and then by our own people still acting as the sepoys for western ideologies (which actually don’t apply to the societies here). If we don’t raise awareness now, it will be impossible to let the future generation know as there is a continuous rise in the bullshit being fed to Indian children about their own civilization which in turn is filling disgust about their own culture. It is also sad to see that most of the Ideologists are still foreign based and the narrative of India and its heritage is still being led by age-old concepts despite having so many recent researches claiming otherwise. It’s high time to act and save the great legacy our ancestors have left us with or there will be nothing left to save.
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