Commentaries are an essential tool for the translator, but they must be used with more caution than Bühler exercised. When the translator encounters a word that is either lexically rare (often a hapax legomenon, cited by dictionaries only for its single appearance in the one verse of Manu) or, more often, that makes no sense in the verse if taken in its usual lexical sense, the commentaries often provide help. They suggest an alternative meaning reasonably close to the basic lexical meaning of the word in question, or they offer to supply an ‘understood’ word or phrase that makes sense of the verse; sometimes they cite passages in other texts that shed light on the verse in question. Many technical terms require commentaries to be understood, ritual terminology in particular, and in those instances I followed them and added what they added to make sense, in the last resort having recourse to the loathsome but often, unfortunately, necessary parentheses that are Bühler’s stock in trade. I did, moreover, construct a critical apparatus, providing an essential bridge between the assumptions of Manu and the very different assumptions of the modern reader. But that bridge is built primarily out of what Manu himself says and what the Sanskrit of his time allows, not from what the commentaries say.
Often when I was puzzled, the commentaries were puzzled too, and would lapse into silence or infuriatingly remark, ‘This is obviously clear,’ when it was not. A commentator does not have the option of saying, ‘I don’t know.’ It has been suggested that Sanskrit commentaries share the philosophy of the people from whom one asks directions in India: they feel that if they do not give you a confident answer they will be failing in their duties of hospitality towards you (their dharma), and so they make up directions when they do not know them. Often the commentaries offer an alternative meaning that does indeed make sense but that simply cannot be derived from the basic meaning of the word, or that entirely twists the apparent general meaning of the verse.
It might be argued that my translation errs in differing from what the commentaries say Manu says, that it is arrogant (or, even worse, ‘Orientalist’, colonialist, or Eurocentric) to ignore the native tradition and to substitute my guesses for their guesses. This objection assumes that the native commentators know more than a Western Orientalist knows and that the text is embedded in the culture and cannot be taken out of it, that the commentary is the culture.
In answer to the first of these objections, it may be said that, though there is indeed a direct line of transmission, a parampara, from Manu to the commentaries, that line is at times stretched quite thin over the centuries. Though the commentaries are closer to Manu in both time and space than we are, they are not so close as to be infallible; the earliest commentary, that of Medhātithi, was composed in the ninth century A.D., and the one most often cited, Kullūka’s, in the fifteenth century. Between Manu’s text and their response to it, more than enough time intervenes to lose certain threads and, perhaps more important, to develop new prejudices and biases.
Of course, both native commentators and Orientalists have axes to grind, but they are different sorts of axes. The axe of the native commentator is honed on a more intense and immediate personal involvement in the text, which may give him good reasons to want to misread the text, to fudge or misinterpret the verse in order to make it mean what he thinks it ought to mean.83 The axe of the Orientalist, on the other hand, is sharpened by cultural ignorance and lack of empathy, on a distancing from the culture, which may lead to misinterpretations of a very different sort. For the political concerns of the Orientalist may be further removed, but they, too, invade the text: choosing an audience (insofar as the decision to prepare a translation for the Harvard Oriental Series rather than for the Penguin Classics is a political decision), choosing a text to translate (insofar as considerations of intellectual and political fashion – ‘Orientalism’ vs., anti‘Orientalism’, for instance – may influence the translator’s ambitions for promotion and tenure), and so on. ‘Whose axe is being bored?’, to paraphrase the Jewish saying. But beyond these practical matters, intellectually the Orientalist reads the text in a spirit very different from that of the native commentary, since the Orientalist, assuming that some meanings are historically possible, some less possible, brings different aids to the text, different sorts of intertextual comparisons, new text-critical considerations, different criteria for false readings – in general, a critical canon.84
We are caught, as usual in cross-cultural studies, on the horns of a dilemma. The anti-Orientalist agenda argues that we do not have the right to interfere, to tell those for whose tradition Manu still speaks that we know better than they do. But the agenda of humanistic scholarship argues that we do have the right to challenge their arguments, as we would challenge anyone’s arguments, that we cannot simply endorse their faith statements. The solution is a compromise: we must try to state fairly what they are saying, and to understand why they think they are right, but we must also say what we think, and we must try to be honest in stating why we think we are right. We can see the commentators’ reasons for interpreting a verse as they do, but we have the right to assert that we do not share that reason and that we therefore interpret the verse differently.
A commentary on a text must attempt to balance both sets of prejudices. And we must make our own commentary. For, ultimately, it is the commentary that brings the law to life and keeps it vital; in order for the law to have meaning for us, we must ask our own questions of it. Any translation is an interpretation, a commentary, and mine is no exception; but mine is a minimalist interpretation, which has certain advantages. It means that I am, indeed, substituting my guesses for the commentators’ guesses, but that my guesses are anti-guesses or un-guesses, in contrast with their more additive guesses.
In answer to the second objection, regarding the cultural role of the commentary, it may be said that the present translation was not created in a vacuum: the commentaries are always available to those who wish to read them alongside the text, as I myself have done. There are English translations of two of the nine commentaries (that of Medhātithi by G. Jha and that of Bhāruci by J. D. M. Derrett), and the reader may also, of course, consult Bühler, who remains invaluable in this regard. Aside from the light that they occasionally shed on the text of Manu, the commentaries are intrinsically interesting for what they tell us about the subsequent history of dharma in India and, in a more general way, for what they teach us about the hermeneutic process. But this information is not essential to the translation of the text itself.
In one sense, of course, the commentaries have become part of the text; but even while we must acknowledge that the text does indeed continue to live and to change in the course of history, it is possible to go back in history, to peel back the layers on the palimpsest. It is impossible for us, in 1990, to read Manu nakedly, to ignore the intervening centuries that impose a screen between us and the text. But it is not impossible to make a conscious effort to distinguish between what the text seems to say minimally, lexically, from what the commentators have obviously expanded it to say. This minimalist approach assumes that we cannot ‘get behind the text’ through the commentaries, that we cannot reach the mind of the author, let alone the ultimate truth of the author; it assumes that the most we can hope for is to understand the literal meanings of his words, and leave their interpretation as open as possible. Here again it is refreshing to recall that this is not merely a problem of ‘Orientalism’. Arguments about ‘minimalist’ and lexical meanings, about the relative weight of canon and commentary, have been debated for centuries with regard to Western scriptural texts. In that controversy, the line that I am adopting – reading the text against the commentaries – would be regarded as a very Protestant way of arguing.85
Manu leaves many questions unanswered, such as who the ‘they’ in a particular verse are, and which of two apparently conflicting rules takes precedence over the other. For many centuries, commentators have argued these points, and translations of Manu usually incorporate their opinions. The present t
ranslation leaves the text in its enigmatic form, showing the challenges that the unglossed text sets for the commentators, and indeed for any modern translator or reader. It leaves unresolved much of what Manu leaves unresolved. On the other hand, the minimalist translation presents clearly what is in fact clear in Manu, without reference to all the obfuscating complications that have subsequently been argued by later commentaries.
At 9.1, for instance, where a husband is said to be ‘separated’ (viprayoge) from his wife, the word is glossed by most commentaries as ‘away on a journey or dead’. Well enough, but perhaps Manu himself actually also envisaged a situation in which one or the other partner actually decided to live apart, a possibility that he does seem to have in mind at 9.77, for instance, where the husband is supposed to wait a year for his wife (to come back to him, one might suppose) if she hates him, and at 9.176, where a woman who leaves her husband and returns to him may perform a second marriage ceremony. The commentaries at 9.1 ignore the possibility of such a reason for separation, and by citing their limited options to the Western reader the translator would be closing the reader’s mind to that possibility, too.
To view Manu through commentarial glasses is often to lose sight of Manu. By contrast, to translate Manu without following the commentaries is rather like translating the Song of Solomon as a poem about the love of a man and a woman rather than as a metaphor of the love of the Church for God. Or, to vary the metaphor, it is like translating the sixth of the ten commandments in a translation of the Hebrew Bible as ‘Thou shalt not murder’, which is what the Hebrew really says, bracketing, as it were, our knowledge that for most of subsequent Western history, and certainly for Christianity, the tradition has interpreted the text to say, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’
The suggestions made by the commentators are usually plausible enough, but they are not the only possibilities. Walter Benjamin has remarked that ‘A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.’86 The same can be said for the commentary, which must be in our ‘own medium’. The beauty of Manu’s aphorisms lies in their transparency; the later commentaries make them opaque. The beauty of the original text is its openness; the commentaries close it forever. It is this open possibility that I hoped to preserve in this translation. For it is the privilege of the Orientalist (and I use the word in a non-pejorative sense, in the hope of restoring some of its faded dignity) to re-open a text that the native commentaries have closed. If we are to give credit to the text itself for being rational and coherent, it is our right, as well as our duty, to find our own rationality and coherence in it. And sometimes we achieve this over the dead bodies of the commentators who, as was their right and duty, found their own rationality and coherence in it, different from our own and, I think, often different from that of the text.
4. The Text and the Critical Apparatus
I did not construct a critical edition of Manu, which still lacks one. Some readers might wish that I had edited a new text, but that is another project, not mine. Few Indian texts have critical editions, and translations of them remain useful; in those few cases where a ‘critical edition’ has been used (as in van Buitenen’s translation of the Mahābhārata), the translation is often rendered less, rather than more, useful because it does not translate the (admittedly flawed) text that people actually use. The recently published Sanskrit edition of the text of Manu with nine commentaries, edited by J. Dave,87 served as my base text, except for Chapter 8, which Dave has not yet published and which I took from the Mandlik edition, with seven commentaries.88 There are relatively few seriously disputed readings, and where such do occur, or where there are misreadings or even typographical errors in Dave, the fact that the many commentaries cite the verses makes it easy to ascertain the correct reading. Often commentaries cite alternative readings, providing, in effect, a kind of native critical edition.89
I tried to make the translation literal, even transparent, to keep the flavour of the individual idiom (leaving ‘fruit’, for instance, as ‘fruit’, rather than ‘reward’) and to maintain, as far as possible, a consistency in the translation of words and even phrases, in order to preserve the patterns and rhythms of repetition. I have never been a follower of the yellow–oblong–fruit school of thesaurus journalism; I prefer to call a banana a banana, no matter how often it is mentioned in a single paragraph. But to avoid the usual donkey refrain of Sanskrit translatorese (‘he who, he who’) I often used the phrase ‘a man’ when no subject was specified (though a man is always the understood subject), which, I fear, may have made the text sound even more sexist than it is.
There are in every language polysemic words for which there are no English equivalents, words that have not a single meaning but a range of meanings, and Sanskrit is particularly prone to this semantic proliferation: it has been said that every word in Sanskrit designates its basic meaning, the opposite of that, a word for an elephant, a name of God, and a position in sexual intercourse. In confronting a Sanskrit text, therefore, the translator must make choices that reflect his or her opinion of what the text is most likely to be about (an elephant, God, …).
I translated everything (even the proper names of birds and trees and castes and hells), however approximately and speculatively, with very few exceptions: I left untranslated the names of several gods and ‘Veda’, which is so definitive of and so deeply embedded in Hindu culture that I despaired of transplanting it on to English linguistic soil. In the case of brahman, dharma, karman, and a few other key terms, I used several English words to translate one Sanskrit word, for instance, ‘activity’, ‘innate activity’, ‘the effects of past actions’, and ‘ritual’ for the Sanskrit karman. Vadha is also significantly ambiguous: it designates either corporal punishment (such as beating or mutilation) or capital punishment (usually by impalement, or by being trampled to death by an elephant). Different translators have often guessed which was intended, in ways that I do not find justifiable; I opted for the rather cumbersome but safer stratagem of translating vadha as ‘corporal or capital punishment’, leaving the reader, once again, free to choose.
On the other hand, I sometimes used one English word to translate several Sanskrit words. This is necessary because, just as there are (wrongly, as it now appears) alleged to be many words for snow among Eskimos, so there are, among Hindus, many words for pollution or dirt, and though I tried consistently to distinguish between them wherever possible, there are instances in which English fails to provide the differentiated nuances to match the Sanskrit. ‘Purity’, the word most often used in this context, is precisely the wrong word, for it implies a natural state, whereas the Sanskrit terms generally refer to a cultural state that is constantly achieved through hard work, best conveyed by double negatives (‘not polluted’, ‘not unclean’). Thus I have tried to distinguish between medhya (pure, fit for sacrifice), prayata (purified, ritually prepared to perform religious acts), śauca/śuci (purification, the removal of pollution and the resulting state of unpollution), śuddhi (cleansing, making clean), and pavitra, pavamāna (purifier, an instrument of purification). Similarly, for the many Sanskrit euphemisms for the sexual act, most of which use some form of a verb meaning ‘to go to’ (gam, vraj, and so forth, rather like the King James Bible’s ‘to go in unto her’), I tried to steer between the Scylla of obscenity and the Charybdis of pseudo-medical jargon, and opted for the slightly vernacular ‘have sex’.
Another sort of problem is posed by the many Sanskrit words for holy men: sages, seers, ascetics, hermits, wise-men, and lots and lots of kinds of priests. I rendered both brāhmaṇa and vipra as ‘priest’, and brahman as ‘ultimate reality’ or ‘Veda’, in a desperate attempt to avert the potential confusion not only between brāhmaṇa and brahman but between the Brahman priest who watches out for errors in the Vedic sacrifice, Brahmā (the god), and Brāhmaṇa (the Vedic text). Yet anoth
er word that can mean ‘priest’, dvija, is in itself ambiguous: literally ‘twice-born’, it can designate any of the three upper classes; often, however, it simply means a priest. Indeed, there are numerous indications (such as the fact that, in the verse summarizing all of Chapter 4, Manu refers to the householder explicitly as a priest) that confirm one’s suspicion that all the rules in this chapter apply primarily to priests, and that, indeed, the term ‘twice-born’ throughout the entire text generally refers only to the ‘best of the twice-born’ (dvijottamas), the priests. Nevertheless, I left it in its uninflected and more general form, as ‘twice-born, and trust the reader to decide when it means any old Aryan and when the context calls for the narrower meaning of ‘priest’.
Finally, I decided to translate the names of the four classes or varṇas of Indian society, though there are no real English equivalents for them: ‘priest’ implies both more and less than ‘Brahmin’, ‘ruler’ both more and less than ‘Kṣatrya’, ‘commoner’ both more and less than ‘Vaiśya’, and ‘servant’ both more and less than ‘Śūdra’. In particular, it is evident that Manu is speaking not of an individual occupying a certain social function, let alone a particular profession, but rather of a class that may be constituted ritually, socially, and ethnically, as well as professionally. It would, perhaps, have been less misleading if I had referred to a Brahmin as ‘a member of the priestly class’ and a Kṣatriya as ‘a member of the ruling class’ (a stratagem that I was, in fact, forced to adopt when referring to the women of these classes), but ‘ruling class’ is potentially misleading in yet other ways, and the words occur so often that such a circumlocation would soon become distractingly cumbersome. Instead, I translated the names of the classes with their best English single-word approximations, by the profession or quality that Manu himself regards as epitomizing the class as a whole.
The Laws of Manu Page 7
