In Rahul's Attack on Manusmriti Resonates the Vision of Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar

Manusmriti’s prescriptions that a girl child is dependent on her father during her childhood, on her husband during youth and on her sons during old age were invoked by Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi in the fourth edition of Chhatron ki Goonj programme organised in Pune exclusively for women to signal the message that such scriptural injunctions robbed women of their distinct identities and independence throughout their lives.

Therefore, while stating that there is nothing wrong with a woman’s relationship with her father, husband and sons, Rahul Gandhi emphatically stated that it must not imperil her separate and independent identity to be her own self. That was the reason why he issued a thundering call for smashing patriarchy and breaking the cage that sought to confine women.

He described prime minister Modi getting a cultural shock because girls, at Jantar Mantar protests against Paper leaks, used abusive language against him and remained silent on abuses hurled by boys as the mindset shaped by Manusmriti.

Gandhi blamed Smritis For inferiors status of women

What Rahul said in an exclusive meeting of women concerning the patriarchal society according them subordinate status and subjecting them through their entire life cycle to the control of men is evocative of Mahatma Gandhi’s speech at Bhagini Samaj (Sisters’ Society) delivered hundred and eight years back at Bombay on February 20, 1918. In that speech Gandhi attributed the degeneration of women in society relatively to men not just to Manusmriti but to all Smritis.

Against the backdrop of the extremely low status of women in society in 1918 he emphatically remarked that, “What the authors of the various Smritis have said about women can in no wise be defended.” “Child-marriage, the restrictions on widows and such other evils,” he said, “owe their origin to the injunctions in the Smritis.” “Women’s being placed on a level with Sudras has done unimaginable harm to Hindu society,” Gandhi lamented.

Being an exemplary Hindu committed to live by its manifold values embracing pluralistic and inclusive values, Gandhi had the courage of conviction to sharply criticise its numerous shortcomings which, among others, degraded the status of women. In the aforementioned speech at Bhagini Samaj he while noting that, “It is easy to demonstrate the grandeur of the Smritis minus these verses,” candidly admitted, “I do not have the slightest desire to put up a weak defence of Hinduism, believing out of false pride or in ignorance, and wanting others to believe, that there is no error in the smritis or in the other accepted books of the Hindu religion.” “I am convinced,” he remarked, “that such an effort will not raise the Hindu religion but will degrade it rather.”

Therefore, “The largest part of our effort in promoting the regeneration of women should be directed towards removing those blemishes which are represented in our shastras as the necessary and ingrained characteristics of women.”

Against that backdrop he flagged the equality of women and men and their independent agencies to play their roles in society without compromising their autonomous identities regardless of their relations with their family members. Gandhi said, “Woman is the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacities. She has the right to participate in the very minutest detail in the activities of man and she has an equal right of freedom and liberty with him. She is entitled to a supreme place in her own sphere of activity as man is in his.”

His resounding words, “She is entitled to a supreme place in her own sphere of activity as man is in his” are reflected in Rahul Gandhi’s assertion that women have their own independent identity to be their own selves.

Gandhi rejected Manu’s notorious dictum

It is instructive to note that in spite of such bold and critical stand taken by Gandhi on Smritis pushing women to lowly status and making them worst victims of patriarchy, he in 1934 was confronted with a question from a close friend if a woman would get the varna of her father before her marriage and after marriage from her husband?

The friend asked if he gave an affirmative reply should one understand that Gandhi supported “Manu’s notorious dictum that there can be no independence for woman at any stage of her life, that before marriage she must remain under the tutelage of her parents, after marriage under that of her husband and, in the event of her widowhood, under that of her children?”

In an article, “Women and Varna” published in the Harijan on 12th October 1934 he sharply wrote, “"The saying attributed to Manu that “For woman there can be no freedom” is not to me sacrosanct. It only shows that probably, at the time when it was promulgated, women were kept in a state of subjection."

In fact every word of the 1918 speech of Gandhi and what he wrote in 1934 concerning verses in Manusmriti degrading the status of women found its echo in the speech of Rahul Gandhi delivered in Pune in 2026.

Ambedkar on Manusmriti

Apart from capturing the vision of Mahatma Gandhi in his sharp interrogation of Manusmriti, Rahul Gandhi also captured Ambedkar’s very innovatively critical reflections of Ambedkar on Manusmriti outlined in his 1950 article, “The Rise and Fall of the Hindu Woman : Who Was Responsible for It;” published in Volume 17, Part II of the Writings and Speeches of B.R. Ambedkar.

It is well documented that Ambedkar burnt Manusmriti in 1927. But in his 1950 article he acknowledges that in the period of history preceding Manusmriti, women excelled in diverse fields by affirming their independent status and individual pursuits for scholarship and many other accomplishments in which men showed their worth. He explained that Manu taking away their own self worth by defining their status in terms of their dependence on men at every stage of life and denying them divorce reduced them to deplorable sub-human levels.

According to Ambedkar, such injunctions endangering women’s independence and their individuality were there as part of social theory even before Manu. He through his Smriti took those decadent ideas from the plane of social theory and made them part of laws of the prevailing state structure of that period. It was done with the purpose of imposing disabilities on women and Sudras so that they could not leave Brahminical order to join Buddhism.

It is clear that both Gandhi and Ambedkar in spite of their ideological differences had a common understanding that Manusmriti caused havoc to society by degrading the status of women. Rahul Gandhi in locating Manusmriti as the main source of retardation of women’s agency and independence, has captured that common vision of Gandhi and Ambedkar invoked recurrently by those exercising the constitutional right to interrogate the regime and hold it to account. Rahul Gandhi's statement in Pune is in this context and he asserts that women and girls are the strength of India, its foundation and future and so it is necessary to smash patriarchy because it suppresses women, frightens, threatens and controls them has to be located.

S N Sahu served as Officer on Special Duty to President of India K.R. Narayanan.

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