Collated texts in the Hindu shastras?

The question that should trouble us is: why do we allow hegemonic institutions to perpetuate a system of systemic misrepresentation about the subalterns? As religious institutions [read brahmanical] are busy denying agency to the subaltern, it falls upon us to take these texts and re-engage with them. The Hindu shastras cover a wide spectrum of issues, and the hegemonic institutions seem too dim-witted for they never question the specter of the absurd within these texts.

In 1884, Pandit Shivnat Sastri, gave a lecture on the caste system at the Sadharon Brahmo Samaj in Calcutta, and questioned the nature of “revealed knowledge” within the Hindu shastras, arguing that were many textual interpolations that took place over centuries; he writes:

Of all books, the earliest were the Vedas, and oldest among them was the Rig Veda … the Vedic mantras were not all composed at one time, but some of them a thousand years later than others.
The most ordinary students of Sanskrit will perceive that the above extract [Pandit Shastri cites a lengthy passage on caste from the Purusa sukta] from the Rig Veda is written in modern Sanskrit. The other mantras of the Rig Veda are not in modern Sanskrit; even with the aid of commentators it is often difficult to understand them. Their grammar and their metre differ; and greater number of words have become obsolete. How comes it about that the fragment of extracted from the Purusha Sukta is in intelligible modern Sanskrit? One must infer that this mantra was composed long after the rest. Professor Max Mueller, and other European scholars devoted to the study of the Vedas, have also shown this to be a very much later composition, imbedded in the Rig Veda.

If we accept the above proposition as a given, then we would simultaneously work towards ensuring that revised editions of the Hindu shastras are written, where the rampant misogyny and caste-ist discourses are erased. These texts on “revealed knowledge” are not absolute, but in fact, have been constructed over a time period of centuries. Literary scholars and postcolonial theorists can wring themselves into knots, trying to recuperate the voices of the subaltern, but unless we acknowledge that for centuries, discourses on the subaltern have diligently denied them any agency, we will really not find any answer. If we consider these texts as having gone through many revision and amendations over centuries as they were handed down orally or through manuscripts, then we should be able to sift through what is “revealed knowledge” and what could essentially be defined as socio-cultural representations that fundamentally deny the subaltern agency.

We need to embrace these texts on Hindu shastras within the pantheon of what constitutes literari-ness, and re-read them and rewrite them.