Guru Lalitendra
The debate on Manusmiriti has acquired a fresh political dimension. At his Chhatron Ki Goonj interaction with girl students in Pune on August 22, 2026, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi again invoked the Manusmriti, describing what he called a “Manusmriti mindset” as one that keeps women under the authority of men and urging the students to “smash patriarchy”. He quoted the familiar passage concerning a woman’s relationship to her father, husband and sons and called its words shameful. There is nothing wrong with debating the historical prescriptions of the Manusmriti, or with challenging any social practice that denies women dignity, equality or autonomy. But Rahul’s intervention also illustrates precisely the larger problem this essay addresses: whether a civilisation whose intellectual inheritance encompasses the Vedas, Shruti and Smriti, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita, and millennia of philosophical inquiry can fairly be represented by selecting passages from one Smriti and calling them the “mindset” of Sanatan Dharma. That is not a serious engagement with the civilisational tradition; it is a reduction of an ocean of knowledge to a single text.
There is something deeply curious about the recurring attempts to define, judge or condemn Sanatan Dharma through the Manusmriti. The text undoubtedly contains passages that deserve historical examination and critical discussion. But to make one Smriti the lens through which an entire civilisation, its philosophy and its conception of knowledge are judged is to mistake a part for the whole.
The difficulty becomes even greater when this exercise is undertaken without engaging with the extraordinary intellectual tradition from which Sanatan Dharma emerged and through which it continued to evolve.
Sanatan Dharma is not an “ism” derived from a single subject of knowledge. It is part of the entire object of knowledge itself. This is perhaps one of the most important distinctions necessary to understand the Indian civilisational experience.
The Vedas, Shrutis and Smritis were transmitted across generations for thousands of years through an extraordinary oral tradition. They were followed and elaborated upon through the Aranyakas, Brahmanas and Upanishads and found profound narrative and ethical expression in the Valmiki Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita. The Puranas and innumerable subsequent philosophical and literary traditions further enriched this immense inheritance.
To place all of this within the narrow frame of one Smriti is therefore not merely an incomplete reading of Sanatan Dharma. It misses the very nature of the tradition.
Sanatan is not founded upon the proposition that one book contains all answers and that questioning must stop once the book has been accepted. Quite the contrary. Its history is a history of inquiry – of asking what is real, what is knowledge, who am I, what is consciousness, what is the purpose of life and what is the relationship between the individual, the universe and the ultimate reality.
This is why the distinction between Shruti and Smriti matters. The Vedic and Upanishadic tradition belongs to Shruti – that which was heard or revealed – while Smriti represents that which was remembered, interpreted and transmitted within the changing circumstances of human society. The two cannot simply be collapsed into one undifferentiated body of immutable commandments.
The very existence of the Smriti tradition demonstrates that Sanatan thought recognised the need for interpretation and contextualisation. The Smritis are products of human engagement with Dharma in particular social and historical circumstances. They are not the equivalent of a single, universally binding scripture comparable to the foundational text of a doctrinal religion.
That distinction becomes crucial when contemporary critics repeatedly return to the Manusmriti as though they have discovered the definitive constitutional document of Hindu civilisation.
They have not.
The intellectual landscape of Sanatan Dharma is incomparably larger. At its heart lies an astonishingly simple but profound proposition from the Rig Veda:
Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti – Truth is One; the wise speak of it in many ways.
This is not merely an invitation to tolerate difference. It expresses something much deeper about the Sanatan approach to knowledge. Human beings may perceive, interpret and articulate reality differently without necessarily possessing different realities.
The search for Truth can therefore accommodate divergent paths.
This is why Sanatan Dharma does not rest upon a rigid division between believers and non-believers in the manner of a faith whose central purpose is acceptance of a prescribed creed. It does not require the world to be divided permanently into “us” and “them”. Its philosophical traditions have historically accommodated questioning, debate, scepticism, multiple schools of thought and radically different approaches to the nature of reality. Its method is not intellectual uniformity. It is intellectual churning.
And that churning is perhaps the defining characteristic of the Indian philosophical tradition.
The questions become progressively deeper. Who am I? What is the purpose of my existence? What is consciousness? Is reality limited to what the senses perceive? What connects the individual to the universe? Is the self separate from ultimate reality or fundamentally one with it?
The journey from the finite to the infinite, from sensory awareness to consciousness and from consciousness to the search for the ultimate reality is at the heart of this civilisational quest.
The Purusha Sukta captures this aspiration in a striking formulation:
Vedaham etam purusham mahantam
Aditya-varnam tamasa parastat
Tam eva viditvamimrityum eti
Nanyah pantha vidyate ‘yanaya
“I know that great Purusha, who shines like the Sun and is beyond darkness. Knowing Him alone, one transcends death; there is no other way to go there.”
Whether one approaches these words as metaphysics, spirituality or philosophy, the underlying impulse is unmistakable: knowledge is not merely accumulation of information. It is a movement towards awareness of the ultimate reality.
And this is where the great philosophical churning of Sanatan thought assumes its extraordinary significance.
The Upanishads did not close the door on inquiry. They opened it further. The Bhagavad Gita did not merely prescribe belief. It placed the human being in the middle of a moral and existential crisis and subjected action, knowledge, devotion, duty and the nature of the Self to profound philosophical examination.
The Valmik Ramayana and Mahabharata did not present human life as an uncomplicated world of absolute heroes and villains. They explored Dharma through situations in which human beings had to confront conflicting duties, desires, loyalties and consequences.
The result was not a single simplistic doctrine. It was a civilisation of philosophical schools and competing interpretations.
It was in this vast intellectual landscape that Adi Shankaracharya gave one of the most profound formulations of the Sanatan quest through Advaita Vedanta.
Advaita – non-duality – takes the inquiry to a remarkable conclusion: the apparent separation between the individual Self and ultimate reality is not the final truth. The deepest reality is Brahman, and the Atman is not ultimately separate from it.
This does not mean that every tradition within Sanatan Dharma is Advaita, nor does Advaita erase the other philosophical schools that developed within the tradition. Rather, it demonstrates something far more important for the present argument: the civilisation’s intellectual journey did not terminate in a narrow social code. It continued into questions about consciousness, existence and the very nature of reality.
A civilisation that could generate such philosophical inquiry cannot sensibly be reduced to a list of social prescriptions contained in one Smriti.
This is not an argument for ignoring the Manusmriti. Historical texts should be studied honestly. Their context should be understood. Their prescriptions should be examined critically, just as every historical society and its institutions should be examined critically.
But criticism becomes intellectually weak when it assumes that the most controversial passages of one historical text constitute the essence of an entire civilisation.
Imagine attempting to understand modern Western civilisation solely by selecting its most objectionable historical laws and social practices while ignoring its philosophy, literature, science, constitutional evolution and centuries of debate. Such an exercise would produce a caricature rather than history.
The same intellectual standard should apply to India.
Sanatan Dharma has never been a civilisation frozen at one historical moment. Its inheritance varies across time and space. It encompasses innumerable communities, languages, customs, philosophies, rituals and cultural expressions. Its continuity has never depended upon absolute uniformity.
That diversity is not a weakness. It is one of its defining strengths.
The idea of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam – the world as one family – expresses another dimension of this expansive civilisational outlook. The boundaries of concern are not confined to one’s own community. The philosophical imagination extends outward to the larger human family and, ultimately, to the interconnectedness of existence itself.
This is why Sanatan Dharma can be understood as a way of life grounded in knowledge, awareness and right living rather than merely adherence to dogma.
Its fundamental questions remain as relevant today as they were thousands of years ago: What is truth? Who am I? What is consciousness? What is my responsibility towards another human being? What is the purpose of life? What lies beyond the limitations imposed by the senses and the ego?
The answers have never been monopolised by one book or one authority.
They have been explored, debated, interpreted, challenged and reinterpreted across millennia.
That is the great churning.
And perhaps this is precisely what contemporary critics of Sanatan Dharma sometimes overlook when they repeatedly return to the Manusmriti. They are attempting to win an argument with a civilisation by arguing with one of its historical texts.
But Sanatan Dharma is not the Manusmriti.
It is the Vedas and the Upanishads. It is Shruti and Smriti. It is the philosophical questioning of the Aranyakas and Brahmanas. It is the moral universe of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. It is the existential dialogue of the Bhagavad Gita. It is the many philosophical schools that debated the nature of reality. It is the continuing search for knowledge and consciousness.
And at one of the highest points of that philosophical journey stands the radical insight of Advaita – that beneath the apparent multiplicity of existence lies an underlying unity.
To understand Sanatan Dharma, therefore, one must enter the ocean rather than examine a single wave.
Those who wish to engage Sanatan Dharma seriously are entirely welcome to question, criticise and debate. Indeed, questioning is intrinsic to the tradition itself.
But if the intention is to understand the civilisation rather than merely attack it, the conversation must be large enough to encompass the civilisation’s entire intellectual inheritance.
Otherwise, what appears to be a critique of Sanatan Dharma becomes little more than an argument with one Smriti.
And an argument with one Smriti, however prolonged, cannot exhaust an ocean of knowledge.
Sanatan Mission 
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