An ancient legal and social treatise whose historical influence on caste and gender hierarchy makes it one of the most contested texts this archive covers, and one requiring the most explicit critical framing.
The Manusmriti is an ancient treatise on law and social ordering, one of several texts in a genre concerned with codifying dharma in a legal and social register. This archive gives it unusually explicit critical framing, because its historical influence and its modern reception cannot be honestly separated from its content.
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A cluster of ideas around duty, order, and right conduct that is understood differently across Indian traditions.
The classical scheme of four legitimate aims of human life — duty, prosperity, pleasure, and liberation — held in tension.
A modern jurist, scholar, and social reformer known for constitutional work and for a public embrace of Buddhism late in life.
A school centered on the interpretation of Vedic ritual injunctions, holding scripture to carry authority independent of any author, human or divine.