Manusmriti: What We Criticize, What We Forget

Before You Burn Manusmriti, Read What Our Own Tradition Says About It

I need to get this off my chest, because I keep watching people from my own culture drag Manusmriti through the mud without knowing the first thing about what it actually is — and honestly, it’s embarrassing. Not because Manusmriti is beyond criticism. It’s not. But because the people attacking it loudest usually haven’t done fifteen minutes of reading, and the people defending it blindly haven’t either. So let me actually lay this out, properly, with receipts.

What Manusmriti actually is

Manusmriti — also called the Manava Dharmashastra — is one of the oldest and most widely referenced Dharmashastra texts, attributed to the sage Manu and generally dated somewhere between roughly 200 BCE and 200 CE (Medium). It lays out the Chaturvarna system — a fourfold division of society into Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras — along with duties, family law, and codes of personal conduct for people within that structure (Countercurrents).

The harder question I can’t dodge

Here’s where I have to stop being comfortable, though, because if I only say what’s above, I haven’t actually answered the strongest version of the criticism — I’ve just sidestepped it.

The most well-known modern critic of Manusmriti is Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who publicly burned copies of it in 1927 at Mahad, Maharashtra, during the Satyagraha for Dalits’ right to access public water — an event now marked every year as Manusmriti Dahan Divas (Countercurrents; The Mooknayak). Ambedkar’s argument wasn’t “wrong text for the wrong era.” His argument was that Manusmriti gave religious sanction to a system of graded inequality — fixed status assigned by birth rather than merit, with Shudras and those treated as outside the varna system denied basic access, dignity, and mobility — and that this sanction was the actual engine of caste oppression, not just an old-fashioned custom that lingered on its own (Countercurrents; Philosophy Institute). His later work, Annihilation of Caste, went further, arguing caste rested on religious sanction, not just social custom, which is exactly why he thought reform “from within” — keeping the religion, changing the practice — couldn’t actually work (Medium; IJHSSI paper on Ambedkar’s critique of Hinduism).

So if I just say “well actually, Manusmriti was only for Satya Yuga, it’s not for today” — that answers when the hierarchy applied. It does not answer whether it should have applied at all, even then, even for Satya Yuga. And that’s the actual question Ambedkar was asking. Saying “it wasn’t meant for now” is not the same as saying “birth-based hierarchy was never acceptable.” Those are two completely different claims, and conflating them is where the yuga-dharma argument gets weak if you lean on it too hard.

I don’t think I can fully resolve that tension in one essay, and I’d rather admit that than pretend I have a clean answer. What I can say is this: the same tradition that gave us Manusmriti also gave us the internal machinery — Kalivarjya, the yuga-succession principle, the Shruti/Smriti hierarchy — to say “this part no longer holds.” That machinery was built to evolve dharma, not freeze it. Whether it went far enough, fast enough, on caste specifically, is a completely fair thing to be angry about. That anger doesn’t require rejecting the whole culture. But it also shouldn’t be waved away with a one-line “wrong yuga” comeback that doesn’t actually engage with what’s being said.

Here’s what it isn’t: it isn’t some untouchable, God-dictated law carved in stone for all time, delivered whole from the divine with no human hand in it. It’s a Dharmashastra — a text that organizes social conduct, duties, and order for a specific society at a specific point in history. It belongs to a category called Smriti, which literally means “that which is remembered,” as opposed to Shruti (“that which is heard” or “revealed”), which is what the Vedas and Upanishads are (Dharmawiki).

That distinction isn’t a technicality I’m making up to save face — it’s baked into the tradition itself: shrutistu vedo vijñeyo dharmaśāstraṁ tu vai smr̥tiḥ — “the Veda is to be known as Shruti, and Dharmashastra is Smriti” (Dharmawiki). Shruti is held to be authorless and divinely revealed, transmitted whole rather than composed by any one person, and treated as eternal and unchanging (Dharmawiki). Smriti, by contrast, is explicitly the product of human sages interpreting and applying Shruti for ordinary people — it has authors, it’s adaptable, and its authority is derived from Shruti rather than standing on its own (Dharmawiki; graphsearch.epfl.ch). Even within Smriti, Manusmriti sits alongside the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas, and other Dharmashastras — all of them “remembered,” none of them claiming to be the final, unchanging word (Unacademy).

So when someone treats Manusmriti like it’s the eternal, non-negotiable word of God — whether they’re defending it that way or attacking it that way — they’ve already misunderstood what category of text it belongs to. You can’t accuse a Smriti of failing to be eternal. It was never trying to be.

Why it’s valid — but only for its own time

Here’s the part that actually surprised me when I first found it: our tradition doesn’t just imply Manusmriti is time-bound, it says so directly, by name, in a verse repeated across multiple Dharmashastra sources:

“Krute tu Maanvo Dharmah, Tritaayaam Goutamah Smritah, Dwaaparey Shankha likhitah, Kalou Paraashah Smritah”

Meaning: Manu’s code was the authority in Krita (Satya) Yuga, Gautama’s in Treta, Shankha and Likhita’s in Dvapara, and Parashara’s Smriti is the one for Kali Yuga — the age we are living in right now (trueayurveda; Dharmawiki). This isn’t one obscure line hiding in a corner somewhere — it’s cited across Parashara Smriti commentaries, and the introduction to Parashara Smriti opens by framing itself explicitly this way: as Manusmriti was the Dharmashastra of Satya Yuga, Parashara Smriti is the Dharmashastra of Kali Yuga, composed specifically because dharma’s expression had to change as the age changed (trueayurveda).

This isn’t a stretch or a modern reinterpretation invented to dodge criticism. It’s a structural principle the tradition built into itself: dharma’s outward form changes as the yugas turn, because the capacity, nature, and circumstances of the people living in each age changes with it. The Mahabharata has Bhishma tell Yudhishthira this directly — that the duties laid out for people in Krita, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali Yuga are different from each other, and that they were made keeping in mind the capacity of human beings living in that particular age, not as fixed, capacity-independent commands meant to bind every generation forever (Swaminarayan).

And it doesn’t stop at one verse about which text is “primary.” There’s an entire, centuries-old body of literature called Kalivarjya — literally “things to be given up in Kali Yuga” — that goes further than just naming a successor text. It goes through specific practices from the older Dharmashastra tradition, names them one by one, and formally voids them for this age. This isn’t a vague gesture at “things change.” It’s a real, detailed list. Depending on the source, it runs to as many as 55 or more specific items (Gaudiya Discussions), and it includes things like certain remarriage customs, an elder son’s larger inheritance share, specific animal sacrifices, particular forms of penance, and even certain kinds of renunciation (sannyasa) that earlier texts permitted but which Kalivarjya literature explicitly prohibits going forward (Hinduism For All Forum; Swaminarayan). Sacrifices involving cows, humans, or horses as victims, along with the consumption of intoxicants in ritual contexts, are specifically named as forbidden in Kali Yuga even though older texts had permitted them (Swaminarayan). This literature isn’t ancient and frozen either — it starts appearing in manuscripts around the 10th–11th century CE and kept growing for centuries after that, as later scholars kept revisiting the list (Hindu Blog; Kiran Atma).

So think about what that actually means: our own scholars, working for roughly a thousand years, were already going back through the old law codes and crossing things out, one by one, because they no longer fit the age. This wasn’t imposed by outsiders, and it wasn’t a defensive reaction to modern criticism either — it predates colonialism, predates any Western engagement with Hindu texts at all. It was done from inside the tradition, by people who took it seriously enough to keep it honest and current rather than frozen.

That’s the real point. Treating Manusmriti as a fixed, eternal rulebook doesn’t just misread it — it goes against a direct, named instruction from within the tradition about which code applies to which age, and against a thousand years of internal scholarship that was actively pruning it. If you’re going to criticize Manusmriti, criticize it for what it was: a Satya Yuga text, later explicitly superseded and partially voided by the tradition’s own internal process. Don’t hold up something explicitly marked “not for this age” as if it’s our eternal, currently-binding law — and don’t let others do it either, in either direction.

The part I’m actually ashamed of

Now here’s where I have to be honest, even if it stings a little. Some of the loudest people tearing into Manusmriti right now come from within our own community — and they do it with zero context, like it’s some kind of trend, without ever mentioning any of the above. That’s what gets me. Not the criticism itself — criticism is fine, healthy even, necessary even — but the fact that people will confidently trash a text from their own tradition while knowing less about it than a five-minute search would teach them.

And look — I’m not saying every scripture is perfect. Every religion on this planet has old passages that read badly by today’s standards. Certain other religions carry verses that, read plainly, endorse slavery, or the subjugation of people who don’t follow the faith, or treatment of women that nobody today would defend outright. That’s not a “gotcha” — it’s just historically true across traditions, not something unique to ours.

There is another uncomfortable part of this conversation that deserves to be said quietly but clearly. If we are going to examine old religious texts for passages concerning women, social hierarchy, slavery, or the treatment of outsiders, then that examination should not stop at whichever tradition happens to be easiest to put under a microscope. Other major religious traditions also contain ancient passages that modern readers may find deeply difficult, including passages concerning slavery, women’s status, or relations with people outside the faith. Some communities interpret such passages historically, metaphorically, or as no longer applicable, while others continue to regard particular scriptures as authoritative in the present. Those differences deserve to be examined honestly rather than assumed away. The standard should be the same: read the text, understand its historical and religious context, understand how its followers interpret it today, and then discuss the difficult parts honestly. Hinduism should not receive a special exemption from criticism, but neither should it be uniquely expected to answer for a historical text without the context its own tradition gives it.

And perhaps the most frustrating part is that a lot of young people, including young Hindus, never get far enough to have this conversation properly. An algorithm can hand someone a thirty-second clip declaring that a particular verse “proves” something about an entire religion, and suddenly that becomes their understanding of a text they have never opened. The same happens in reverse: someone sees a defence of their tradition and accepts it without checking whether the argument actually holds up. Neither is scholarship. If we genuinely care about our traditions, or about criticising them fairly, we have to be willing to look beyond whatever version of history the algorithm happens to serve us that afternoon.

What bothers me is the double standard. When it’s Manusmriti, people demand it be judged as if it’s still fully in force today, with zero context about yuga-dharma, Kalivarjya, or the Shruti/Smriti distinction. But when it’s a passage from their own scripture, suddenly there’s context, there’s historical framing, there’s “you have to understand the time and culture it was written in.” Some of these same traditions still hold onto practices today — restrictions on women, strict segregation, rules justified as divine and unchangeable — without anywhere near the same scrutiny from the people so eager to condemn us.

I’m not saying that to deflect. I’m saying it because if you’re going to hold a text to a standard, hold every text to that same standard — including your own. That’s not what’s happening right now, and it’s not honest.

Where I land

Real respect for a tradition isn’t blind defense, and it isn’t reflexive shame either. It’s knowing it well enough to defend the parts worth defending — the built-in capacity for self-correction, the explicit acknowledgment that dharma isn’t frozen, the honesty of a tradition that names its own limits out loud — while admitting the parts that don’t hold up, and pushing for the tradition to keep doing what it’s always claimed to be capable of doing: changing when it needs to.

And it means not letting people — inside or outside the community — argue about any of this without doing the reading first. Whether you end up agreeing with Ambedkar or defending the yuga-dharma framework or landing somewhere in between, at least land there because you actually looked, not because it was the easiest take available.