I have been engaged in preparing a critical edition of the Mānava Dharmaśāstra (MDh) for the past several years on the basis of over fifty manuscripts, nine commentaries, and citations in several medieval texts. As the editorial task nears its completion, I want to present before the scholarly audience some preliminary results of my close reading of and engagement with this text. These observations relate to the deep structure of the text, its authorship, and possible intervention of one or more redactors between the time of its composition and the period when we obtain manuscript and other evidence for the text.

Scholars traditionally have regarded the composition of the MDh as a gradual process at the hands of anonymous and successive compilers, editors, and copyists lasting for several centuries, the same sort of agent-less process that many have thought lay behind the composition of the great epic Mahābhārata. These compilers and editors, we are told, did nothing more than gather together proverbial sayings, moral maxims, and legal axioms that were floating in the mouths of people and handed down from generation to generation. The composition of the text is thus divorced from authorial intent and agency and from social, political, and economic context.