RASSL lecture: “Law of Manu” and its impact on modern jurisprudence
View(s):Punsara Amarasinghe, Visiting Lecturer, Faculty of Arts, University of Colombo will present the monthly lecture of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka (RASSL) speaking on the “Discovery of Law of Manu and its impacts on western jurisprudence” on Monday, August 28 at 5 p.m. at the Gamini Dissanayake Auditorium, No. 96, Ananda Coomaraswamy Mawatha, Colombo 7. The lecture is open to all.
This research paper addresses the discovery of “ Law of Manu (Manusmruthi) “ by Sir William Jones in the 19th century during his judicial tenure in Calcutta. Its author Manu, the pious mythological survivor of flood has been depicted in Hindu Mythology as the father of the human race. A classics and divinity student from Oxford, Jones found a heavy affinity between the image of Manu with Biblical figures like Moses and Noah.
In the western thinking of jurisprudence, scholars only relied on classical Roman legal texts by Justinian’s “Corpus Juris “ or some other authors like Gaius or Ulpian as the main source of law and there was no organized scholarship to explore the oriental attitude on jurisprudence. The real turning point of the discovery of “Manusmruthi” was the rapid change that occurred within the Britishers on jurisprudence. This paper intends to trace how western scholars took the text of “Law of Manu “ to their consideration and explain the vast impacts made by Jones’ translation to the aspects of modern jurisprudence.