How we, that is, women – eat, breathe, dress and conduct ourselves and the kinds of labor that we are allowed to perform – are codified and seen as intrinsic to the Hindu shastras. The realm of religion, indeed, is the privilege of men. And indeed, it would not be salacious to argue that self-identifying Brahmin men and those who function in the religious institutions and are the so-called custodians of Hindu dharma are mostly myopic; they are unable to distinguish between what constitutes “revealed knowledge” about Existence and Brahman and Creation, and temporal gender-caste based social modes of being. What prevents the government of India (which is also a signatory to CEDAW) from slapping legal cases against these religious institutions as they propound unconstitutional rhetoric that, in all respects, violates our Fundamental Rights that are embedded within the Indian Constitution?
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The larger question, though, is: can we ever take it for a given that what we know, in a definitive manner, as being central to the Hindu shastras can be construed as being infallible? – for all we know – these texts might have been amended and changes made as they were handed down generations. In the preface to his version of Manavadharma, Sir William Jones wrote about the textual variations that existed and how he collated different versions that were available in manuscript form to arrive at his final text:
At length appeared KULLU’KA BHATTA; who, after a painful course of study and the collation of numerous manuscripts, produced a work, of which it may, perhaps, be said very truly, that it is the shortest, yet the most luminous, the least ostentatious, yet the most learned, the deepest, yet the most agreeable, commentary ever composed on any author [namely, Manu] ancient or modern, European or Asiatic. The Pandits care so little for genuine chronology, that none of them can tell me the age of KULLU’KA, whom they always name with applause; but he informs us himself, that he was a Brahmin of the Varéndra tribe, whose family had been long settled in Gaur or Bengal, but that he had chosen his residence among the learned on the banks of the holy river at Ka’si. His text and interpretation I have almost implicitly followed, though I had myself collated many copies of MANU, and among them a manuscript of a very ancient date: …
We can arrive at the obvious conclusion that William Jones consulted many textual variations of the Manusmriti, and if so, the implication is that there was no single authoritative text. If these texts that constitute our Hindu shastras are unreliable with numerous variants existing simultaneously, then it stands to reason that there is no authentic version that we can refer to as being the original. Who is to tell as to which part comprised “revealed knowledge” and which sections were subsequent add-ons?
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