# Manusmriti

- id: manusmriti
- original title: मनुस्मृति / Manusmrti
- author: Manu
- language: Sanskrit
- composed: c. 200 BCE–200 CE
- field: law

The ordinances of Manu: dharma codified. Its English chain begins with a Calcutta judge who needed the law he was supposed to administer.

## The chain

- **1794** Sanskrit -> English, translation [attested]
  William Jones (translator), Calcutta
  Jones proposed the codification project to Cornwallis himself in 1788, having written three years earlier that he could no longer bear to be 'at the mercy of our pandits, who deal out Hindu law as they please'. The Institutes were printed by order of the Government at Calcutta early in 1794; Jones died there that April.
  Evidence: William Jones 1794; Garland Cannon 1990
- **1886** Sanskrit -> English, translation [attested]
  Georg Buhler (translator), Oxford
  Volume 25 of the Sacred Books of the East: the scholarly replacement for Jones, with the apparatus his century lacked.
  Evidence: Georg Buhler 1886

## Worth knowing

William Jones translated the Manusmriti because British courts in Bengal claimed to apply Hindu law without being able to read it; he worked with the pandits of the Asiatic Society's circle and published the Institutes of Hindu Law in Calcutta in 1794, the year he died. Buhler's Sacred Books of the East version replaced it for scholars in 1886. This library carries the smriti corpus in fresh AI-assisted translation alongside the atlas of its first crossing.

## Sources

- William Jones (1794). Institutes of Hindu Law: or, the Ordinances of Menu. Calcutta.
- Garland Cannon (1990). The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones. Cambridge University Press.
- Georg Buhler (1886). The Laws of Manu (Sacred Books of the East, vol. 25). Oxford University Press.

Confidence grades: attested (named in the medieval record or settled in scholarship), probable (standard view with real uncertainty), disputed (scholars disagree).