[Advaita-l] catuh shloki manusmriti

[Rajaram Venkataramani]

Overall, catuh shloki manusmriti by Nithin Sridhar is an excellent work
that should be read by one and all. While this is a advaita vedanta group,
a study of dharma is important too.

While l personally don't expect a text to be of unitary authorship to be
considered useful and look more for consistency of thought, l find his
arguments on authorship insightful. He has demonstrated a good
understanding of modern scholarship and has approached it with logical
rigour. It would be naive to think that the issue of authorship would be
easily settled without a detailed linguistic and philological analysis, but
he has successfully laid the foundations for further research into the
question of authorship.

He has done a great job in clarifying why dharma sastras are pramana and in
what sense they apply to the Hindu society and explaining why we should not
ignore the text or its injunctions. He has also shown that the purpose of
the text is to help āstikās understand what dharma is not present a set of
laws.

Having established the importance of the text, which many of us are guilty
of ignoring, he has lucidly presented the keys to decode the text. Even the
most able teachers would take simple examples, but he has taken the popular
and controversial verses on the status of women. Given the popular
misunderstanding of these statements, this section alone is worth the
efforts of the readers in getting the book.

The book is so readable and illuminating that anyone who read this far
would continue reading the word for explanation of the first four verses
with references to commentaries. Manu, a kshatriya, teaches the dharma for
all the varnas to brahmana sages. This itself would show Hindus that it is
not a brahmana hegemony at play and everyone irrespective of varna enjoyed
a pride of place in the society. The women readers would particularly find
it an eye opener to learn about sadhyovadhus and vivaha samskara and that
the brahmavādinis had the adhikara for upanayanam and vedādhyanam and The
appendices give a detailed understanding of varna concept, fallacy of
revisionism and most appropriately end with a stuti dedicated the much
maligned Manu.

The misconceptions about and the scars of social discrimination won't go
due to this one book, however well researched and referenced, but there's
no doubt that this is a firm step towards a correct traditional
understanding of Manu dharma. Building further on this, I hope that he will
soon publish an authoritative translation and explanation based on previous
commentaries of all the 2700 verses. Thank him for his efforts in sharing
his knowledge with us. 🙏