Manusmriti was supposedly buried decades ago. India keeps digging it back up
A DALIT speaker
of a state legislature is insulted. Public outrage, rightly, follows. Then,
almost reflexively, comes a second wave of commentary — not about the insult
itself, but about the caste of the man who delivered the rebuke. Was he Dalit
enough? Should the retaliation have come from a fellow Dalit, an upper-caste
ally, a woman, a Brahmin, a Backward Class leader? The question is absurd on
its face. An insult against dignity does not require a caste-matched avenger.
Yet in modern India, even movements built to dismantle caste hierarchy find
themselves, again and again, reaching for caste as the measuring stick of
legitimacy. That reflex is worth examining, because it says less about the
insult than about how deeply the logic of an ancient text has lodged itself in
the modern mind.
That text is
the Manusmriti, a Sanskrit law code compiled roughly two millennia ago, and its
intellectual scaffolding predates even that. The Purusha Sukta, a hymn in the
Rig Veda (10.90.12), imagines society as a cosmic body: Brahmins from the
mouth, Kshatriyas from the arms, Vaishyas from the thighs, Shudras from the
feet. It is neat, memorable and, not coincidentally, extremely convenient for
whoever happened to be sitting near the mouth. Centuries later the Bhagavad
Gita offered a subtler justification, describing the four varnas as arising
from a division of "qualities and actions" (guna and karma) rather
than birth. Philosophically that leaves room for mobility. In practice, caste
society took the poetic metaphor and the philosophical loophole alike and fused
them into something far blunter: a hereditary hierarchy of labour, wealth and
status, with the Manusmriti supplying the fine print. Chapter after chapter
instructs that service to the other three varnas is the Shudra's proper station
in life, and that he ought not aspire beyond it. One need not conclude that the
Vedas are worthless, nor insist that Manu's rules are eternal law, to recognise
the pattern: a spiritual text became an administrative one, and the
administration was designed to last.
Inherited
jobs, inherited chains
It lasted, in
one form, well into living memory. Potters made pots because their fathers made
pots. Washerfolk washed clothes because their mothers had washed clothes.
Barbers cut hair, fisherfolk fished, and each trade passed down a genuine and
often impressive body of technical knowledge, generation to generation. The
trouble was never the craft; it was the chain. Occupation by birth is efficient
in the way a caste system always claims to be efficient — and unjust in exactly
the way its critics have always said. Nobody today asks which caste ought to
run a dry-cleaning chain, a jewellery business, a hotel group, an IT firm or a
hospital. Those doors opened, imperfectly and unevenly, through education,
capital and effort rather than lineage. The uncomfortable question is why the
same logic that liberated the entrepreneur has not yet fully liberated the
electorate — why appeals to "our culture" and "the pride of our
community" still recruit voters into caste blocs even as caste recedes
from the shop floor.
The path
Ambedkar did not take
B.R. Ambedkar,
the chief architect of India's constitution and the country's most
consequential critic of caste, understood the problem as one of power, not
merely of prejudice. His proposed Hindu Code Bill, introduced in 1951, aimed to
rewrite Hindu personal law on more egalitarian lines — on marriage, inheritance
and the status of women — and thereby chip away at the legal infrastructure
that caste hierarchy depended on. When parliament balked, Ambedkar resigned
from the cabinet rather than dilute the project. Later he converted to
Buddhism, in a public and deliberate act framed explicitly as liberation rather
than mere religious preference. What he did not do, notably, is build a
movement organised around caste identity as an end in itself. His tools were
legal reform and moral argument, not caste arithmetic. Contemporary leaders who
claim his legacy while demanding ministerial berths for their community, quotas
for their followers, or concessions calibrated precisely to caste headcounts,
might reasonably be asked which part of that inheritance they are actually drawing
on.
What
freedom would look like
Reservations —
India's decades-old system of quotas in education and public employment for
historically disadvantaged groups — have unquestionably opened doors that would
otherwise have stayed shut, and no serious argument for a casteless society
requires their abolition. But reservations were always meant as a remedy, not a
destination. Real liberation, on any honest reading, requires four things
reservations alone cannot supply: education broad enough to be genuinely
transformative, economic independence that does not depend on political
patronage, occupational choice unconstrained by birth, and a public culture
that no longer treats caste as the natural first question to ask about a
stranger. Knowledge is the only durable wealth; death, rather grimly, is the
only reliable equaliser. Everything else is negotiable, which is precisely why
it keeps being renegotiated along caste lines instead of being dissolved.
Old wine,
new label
There is a
darker possibility lurking underneath the identity politics of contemporary
India: that caste consciousness is not fading but rebranding. Karl Marx's
language of class struggle, translated loosely into Indian conditions, risks
becoming a sophisticated "colour index" for reorganising the very
caste hierarchies it claims to oppose — a mechanism for restoring old
proximities to power under a modern vocabulary. Political parties across the
spectrum have found caste blocs too useful to abandon and too risky to be seen
encouraging outright, producing a peculiar double game: private caste calculus,
public caste denial. A society that repackages Manusmriti's hierarchy in the
language of empowerment, representation or cultural pride has not achieved equality.
It has achieved rebranding, and rebranding is not worth celebrating, let alone
worshipping.
The
unfinished question
None of this
argues for indifference to caste discrimination, which remains real, measurable
and often violent. It argues for precision about what the goal actually is. An
insult to a Dalit legislator deserves condemnation regardless of who delivers
the rebuke and regardless of who committed it. A potter's grandson deserves the
freedom to become an engineer without anyone treating that as a betrayal of
heritage. And a country that still instinctively classifies people, and their
acts, by caste before anything else — even in its most well-intentioned reform
movements — has not yet finished the argument it started with Ambedkar. It has,
perhaps, only relearned Manu's old lesson in a new dialect. The test of a
casteless India will not be how skilfully caste is managed, but how thoroughly
it becomes irrelevant — and by that test, the country still has a long way to
walk.
Adapted and
expanded from an original Telugu op-ed by Ch. V. Prabhakar Rao, senior
journalist. This version restructures and substantially expands the source
commentary for an English-language readership; views on Ambedkar's legacy, the
Hindu Code Bill, and contemporary caste politics reflect one analytical
perspective among several in an ongoing and contested debate.
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