DHARMASHASTRA

Introduction Ancient Indian Political thought is part and parcel of the ancient Indian Philosophy.
Indian philosophy means the philosophy which originated in the Indian sub-continent. A central
principle of Indian Philosophy is the concept of ‘dharma’. The rules and regulation of Dharma is
contained in the ‘Dharmasaastras’. Dharma means the right duty of a person. It means virtuous
path. It means the "higher truth". It is the moral law or natural law. It is the natural order of things.
It is the cosmic order. It is the social order. It is the ethical behavior. Dharma means the duty and
responsibility of the individual and the society. Dharma means service to the community also.
Dharma means self-expression also. People must live according to Dharma. It must govern the life
of the individual and the society. It means that each human being has a purpose of life. Each person
has a duty in life. He must perform his duties. This is the only method of purification of his soul.
By this way he will get ‘nirvana’ or ‘moksha’. Besides Hinduism, Budhism and Jainism also
believed in the concept of Dharma.

There are different types of Dharma also. They are as follows:

1. Vyakti dharma (the dharma of an individual).
2. Parivarika dharma (family dharma) (also called kutumba dharma).
3. Samaja dharma (dharma of society),
4. Rashtra dharma (national dharma).
5. Manava dharma (the dharma of mankind).
6. Varna dharma (professional dharma or dharma of each caste).
7. Apad dharma (special dharma for exceptional/abnormal situations).
8. Yuga dharma (dharma for an age).
9. Ashrama dharma (dharma for stage of life).

Following Dharma in life is Justice. Not following Dharma is injustice. It is the duty of an
individual to maintain dharma in his life. It is the duty of the head of family to maintain dharma in
his family. It is the duty of the ruler to maintain Dharma in his country. There shall be rules and
regulations for the individual, the family, the society and the country to maintain dharma.
Maintaining Dharma means justice.

The Dharmasaastras proposes Rajadharma as the duties of the king. The primary duty of the king
is the protection of his subjects. It is the highest dharma. In the protection of his subject, the king
must be able to give his life as prize. The must be able to protect his subjects not only from enemies
but also from thieves, corrupt officials, and enemies of the king. It is also the duty of the king to
look after the welfare of the people. The king must be able to protect the poor, the destitutes, the
crippled, the blind, the orphans, those suffering from calamities etc. It is also the duty of king to
build hospitals for men as well as animals, build rest houses, place for food and water and plant
shade trees along high ways. It is the duty of the king to administer a proper system of punishment.
It will keep his subjects obedient and law abiding citizens besides making them happy.
Dharamshastra:

Although, the theoretical text of Arthasastra initiated inductive reasoning and a greater realism
into political thought, the Dharma Sastras are basically deductive in nature. The shastras in
Sanskrit Hindu literature are the texts of spiritual and legal duty. Shastra factually means "rule,
command, code of laws, science," and these works focus on many different subjects, including the
three principal goals for human beings: dharma (law), artha (wealth, profit, business, or property),
and kama (passion, desire, pleasure). The Dharmashastra is related to dharma. It is a concept that
integrates the nature of the world, eternal or cosmic law, and social law, applied to rituals and life-
cycle rites, procedures for resolving disputes, and penalties for defilements of these rules.
Dharmasastra is a genus of Sanskrit texts, and refers to the treatises (shastras) of Hinduism on
Dharma. The Dharmashastras are the ancient law books of Hindus, which advocate moral laws
and principles for devout duty and righteous conduct for the followers of the faith. They also
shaped the guidelines for their social and religious code of conduct Hindus in the past where Hindu
monarchs enforced the laws as part of their religious duty. However, looking to the heterogeneity
and complex nature of Indian society from the earlier times, it is difficult to state how seriously
these laws were imposed by the ruling classes among all sections of society. However, the
Dharmashastras highlighted upon the social and religious conditions of ancient India, family life,
gender and caste based distinctions, and principles of ancient jurisprudence. It can be find in them
rudiments of many principles and practices of social and religious aspects of modern Hindu
civilisation.
Origin of Dharma Sutras: A Sutra is a style of writing treatise by utilizing the fewest possible
words to ensure brevity and easy memorization. The Dharma Sutras along with Srauta Sutras and
Grihya Sutras comprises the Kalpa, one among the six Vedangas, the auxiliary of the Vedas.
- The Srauta Sutras deal with the great Vedic sacrifices of Havis (oblation) and Soma and other
religious matters.
- The Grihya Sutra deal with domestic ritual. They contain minute rules for the performance of
various ceremonies (samskaras) marking every important epoch of an individual's life from
conception to cremation.
- The Dharma Sutras deal with social usage and customs of everyday life. In them we see the
beginning of civil and criminal law. The important Dharma Sutras are the Gautama Sutra,
Baudhayana Sutra and Apastamba Sutra to name a few.
Historical review: The shastras, including the Dharmashastra, are categorized as smriti, a word
indicating "what is remembered," as distinct from the Vedas and the Upanishads which are shruti,
"what is heard." The Vedas and the Upanishads are deliberated to be divinely perceived that is, the
early seers were held to have perceived eternal truths and the Dharmashastra, as well as other
smriti texts, are the thoughts and explanations of Hindu scholars in response to the shruti books.
Chronologically, the sutras of the Dharmahshastra follow sometime after the Vedic period, but
these works have been extremely difficult to date. Most researchers agree that the first three sutras
from which selections are included in this volume, Gautama, Apastamba, and Vasishtha, fall
sometime between the 6th century B.C. and the 1st century B.C. From the time of their
composition, the works of the Dharmashastra had vital role in influencing Hindu culture and law.
In fact, the shastras were still being cited in cases of legal contracts as late as the mid-19th century
in some regions of India.
The Dharma-shastras asserted to be divine in origin and to have been transmitted by ancient saints
who cannot be recognized as historical figures. Manu is found as early as the Rg Veda (c, 1200
BCE), where he is pronounced as Father Manu, ancestor of the human race. In the Satapatha
Brahmana of around 900 BCE, Manu is evidently the father of mankind when he follows the advice
of a fish and builds a ship in which he alone among men survives the great flood. Afterwards, he
worships and performs penance and a woman, Ida or Ila, is produced and he starts mankind with
her. Manu was also the first king and the first to spark the sacrificial fire. As the inventor of social
and moral order, he is the rishi who discloses the most authoritative of the Dharma-shastras.
Manu's text, the Manusmrti or Manava Dharma-shastra is the earliest of the Dharma-shastras. Its
date is unclear, being somewhere between 200BCE and 100 CE. It probably reached its present
form around the second century CE. In the section of the text on rajadharma, the king's dharma,
there are passages on Hindu law. It was these passages which were first noted by Western scholars
and so the text became known as the Laws of Manu.
The Manusmrti gives importance to the ruling groups of invading peoples such as the Sakas,
Pahlavas, and the Greeks, who were called the Yavanas. In this, the Manusmrti was cooperative
with the new social realities to the theoretical pattern. Yavanas, Sakas, Pahlavas and other foreign
trespassers are described by Manu as lapsed ksatriyas, of the warrior class. These warriors had lost
their status for not following dharma, but by performing appropriate expiatory sacrifices and
acknowledging the brahmans as religious leaders they could come into the fold of the orthodox
community. During fourth century CE, the writing of mature Dharma-shastras was fully thriving.
In this period, the rules of caste were being systematically enforced by brahmanical dynasties for
the first time after centuries of foreign rule.
There were other aspects of Manu's text which brought theory with actual practice and social
reality. In his theory of mixed castes, he developed a system of combination between the four
classes (varnas), producing the many castes (jati). Already occupational groups or guilds had set
up closed patterns of endogamy characteristic of a jati, so Manu was fitting his theory to the facts.
It is debated whether the Dharma-shastras highlighted an ideal picture that did not correspond to
real life. However, the Dharma-shastras, though stylised and systematised, were collections of
existing customs and practices that provided the overall theoretical framework for everyone to
practise their traditionally recognised ways of life.
In the period of first centuries A.D. the text Dharma Sutra texts were reworked in verse form, and
the social and religious regulations of the orthodox brahman culture were systematized. These
codes are accepted as authentic guides to law, custom, and duty. Since many centuries, they
attained a stature comparable to that of the Vedic hymns, although it is not possible to assess
whether any of the law codes were purposely employed as guidelines supported by coercive
sanctions. In the beginning of sixteenth century, there were several streams of religio-cultural
creativity among Bengali Hindus. One of these was Raghunandan Siromani in the field of Dharma-
shastra. He may have been a contemporary of Caitanya in Mayapur.
Dharma in Hinduism is a very extravagant concept with different meanings. Its primary aim is to
guarantee the orderly development of creation and existence, by preserving their foundational
structure, supporting mechanism, values, order and regularity. Hinduism described as one of the
self-appointed duties of God is to shield the worlds and beings by enforcing the Dharma that is
specific to each of them. The rules of Dharma are world-wide in the sense that their primary source
is God only. However, variations rise in their implementations as they are applied at different
levels and in different worlds according to the duties, roles and responsibilities suggested to each
of them.
Dharma is everlasting, but its enforcement and observance are subject to variations according to
the progression of time. Hence, they are subject to change. They are also applicable to beings who
are bound to either duty or mortality, but not to those who are liberated forever. In the liberated
state, the souls (muktas) enjoy eternal power in the world of Brahman, where there are no limits
and no laws, but only all-knowing awareness, and vast existence that is not subject to any laws or
limitations. In that eternal and infinite state, each soul governs itself, exists by itself, bound to
nothing, complete, perfect and very much like God in a state of unity.
The Dharma Shastras were predestined for people who are assured to the worldly world, because
of their ignorance, immoral karma, delusion and desires, and who engage in desire-ridden actions.
For such people, guidance is required for differentiating the legal act from the unlawful, and
performing such duties that flow directly from God which will ensure the orderly development of
the world and preservation of the moral, social and political order.
The Dharmashastras are not products of divine revelations like the Vedas. Therefore, they are
susceptible to the imperfections to which the human mind is prone. Yet, we cannot cast them away
as mere intellectual works of limited vision. They were shaped with care to provide guidance from
a divine perspective. In them, people will find a sincere attempt to provide practical solutions to
possible social disorder, disarrangement, and moral confusion. In them people will find divine
wisdom as purified by the human mind and filtered by perceptive intelligence. Hence, they are
considered smriti rather than sruti. They signify the collective wisdom of spiritual teachers,
scholars, rulers, and law makers who were instrumental in their creation and implementation. The
law books prescribed best possible solutions to each class of beings to chase the four principles of
dharma, artha, kama and Moksha, but in doing so they were not completely free from the caste
predilections that favoured a few social classes. They deceive a veiled attempt by clever minds to
ensure status quo and preserve the social, economic and political privileges of select castes.
With the use of authority of God and religion, the Dharma Shastras attempted to ensure the order
and regularity of the world on an ongoing basis, but in that they were not completely successful as
it is evident from the decline of their jurisdictional power following the decline of the power of
Hindu rulers in the Indian subcontinent. Nonetheless, on the positive side, they created a
framework to imagine ideal human conduct and standards to distinguish the right from the wrong.
They laid down elaborate rules to oversee human conduct and instil fear of moral and temporal
power.
Some of the laws and principles of unfairness prescribed in the Dharma Sutras are bound to offend
the sensibilities of present day educated Hindus, who have been heavily influenced by modern
western education and brought up upon the values of equality, fraternity, individual liberty and
social and moral justice. Many verses in them stand in contrast to these modern values and sound
retrogressive. Therefore, when people study them, suspend their judgment and weigh the
knowledge from an academic or historical standpoint as a work in progress. It is reckless to use
them as a reference to rationalise any social or gender inequality in current society or make an
argument that people must draw inspiration from them to regulate their social conduct. People may
take from them a few principles that are still valid in the present day world and observe them in
their life, but they may not use it as a reasonable point to argue their universal version.
The Gautama Dharmasutra, most ancient the texts of the Dharmashastra, possibly composed
sometime between 600 and 400 B.C.. It was concerned with the sources of dharma, standards for
both students and the uninitiated, the four stages of life, dietary rules, penance, rules concerning
impurity, and many other regulations and rituals for Hindu life.
The Dharmasutra of Apastamba was possibly composed between 450 and 350 B.C. It is an
extensive work with many aphoristic verses and meticulously detailed rituals for daily life. Some
of the noticeable subject matter includes rules about marriage and married life, forbidden foods
and dietary regulations, ritual purity, property laws, rebirth, and various penances. This sutra
details various methods of self-destruction that will exculpate violators of certain Hindu laws
fornication with the wife of a religious teacher, drinking alcohol, theft, or murder of a high-caste
man and relieve them of their impurity. It also includes contrary rules, including a ban of self-
killing.
The Vasishtha Dharmasutra was possibly written between 300 and 100 B.C. This sutra is famous
for its sections on adoption, but it also concerns justice, legal testimony, inheritance, interest rates,
and other matters of social law. Several issues surrounding suicide are raised in the text, including
penances for those who contemplate suicide or fail in an attempt at self-killing; these are
unpermitted suicides. As in the Apastamba sutra, which it echoes, suicide can also be an act of
expiation for unlawful behaviour, restoring one to purity after death.
The Manu-Smrti is the ancient and most prominent of the Dharma Sastras. The Laws of Manu are
perhaps the most famous part of the Dharmashastra. It was written in the later part of the Epic
Period and often given separate recognition because of their unique metrical style. The Laws of
Manu communicated extensive regulations for many aspects of Hindu life, including rules
governing religious offerings, purifications, rites, and many other religious and social practices.
This code, like Hindu thought generally, differentiates between unpermitted and permitted
suicides. In Book V, suicides are grouped with heretics, those who fail to perform the appropriate
religious rites, and those of mixed caste: libations may not be offered to them. In Book VI, the
code compares the person who is alive to a servant awaiting payment from his master, explaining
that one should neither "desire to die" nor "desire to live." In many of their other passages,
however, the Laws of Manu emphasize the value of leaving the body and becoming free of its
pains and torment, as well as achieving full liberation from worldliness and desire. Books VI and
XI indicated the means by which the Brahmana or renouncer should separate himself from his
body. Based on the teaching of the four stages of life, developed in the text in detail, the Laws of
Manu hold that, after one has become old and passed through the three previous stages of life
celibate religious discipleship, married householder status, and, after one's grandchildren are born,
retirement to the forest. One should simply walk in a northeasterly direction in this version, without
food or water until one dies. It is in this stage that one becomes a sanyasin, attaining the highest
level of spirituality. This expedition that ends in death is often called "the Great Departure."
As a broad social code, Manu Smrti served as an authoritative conductor for Hindu jurisprudence
for a long time in Indian social history. In terms of authority and admiration, it has important place
next only to the Vedas from which it derives its authority. It is usually considered as the most
influential work on Hindu law. To elaborate sacred law, the treatise includes, in addition to the
sacred tradition, individual conscience and the example of virtuous men. Allowance must be made
for local custom, and past usage must be considered in the settling of legal clashes. The king is
assumed to be divinely created and ordained to shield the people from a cruel state of nature, but
the absolutism of the European divine right argument is not found in the conception. The king
embodies the virtues of eight deities; his authority is derived from the divine nature of his office
and the significance of his crucial role in the preservation of the social order, as well as from the
supernatural origin of his person. It is said that such descriptions of monarchy as found in the
Manu-Smrti and the Mahabharata are attuned only with hereditary kingship. Caste distinctions are
also made the product of divine decree as well as the result of social necessity. Brahman dominance
is described and justified in the most exaggerated terms. In the Manu-Smrti and most of the law
books, punishment increased in severity as social status weakened.
Manu's text contain12 chapters with 2685 verses, it is evident from the translated work of C.
Buhler, and other scholars.
Manu's Samriti covers following topics (K. S. Padhy, 2011):

1. Social responsibilities, obligations, duties of various caste and individuals in different

stages of life.
2. The way a perfect and righteous king of rules and punishes the criminals and
transgressors of law in his kingdom.
 3. Social relations between man and woman of different caste and of husband and wife in
privacy of the house.
4. Birth, death and taxes.
5. Cosmogony, karma and rebirths.
6. Ritual practices.
7. Error and restoration.

In his valuable work, Manu elaborated the text on following (K. S. Padhy, 2011):
- Origin of universe and rules for the rituals.
- Keeping promises and attending the teacher.
- Kinds of marriages.
- Regulation for great sacrifices and the obligatory rule for the ceremonies for the dead and for
questioning witnesses..
- Various means of livelihood, vows of the Vedic graduate, kinds of food to be eaten, purification
and cleansing of impurities.
- Duties of women, of a king, of a husband and wife, heretics.
- Freedom and renunciation.
- Partition of property, gambling, and cleaning out thorns.
- Attendance by commoners and servants and origin of confused classes.
- Religious duties of all classes in extremity and rules for restorations.
- Three fold course for transmigration that arises from the effect of past actions.
- Supreme good and examination of the virtues and vices of the effect of past actions.
- Obligatory duties of countries, cates and families.
It can be said that text of Manu focused on life, how is it or how it should be? It is about Dharma
which covers notions like religion, duty, law, right, justice, practice and principle (K. S. Padhy,
2011). It describes religion in its entirely good and bad effect of the past actions and the external
code of conduct of four classes of people. The code is the highest law and it is described in the
revealed canon and in tradition. Therefore, a twice born person who is self-possessed should
always practice it. He who fails to do so does not reap the fruit of the Veda. Its strict adherence
ensures full enjoyment of the fruit. Manu's text though ancient cannot be ignored for its
comprehensiveness. It covers family life, psychology, human body, sex, relationship between
humans and animals attitude to money and material possession, politics, law, castes, purification
and pollution, rituals, social practices and ideals, world renunciation and worldly goals. Manu's
teaching inspire humans to fulfil his promises and liberate himself from the consequences of his
past deeds. He not only purifies himself of all his sins but help his predecessors and successors up
to seven generations in achieving salvation. Manu's law are found in Vedas (K. S. Padhy, 2011).