Scripture and Statute: On Teaching the Vedas alongside the Constitution

By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan

A judge wants law schools to teach the Vedas alongside the constitution. That is a bigger ask than it sounds

INDIA'S SUPREME COURT likes anniversaries. For its 75th, in April 2025, it unveiled a new statue of Lady Justice: sari instead of toga, a book instead of a sword, eyes uncovered rather than blindfolded. At the same event, at a legal conclave hosted by the National Law Institute University in Bhopal, Justice Pankaj Mithal, a sitting judge of the court, went further. Law schools, he argued, should formally teach the Vedas, the Smritis, the Arthashastra, the Manusmriti, the Buddhist Dhammas and the epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata as sources of legal reasoning, under a course titled something like "Dharma and Indian Legal Thought." The constitution, he suggested, should not be the only book Lady Justice holds. The Gita, the Vedas and the Puranas ought to join it.

Judges opining on curriculum design is unusual enough. What makes the proposal worth scrutinising is what it quietly assumes: that "ancient Indian legal tradition" and "Vedic and Hindu textual tradition" are the same thing.

They are not. India's pre-colonial and colonial legal landscape was considerably more plural than the reading list on offer. Muslim rulers and later British courts administered Anglo-Mohammedan law, drawing on Islamic jurisprudence, across large parts of the subcontinent for centuries. Goa still runs on a Portuguese-era civil code. Dozens of tribal and customary-law systems, uncodified and orally transmitted, governed vast populations the Sanskrit textual tradition never reached. A curriculum built mainly from Vedic, Smriti and epic Hindu sources represents one strand of Indian legal history rather than the whole of it — an odd basis on which to claim, as Justice Mithal did, that the reform would "preserve India's pluralistic legal identity."

There is also the matter of what some of those texts actually say. The Manusmriti, singled out by name in the judge's remarks, codifies a rigid caste hierarchy and prescribes differential punishment by caste — provisions that sit uneasily beside Article 14 of the constitution, which the judge elsewhere invoked approvingly. B.R. Ambedkar, the constitution's chief architect and a Dalit himself, publicly burned copies of the Manusmriti in 1927 as a protest against caste oppression, before going on to draft the document Justice Mithal now proposes to supplement. Recommending Manusmriti study as indispensable "legal reasoning," without engaging that history, is a peculiar omission for a jurist speaking about equity.

This is not Justice Mithal's first foray into contested constitutional territory. As chief justice of the Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh High Court, he suggested that adding the words "socialist" and "secular" to the constitution's preamble — inserted during the Emergency in 1976 — had narrowed India's spiritual character, remarks that drew a formal complaint from the CPI(M) calling for his removal. He has also described caste-based reservation as a "swelling balloon" at risk of reviving the very casteism it was designed to dismantle — a claim that fits awkwardly next to his newer argument that ancient Hindu texts, several of which formalised caste hierarchy, deserve a formal place in the law curriculum.

None of this makes the underlying instinct baseless. Indian legal education genuinely does under-teach its own pre-colonial history, often presenting law as though it arrived fully formed with the Government of India Act, 1935. Comparative law scholars have long argued that Kautilya's Arthashastra, with its detailed treatment of contracts, taxation and statecraft, or the Panchayat tradition's approach to community dispute resolution, merit serious academic study — as history and comparative jurisprudence, taught critically, alongside Islamic, tribal and colonial legal traditions, not as a parallel moral source competing with a document that, unlike the Manusmriti, explicitly abolished caste discrimination.

The practical objection is more mundane but no less real. India's Bar Council already prescribes a crowded syllabus; law graduates routinely report weak grounding even in core subjects like evidence and civil procedure. Adding four additional scriptural texts as compulsory jurisprudence, on top of an already-strained curriculum, risks becoming symbolic politics dressed as pedagogy — heavy on the unveiling of statues, light on where the extra teaching hours will actually come from.

India's Supreme Court has, since S.R. Bommai v Union of India (1994), treated secularism as part of the constitution's unamendable "basic structure." A sitting judge publicly urging that law schools teach Hindu scripture as a source of jurisprudential authority tests that principle's spirit, even without amending a word of it. The line between studying a civilisation's legal history and elevating one religious tradition's texts to quasi-constitutional status is a fine one. Justice Mithal, so far, has not shown much interest in drawing it.