Of course there is always the danger that the coherence is in the eye of the beholder, that we project upon the text a pattern that is not of its making. But we have no choice but to attempt to think the text in English, and, in the course of that attempt, to apprehend the text as a coherent, if not necessarily always consistent, approach to religious law. We must make this attempt for at least two reasons, one arising from the nature of the author(s) and the other from the nature of the reader(s), ourselves. We must assume that the author(s) saw coherence in it for the simple but compelling reason that the tradition regards the product as a single text and treats it as a text. And we ourselves must see coherence in it as a whole because there is simply no other way to begin to read a text, however much scepticism we may develop in response to particular passages as we get to know it better. The gymnastics that the Indian commentators go through on some occasions (often in blatant disagreement not only with one another but with the patent meaning of the original verse) suggests that, like us, they too sometimes failed to make sense of the text. Yet we must assume that if we knew enough about the culture, we would at least know why something puzzling to us made sense to them, though we may still find it irrational in light of our assumptions about the world.
We must begin the confrontation or translation of a foreign text (for every reader is in a very real sense a translator) with what George Steiner has called ‘initiative trust’:
an investment of belief, underwritten by previous experience but epistemologically exposed and psychologically hazardous, in the meaningfulness, in the ‘seriousness’ of the facing or, strictly speaking, adverse text. We venture a leap: we grant ab initio that there is ‘something there’ to be understood. All understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding which is translation, starts with an act of trust … which derives from a sequence of phenomenological assumptions about the coherence of the world, about the presence of meaning in very different, perhaps formally antithetical semantic systems, about the validity of analogy and parallel. The radical generosity of the translator (‘I grant beforehand that there must be something there’), his trust in the ‘other’, as yet untried, unmapped alterity of statement … But the trust can never be final. It is betrayed, trivially, by nonsense, by the discovery that ‘there is nothing there’ to elicit and translate … ‘This means nothing’ asserts the exasperated child in front of his Latin reader or the beginner at Berlitz … As he sets out, the translator must gamble on the coherence, on the symbolic plenitude of the world. Concomitantly he leaves himself vulnerable, though only in extremity and at the theoretical edge, to two dialectically related, mutually determined metaphysical risks. He may find that ‘anything’ or ‘almost anything’ can mean ‘everything’ … Or he may find that there is ‘nothing there’ which can be divorced from its formal autonomy …66
Steiner goes on to describe the further stages of aggression (thrust and penetration) and incorporation (assimilation and accommodation), but he returns at the end to the final stage of ‘reciprocity in order to restore balance’. Thus at the start and at the finish of translating, we must be in harmony with the text.
Similarly, Walter Benjamin has remarked that ‘a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification’.67 In the case of Manu, we may have to take this advice with a grain of salt; it may be difficult to translate ‘lovingly’ and with ‘initiative trust’ what Manu says about women and about Untouchables. But we must still respect and attempt to convey the power with which he expresses opinions that we do not share, for this is the only way that we can hope to begin to enter his moral world. Manu speaks not as an individual but as the conscience of at least part of his society. His text therefore challenges us to ask how it can be that a human being or a whole culture that we must assume is, by nature, no worse than we are could believe and express ideas that we judge to be evil. And even if we ultimately fail to achieve this empathy, our ‘loving’ translation, by preserving something of the clarity of the original voice, will at least make possible an equal but opposite, and perhaps equally valuable, reaction: it will allow those who find it evil to see the full power of its evil. In this way the translator can hope to make the ‘aggressive penetration’ of the text not the rape that the anti-‘Orientalists’ see in any translation, but an act of love. The assumption of coherence is therefore a strategy of anti-anti-‘Orientalism,’ for which, like post-post-Structuralism, the time has come.
The nineteenth-century translators and commentators were indeed ‘Orientalists’ of the wrong sort. F. Max Müller thought the Brāhmaṇas were ‘simply twaddle, and what is worse, theological twaddle’, while Julius Eggeling, who devoted most of his life to translating the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, bemoaned its ‘wearisome prolixity of exposition, characterized by dogmatic assertion and a flimsy symbolism rather than by serious reasoning’.68 Fitzgerald regarded his translation of the Rubaiyat as a major improvement on the original text of Omar Khayyám. But the sins of the fathers need not fall upon the heads of the descendants in the Orientalist parampara. Nowadays we regard the original as the master and the translation as an inevitably inadequate slave, and we respect the logic and integrity of the text.
That Manu is a structured synthesis of various subjects, arranged in such a way as to be mutually informative, may be seen from the patterns that recur in the text as a whole. The first and last chapters, parallel in many ways, stand as metaphysical bookends around the more worldly concerns of the internal chapters. The first chapter (1.26–50) establishes the law of karma and situates within it the creation of the various classes of beings, particularly humans and animals, while the last (12.40–81) reverts to the law of karma to explain how, depending on their past actions, people are reborn as various classes of beings, particularly humans and animals. Midway through the text (6.61–4), the ascetic meditates briefly on the miseries of transmigration.
Throughout the intervening chapters, the theme of rebirth in various classes of creatures is interwoven with a second, parallel leitmotif: the problem of killing and eating (two acts which are clearly separated, though equally clearly interrelated). This theme is expressed through a series of lists: people whose food one should not eat (4.205–23); classes of beings one should and should not eat (5.5–44); situations in which lawsuits arise between humans and livestock (8.229–40); punishments for people who injure (8.296–8), steal (8.324–8), or kill (11.132–44) various animals; animals (including humans) that priests should not sell (10.86–9); and vows of restoration for anyone who has, advertently or inadvertently, injured, stolen, killed, or eaten (or even eaten the excrement of) various animals (11.54–227). More subtle relationships between humans and animals are also addressed; there are punishments for urinating on a cow (4.52) or having sex with other female animals (11.174).
The same animals and people recur in many different lists, with particular variants here and there; whenever he sets his mind to the problems of evil and violence, Manu tends to round up the usual suspects. And the animals which are the problem are also the solution: various crimes, some having nothing to do with animals, are punished by animals. Thus adulterous women are to be devoured by dogs or paraded on donkeys (8.370–71) and are reborn as jackals (9.30), and thieves are to be trampled to death by elephants (8.34); while cow-killing and various other misdemeanours may be atoned for by keeping company with cows and refraining from reporting them when they pilfer food and water (11.109–15). Manu also refers to the Vedic horse-sacrifice as a supreme source of purification and restoration (5.53, 11.261).
A third basic theme is further interwoven into the warp of rebirth and the woof of the mutual killing and eating of humans and animals. This theme that pervades Manu, that is indeed the central agenda of the text, is the distinction between good and bad people. Violations of the taboos of killing and eating (that is, eating, selling, injuring, or killing the wrong sorts of animals) furnish on
e of the basic criteria for acceptance in or exclusion from society. This, too, is expressed in the form of recurrent lists, blacklists, as it were, of people who are to be excluded from various sorts of personal contract, somewhat reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan’s hero who had ‘a little list, and they’d none of them be missed’: people to whom the Veda should not be taught (2.108–16); women one should not marry (3.8–11); people one should and should not invite to the ceremony for the dead (3.127–86 and 236–50); people whose food one should not eat (4.205–23); people who cannot serve as witnesses (8.61–88); sons who are disqualified from inheritance (9.143–7); the mixed castes, who are excluded from most social contacts (10.5–61); the sins and crimes that cause one to fall from caste and thus to be excluded in yet other ways (11.55–71); and, finally, the crimes that cause one to be reborn as bad people who are to be excluded (12.54–72).
Just as dogs and donkeys, camels and cows, are the basic cast of characters in the theme of killing and eating, so too madmen and drunkards, adulterers and gamblers, impotent men and lepers, blind men and one-eyed men, present themselves as candidates for social intercourse again and again, and are rejected again and again, while other sorts of people are unique to one list or another. Together, and through the work as a whole, these disenfranchised groups form a complex pattern of social groups engaged in an elaborate quadrille or square dance, as they advance, retreat, separate, regroup, advance and retreat again.
This is a dance of the victims and the victimizers. For the same people and animals appear on both sides of the line, and the assertions that certain animals should not be killed and that people who are leprous or blind have no rights are causally related: people who have killed certain animals are reborn as certain animals, but they are also reborn as lepers or blind men. So, too, not only are there punishments for humans who eat or sell certain animals, but there are also punishments for humans who eat or sell humans, including their sons (9.174) and themselves (11.60), or who sell their wives (which Manu both permits and punishes, at 9.46 and 11.62) or drink the milk of women (5.9). There is a chain of food and eaters which both justifies itself and demands that we break out of it; it happens, but it must not happen. This, too, is the inner tension of dharma (which subsumes nature and culture), a tension to which we will return below.
2. Law in Extremity
If we grant, then, that the work has a master plan that we may glimpse in broad outlines such as these, we may take a more careful look at the alleged contradictions in Manu. One striking example of an apparent contradiction is the discussion of the possibility of allowing a woman to sleep with her husband’s brother ‘in extremity’, i.e. when the husband has failed to produce a male heir. Manu says that you should do this (9.56–63); in the next breath, he says that you should not do this, that it is not recommended, that it is despised (9.64–8). The commentaries (and later scholars) explicitly regard these two sections as mutually contradictory. But Manu does mean both of these statements: he is saying that this is what one has to do in extremity, but that it is really a very bad thing to do, and that, if you do it, you should not enjoy it, and you should only do it once. If you have to do it, you must be very, very careful.
This is the way in which one should regard other apparent contradictions in Manu, such as the statement (repeated ad nauseam69) that one must never kill a priest, and the statement that ‘A man may without hesitation kill anyone who attacks him with a weapon in his hand, even if it is his guru, a child or an old man, or a priest thoroughly versed in the Veda. There is no stain at all for the killer in slaying a man who has a weapon in his hand, whether he does it openly or secretly; rage befalls rage’ (8.350–51). Similarly, one must resolve Manu’s diatribes against the bride-price (3.51–4, 9.93–100) with his casual explanations of the way to pay it (8.204, 8.366). But it is not difficult to make sense of all this: ideally, one should not sleep with one’s brother’s wife or kill a priest or accept a bride-price; but there are times when one cannot help doing it, and then Manu is there to tell you how to do it. This is what one does when caught between a rock and a hard place, the Devil and the deep blue sea; it is the best one can do in a no-win situation to which there is no truly satisfactory solution.
The Sanskrit term for the rock and the hard place is āpad, which may be translated ‘in extremity’, an emergency when normal rules do not apply, when all bets are off. Āpad is further supplemented by other loophole concepts such as adversity (anaya), distress (ārti), and near-starvation (kṣudhā). In a famine, a father may kill his son (10.105), and, far worse, priests may eat dogs (which would otherwise make them ‘dog-cookers’, a common term of opprobrium for Untouchables, 10.106–8). The concept of āpad recognizes the inevitability of human fallibility: don’t do this, Manu says, but if you do, this is what to do to fix it. This two-edged sword is, after all, the rationale for any system of legal punishments and religious restorations: people will persist in misbehaving, and religion must take account of this.
The emergency escape clause is further bolstered by recurrent references to what is an astonishingly subjective standard of moral conduct:
The root of religion is the entire Veda, and (then) the tradition and customs of those who know (the Veda), and the conduct of virtuous people, and what is satisfactory to oneself (2.6). The Veda, tradition, the conduct of good people, and what is pleasing to oneself – they say that this is the four-fold mark of religion, right before one’s eyes (2.12). If a woman or a man lower born does anything that is better, a man should do all of that diligently, and whatever his mind and heart delight in (2.223). Whatever activity satisfies him inwardly when he is doing it should be done zealously; but he should avoid the (activity) which is the opposite (4.161). A person should recognize as lucidity whatever he perceives in his self as full of joy, something of pure light which seems to be entirely at peace … When he longs with his all to know something and is not ashamed when he does it, and his self is satisfied by it, that (act) has the mark of the quality of lucidity (12.27, 37).70
Thus the elaborate web of rules, which, if followed to the letter, would paralyse human life entirely, is equally elaborately unravelled by Manu through the escape clauses; every knot tied in one verse is untied in another verse; the constrictive fabric that he weaves in the central text he unweaves in the subtext of āpad, as Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey carefully unwove at night what she had woven in the day.
3. Contradictions in Manu
And there are other ways of resolving apparent contradictions. Concepts that seem at first to be mutually contradictory often turn out, on closer examination, merely to constitute a general principle and a series of exceptions to it. This is, after all, the normal way to constitute any sort of legal code, and it is a method whose most extreme form was already achieved in the grammatical treatise of Pāṇini, which set the paradigm for all kinds of scientific inquiry in India: state one general rule, to which the whole of the subsequent treatise constitutes nothing but a series of increasingly specific exceptions. Ritual texts have archetypes and ectypes, rules and exceptions, just like Pāṇini. A metarule on metarules states that the distinctiveness of the particular overrides the general application of the metarule. Thus, ‘A specific injunction is stronger than a general one.’71 Manu, like the Vedic texts it so faithfully follows in this, posits a few general principles and then a host of exceptions. An excellent example of this occurs where Manu says: priests should study the Veda, and commoners should trade; in extremity, however (āpad to the rescue), a priest can engage in trade; but he is not allowed to trade all the things that commoners trade; he cannot sell sesame seed, for instance; but he can sell sesame seed under certain circumstances; and, finally, if he does sell it in the wrong circumstances, he will become a worm submerged in dogshit (10.75–91). From the narrow opening of a law the text moves on and out to the wide possibility of āpad, pulls back for a moment, moves out again, and finishes with the flourish of an enforcing threat.
The app
arent inconsistencies are no mere accidents of historical conflation (the ‘throw it in the hopper’ approach to Indian texts) but rather the natural outgrowth of centuries of development during which different minds reached different conclusions about problems that are ultimately insoluble. Contradiction is inevitable in a tradition that insists upon hanging on to old ways of approaching complex human problems while simultaneously adding new, often different, approaches to the same subjects. Manu inherits this tradition and deals with it explicitly, juxtaposing conflicting views and then adjudicating between them.
Many apparent contradictions result from a misunderstanding of the interrelationship between two different meanings of dharma, which in Hindu thinking represent a creative tension between what is and what should be; not so much contradictory ideals as a series of different ideals, all set forth as desirable but easily qualified or jettisoned in favour of others in different circumstances. The relativity of dharmas – different not only for different people, but for different times and places for the same person – makes it possible to state a series of different ideals, one after the other, all true (for someone, some time, some place). Thus when the marriage laws state that a priest can marry a servant woman (3.13) and that a priest should not marry a servant woman (3.14–17), that commoners can engage in marriages in the manner of demons or ghouls (3.23–4) but that no one should engage in a marriage in the manner of demons or ghouls (3.25), there is truth, for different contexts, in all of these assertions. Similarly, when Manu states (in 2.145) that ‘the teacher is more important than ten instructors, and the father more than a hundred teachers, but the mother more than a thousand fathers’, and then, in the verses that follow, argues that ‘between the one who gives him birth and the one who gives him the Veda, the one who gives the Veda is the more important father …’, he may be quoting two different traditions, or stating first the ‘other’ view (the pūrvapakṣa, or straw man, in Indian logic) and then his preferred view.
The Laws of Manu Page 5
