Wendy Doniger - The Laws of Manu

This book would never have been written but for Brian K. Smith, who conceived the project, had the idea of translating everything (even dharma), contributed many of the ideas for the introduction, compiled most of the bibliography, brought back the texts from India, furnished a translation of the parts of the book dealing with Vedic ritual (all of ; Greg Spinner (who did more work on the bibliography); David Gitomer, Sheldon Pollock, David Tracy, and Laurie Patton (who offered benevolent but penetrating criticisms of the introduction); David Grene, who read the translation and, as always, reacted with detailed, wise, and usefully non-Indological advice; Peggy Edwards, who typed the index, and Elise LaRose, who double-checked it. McKim Marriott, who was brave enough to try out an early draft on his classes, presented me with a long, painstaking, spirited, and insightful critique, particularly on matters of kinship, ritual, and pollution; I am grateful to him for the suggestions that I took (most of them) and beg his pardon for the ones that I could not accommodate to my own vision of the text. I am deeply indebted to Ariel Glucklich, who plied me with esoteric bibliographies and buoyant support, both dharmic and adharmic, during the final laps of the marathon. Finally, I wish to dedicate the book to Arshia Sattar and Sanjay Iyer, whose loyal friendship and incorrigible high spirits sustained me through rough passages in my life during the years in which this book was written.

WENDY DONIGER

Chicago, 31 December 1990

Right and wrong (dharma and adharma) do not go about saying, Here we are; nor do gods, centaurs, or ancestors say, This is right, that is wrong.

PASTAMBA

To set up a law-book of the kind of Manu means to concede to a people the right henceforth to become masterly, to become perfect to be ambitious for the highest art of living. To that end, the law must be made unconscious: this is the purpose of every holy lie.

NIETZSCHE

These two epigrams suggest two very different views of The Laws of Manu, the first from inside the tradition, acknowledging the complexity of its moral judgements, and the second from the outside, arguing for the duplicity of its presentation of those judgements. These two views lead to two very different assessments of the coherence or contradiction in Manus position on certain central religious issues, particularly on the paradox of killing and eating, and both are invaluable for our understanding of the text.

Manus ambivalence on these and other dilemmas is reflected in the evaluation of his work made by the two authors of this introduction, one of whom will argue for an irreconcilable tension between two divergent world-views in Manu while the other will argue for their integration. It is our hope that these two different evaluations will prove to be, like the two historical currents in the text that they attempt to comprehend, not mutually contradictory but symbiotic and coherent. The reader is left free to choose, both between the different strains in Manu, as expressed in the translation, and between the two different scholarly assessments of the relationship between those strains, as expressed in this introduction to the translation.

Part I will situate the text in Indian religious and social history and delineate its sources and its subsequent impact; it will demonstrate the historical origin of a tension between what may be regarded as mutually contradictory world-views in the work.