A Trophy, a Museum or a Weapon? — Why India should read its ancient wisdom like a laboratory notebook, not obey it like a command
Blossomed, Not Assembled · Volume II of VI · Parts Seven to Eleven
The first volume argued that India cannot copy its way to development, because copied forms arrive without the reasons and habits that made them work elsewhere.
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India should not obey its ancient texts or ignore them. They cannot set a carbon price or run a central bank, but they give principles, questions and warnings, and their own teachers told students to keep the good and drop the rest.
In Brief: Ancient Indian texts are often used as trophies, museum pieces or weapons. This article shows a better use. It reads the Arthaśāstra, the Upaniṣads and the law books for what they actually say about wealth, the aims of life, women and caste, and sets out tests for keeping what is good and dropping the rest. It ends with a plain list of what the texts cannot tell a developing country and what they still can. For readers who want India to be developed without either worshipping or despising its past.
India should read its ancient wisdom the way a scientist reads an old laboratory notebook, as a record to test and not a command to obey, because inheritance tells us where an idea came from but never whether to keep it. Opened and sorted, the inheritance holds texts that are openly worldly about wealth, that name several aims of life and not one, and that tell their own students to follow the good in their teachers and not the rest. It also holds rules that ranked people by birth and by sex, and a society that did not retire them when its own best sentences should have. The texts supply principles, questions and warnings. They do not supply numbers. Where the numbers came from is left for the volumes that follow.
yāny asmākaṃ sucaritāni tāni tvayopāsyāni, no itarāṇi Those of our deeds that are good, you should follow. Not the others. Taittirīya Upaniṣad 1.11.2, the teacher's farewell to his students¹
Opening — The Scholar Who Read the Verse Back
Early in 1855, a Sanskrit scholar in Calcutta published a short tract in Bengali with a dangerous question in it. Īśvaracandra Vidyāsāgar was the principal of the city's Sanskrit College. He asked whether the śāstras, the classical books of law and duty, really forbade a Hindu widow to marry again.² Custom among the higher castes of Bengal said they did. Girls widowed as children were expected to stay widows for life.
Vidyāsāgar answered from the books themselves. His chief witness was a verse in the Parāśara Smṛti, a law book composed some time in the first five centuries CE:³
naṣṭe mṛte pravrajite klībe ca patite patau / pañcasv āpatsu nārīṇāṃ patir anyo vidhīyate If the husband is lost, dead, has renounced the world, is impotent or has fallen from caste, in these five calamities another husband is ordained for women. Parāśara Smṛti 4.30 in the numbering most scholars cite (4.28 in some printed editions). The same verse appears in the Nārada Smṛti.⁴
The verse was not obscure, and its book made a claim that mattered. The Parāśara Smṛti opens by assigning itself to the present age, the Kali age, and assigning older law books to earlier ages.⁵ If any law book was meant for Vidyāsāgar's century, it was this one. He concluded, in the words of an English version of his argument, that "the marriage of widows in the Kali Yuga is consonant to the Sastras".⁶
The answer from orthodoxy did not come mainly as a better reading. Petitions against a new law gathered tens of thousands of signatures, several times more than Vidyāsāgar's side could collect.⁷ Commentators had long had a way round the verse. Some, among them the fourteenth-century commentary of Mādhava, said it described another age and did not apply in the Kali.⁴ The law book said it was written for the Kali age. The commentary moved its inconvenient verse out of it.
The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act became law on 26 July 1856.⁷ On 7 December that year, in Calcutta, a child widow named Kalimati Devi married Śrīścandra Vidyāratna, at Vidyāsāgar's initiative and expense.⁸ The Act itself carried a price. A widow who remarried lost the rights she held in her dead husband's property, "as if she had then died".⁹ The custom also had a narrower base than its defenders claimed. Many Śūdra and Dalit communities had never forbidden widows to remarry. The ban was the custom of the higher castes, presented as the law of all.⁷
Practice lagged for generations. Writing more than eighty years after the Act, P. V. Kane, the great historian of the dharmaśāstra, the classical law books, recorded that not many widows had taken advantage of it.⁴ The law permitted what families and castes went on punishing.
The weapon in this story was never the text. It was a custom wearing the text's authority, and it did not lay the weapon down when the text was read back to it. The question is not only what the old books say. It is who holds them, against whom, and whether anyone is allowed to check.
This is also the easy case, because here the text stood with the reformer. Often it does not. Some old rules are unjust in their own words, and no better reading will save them. This article reads one such rule from Manu's law book in full, so that no one can say its method keeps every good text as authentic and excuses every bad one as custom.
Part Seven — Three Ways to Misuse the Past
There are three popular ways of bringing ancient India into a conversation about 2047, the year India has set for becoming a developed country. All three are more common than the useful way. All three are dead ends.
The trophy cabinet
The first treats the past as a display of things Indians supposedly knew before anyone else. Most people know its exhibits by heart: aircraft in the epics, surgery before the Greeks, atoms before Dalton. Pointing at the cabinet is not enough. It has to be opened, because it holds true things as well as false ones, and both teach the same lesson.
Take a true one, the decimal system with a sign for zero, and begin with what India did not build around it. India did not build public banks on it. It did not teach double-entry bookkeeping in schools, print arithmetic primers for every market town, or found universities where merchants' sons and astronomers' sons studied side by side. Indian merchants kept excellent accounts, but in scripts and systems held within families and castes.
The idea itself was real, but it was two ideas. Zero as a placeholder marks an empty place in a written number, as in 205. The Babylonians were using a placeholder sign by about 400 BCE.¹⁰ Zero as a number, with rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying by it, appears first, in the texts that survive, in Brahmagupta's Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta of 628 CE.¹¹ Not every rule survived. He held that zero divided by zero is zero, which no mathematician now accepts.¹¹
The Indian numerals then passed to scholars writing in Arabic. In Baghdad in the ninth century, al-Khwārizmī wrote a book explaining them, and a Latin version of it gave Europe the word "algorithm".¹² Fibonacci's Liber Abaci of 1202 carried the numerals into European commerce.¹³
The countries that built most on the idea were the ones that built banks, printing presses, account books and universities around it. Every spreadsheet now runs on it. Knowing first did not make India rich. Knowing first is not a method for lasting.
Now take a false trophy. A text called the Vaimānika Śāstra is often cited as proof that ancient India had aircraft. In 1974 five engineers at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru studied it. They found that it had been brought into existence between 1900 and 1922 by one Pandit Subbaraya Shastry, who dictated its verses. They concluded that none of its planes had "properties or capabilities of being flown".¹⁴ So did ancient India have aeroplanes? No source shows it, and the best-known text that claims it is a twentieth-century dictation.
False trophies do real damage. Every one spends credibility that the true ones then cannot draw on. A reader told that the Vedas contain aeroplanes will not believe you when you tell him that Brahmagupta's rules for zero are real.
Then how did India fall behind?
Partly through causes inside Indian society, and partly through colonial rule, though historians have not settled how much each weighed. The question deserves an answer because the cabinet provokes it. The further ahead India claims to have been, the harder the fall is to explain.
I offer a hypothesis, not a finding. Knowledge was gated by birth. Those who wrote the treatises were often not those who worked the metal or wove the cloth. The split was never complete. Architects' manuals and metallurgical recipes show learned and practical knowledge meeting. So does the Kerala school of mathematics, which reached infinite series for the sine and cosine centuries before Europe.¹⁵ But theory and craft seem to have met less often here than in the places that industrialised, and craft knowledge stayed in families more than in books. This is the part of my reading most likely to be wrong.
Print is firmer ground. A press arrived in Goa in 1556, brought by Jesuits and meant for Ethiopia.¹⁶ It printed for missions. Tamil printing there stopped after 1612, and an order of 1684 suppressed the local languages. Printing revived only in 1706, at a Danish mission press in Tranquebar.¹⁶ For most of three hundred years, Indian knowledge stayed in manuscripts and in the memories of those permitted to hold it.
Then came colonial rule. In the nineteenth century, India's great export of cotton cloth collapsed under machine-made British textiles and a trade regime built for Britain.¹⁷ The economist Angus Maddison estimated that India's share of world output fell from about 24 per cent in 1700 to about 4 per cent in 1950, though historians dispute these figures.¹⁸
A share of world output is not income per person, and it is not the size of the economy. A share can fall while output grows, if the rest of the world grows faster. The early figures are also reconstructions, and a large share of a pre-industrial world says more about population than about prosperity.
The direction of the fall is not disputed. Enough of this is true that no one should take pride in the cabinet without also taking responsibility for the fall.
The museum
The second misuse treats the past as venerable, beautiful, behind glass, and nothing to do with roads, jobs, courts or power grids. On this view Viksit Bharat, a developed India, is an engineering problem. The Upaniṣads, the philosophical dialogues that close the Vedas, are for Sundays, and anyone who brings Kauṭilya, the ancient author of a treatise on statecraft, into a budget discussion is being decorative. This view is common among people who have never read Kauṭilya. Part Eight tests it on a real budget line.
The weapon
The third misuse is the hardest, and in India it is the most dangerous. It treats antiquity as a stick for disciplining the living. It decides who may marry whom, who may eat with whom, what a woman may become and which language may be spoken in public. It is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is a soft vice, a longing for a past that never quite existed. The weapon is command. It uses the prestige of old texts to enforce old social arrangements, and it is usually indifferent to what the texts actually say. The widow's story shows how indifferent.
The error all three share
All three misuses look for the inheritance in its conclusions, in what ancient Indians believed, knew or commanded. The trophy-keeper wants those conclusions to have been advanced. The museum-keeper finds them quaint, and the weapon-wielder wants them obeyed.
None of them asks the useful question. That question is not whether ancient India was developed. By any measure a modern economist would use, it mostly was not. Incomes were low, lives were short, and most people could not read. The useful question is whether people on this soil understood some of the conditions under which good outcomes last. Did they know how to make knowledge outlive its knowers, wealth outlive its makers and power answer to someone? Did they know how to hold a society together when no state was holding it?
Five levels of evidence
To answer that honestly, one has to be clear about what counts as evidence. I use five levels, and each is harder to reach than the one before.
A text is evidence that someone had an idea.
An institution, such as a law, an inscription or a contract, is evidence that people built an arrangement around the idea.
Repeated practice is evidence that the arrangement worked more than once.
Survival across generations is evidence that it was handed on.
Change under failure is evidence that it could be corrected.
Most claims about "ancient Indian wisdom" stop at the first level and speak as if they had reached the fifth. A verse shows that an idea existed. It does not show that a society lived by it. This article works mostly at the first level. The later volumes of this series try to reach the second, and in two cases the fifth.
Continuity, and what it carried
On the fourth level, survival, there is one broad observation. On this subcontinent, many practices, legal ideas, forms of learning and social obligations persisted, in changing forms, across the rise and fall of many states. China kept its continuity largely through a bureaucracy and an examination system that outlasted dynasties, until the Qing abolished the examinations in 1905.¹⁹ India's pattern leaned more on family, caste, temple, guild, language and village than on any central apparatus.
The pattern made India resilient to conquest. It also made it resistant to reform, because the bodies that carried continuity were the same bodies that enforced exclusion. Survival is not proof of worth. Much was lost besides. The crucible steel that made Indian ingots famous for patterned blades is a warning case. Metallurgists who studied the old blades think the best ones stopped being made around 1750. Their explanation is that a particular ore source failed and the smiths who knew the technique died without passing it on.²⁰ Continuity here was real, and it was not innocent.
Inheritance is not authority
The first rule of this article follows from that. Inheritance tells us where something came from. It does not tell us why we should keep it. A caste rule, a language, a legal idea, a ritual, a prejudice and a great insight can all be inherited, and they have nothing else in common. The past has no veto over the present, and the present has no licence to despise the past.
The historian of Christian doctrine Jaroslav Pelikan put the difference in one line:
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."²¹
The weapon is traditionalism. The good use of the past is closer to a laboratory notebook. A notebook is a long record of experiments, with the failures written down beside the successes. Nobody obeys a notebook. People read it because they intend to run the next experiment better.
Here the likeness ends. A scientist strikes through a failed result where everyone can see it. The old law books rarely struck anything through. A rule that had become awkward was buried under commentary, or moved to another age of the world. There was even a name for the second move. Lists of kalivarjya, things forbidden in the Kali age, retired older rules without deleting them, and writers from the twelfth century on quoted such a list that included Parāśara's own widow verse.²² The reader today must strike through openly what the tradition only buried.
Whose past is this?
A fair reader will ask whether this is only about Hindu texts. Mostly, in this article, it is about Sanskrit texts from the Brahmanical tradition. Those are the texts most often waved in public arguments about development, and most often used as weapons. The selection is narrow, and I say so.
India's inheritance also includes Buddhist and Jain thought, Tamil literature, the edicts of the emperor Aśoka, Sikh institutions, Islamic and Christian learning, and the knowledge of tribal and craft communities. The method in this article is meant for all of it. Any inheritance can be put to the same five levels and the same sift.
Part Eight — Is Wanting to Be Rich Un-Indian?
No. The texts most often called otherworldly say the opposite, and they say it without apology.
The picture of India as a "spiritual" civilisation opposed to a "material" West has several sources. Some colonial administrators found it convenient. Some monastic traditions prefer it. Some foreign visitors went looking for it. As a description of the texts in this article, it is false, and it has been expensive.
The Sanskrit śāstras named the aims of a human life the puruṣārthas, "the aims of a person". The classical list has four. Dharma is right order and duty. Artha is wealth, prosperity and the means of a good life, and by extension the science of economy and statecraft. Kāma is the fulfilment of desire. Mokṣa is liberation. Artha is second on that list. It is not last, and it is not outside the list.
The Arthaśāstra attributed to Kauṭilya is a manual for building a rich, strong and well-run state. It covers irrigation, mines, trade, weights and measures, tax, accounts, courts, espionage and war.²³ It is among the least sentimental books any people has produced. In its first book, after saying the king may enjoy the three aims in balance, it gives its author's own view:
artha eva pradhāna iti kauṭilyaḥ. arthamūlau hi dharmakāmāv iti. Artha alone is chief, says Kauṭilya, for dharma and kāma are rooted in artha. Arthaśāstra 1.7.6–7²⁴
The same chapter asks the king to master his senses, indriyajaya, and to keep company with the old and wise.²⁴ Both return below as the roots of a famous chain.
India also produced outright materialists. The Cārvāka, or Lokāyata, thinkers denied the authority of the Vedas and life after death, and held perception to be the chief means of knowledge. Some scholars say the only one, others that they allowed inference grounded in perception.²⁵ Little of their own writing survives, and much of what we know comes through their opponents.²⁵ Even so, the opponents had to answer them, which shows that the inheritance was plural. Worldliness on this soil was not only a priestly concession.
The chain that is usually quoted halfway
A collection of maxims attributed to Cāṇakya, whom tradition identifies with Kauṭilya, makes the same argument as a chain. Its date and authorship are uncertain, so I treat it as a witness to how the tradition read Kauṭilya, not as his own words. It is worth reading in full, because it is usually quoted only halfway:
sukhasya mūlaṃ dharmaḥ. dharmasya mūlam arthaḥ. arthasya mūlaṃ rājyam. rājyasya mūlam indriyajayaḥ. indriyajayasya mūlaṃ vinayaḥ. vinayasya mūlaṃ vṛddhopasevā. The root of happiness is dharma. The root of dharma is artha. The root of artha is the state. The root of the state is mastery of the senses. The root of mastery of the senses is discipline. The root of discipline is service to the wise. Cāṇakya-sūtra 1–6²⁶
Start with the second link. Dharma rests on artha. Righteousness depends on prosperity. A starving society cannot be a righteous one. It can only be a desperate one. On this view, wealth is not the enemy of virtue. It is what virtue stands on.
Then read the rest of the chain. Artha rests on the state, and a hasty reader stops there, concluding that the text hands the government a blank cheque. The chain goes on. The state rests on indriyajaya, the rulers' mastery of their own appetites. That mastery rests on vinaya, trained discipline. Discipline in turn rests on vṛddhopasevā, sitting with and serving those older and wiser than oneself.
The foundation of a prosperous state, in this text, is the self-restraint and teachability of those who run it. The economy is downstream of the character of its institutions. Modern India has names for what happens when those entrusted with abundance cannot restrain themselves: rent-seeking, capture, crony credit, the budget spent before the election.
Make food abundant
The Taittirīya Upaniṣad, one of the older Upaniṣads, goes further than the treatise on statecraft. In its third section a student, Bhṛgu, learns step by step to understand the Absolute as food, then as breath, mind, understanding and bliss. Among the vows the section lays down is this one:
annaṃ bahu kurvīta, tad vratam Make food abundant. That is the vow. Taittirīya Upaniṣad 3.9.1²⁷
The verse sits in a teaching on food and brahman, the Absolute, and it was not written about economics. The economic use is my application. Even so, the sentence says what it says. It does not say "be content with little". It says make much.
The long apology, and its modern form
After 1947 India planned its economy for serious reasons. The country was very poor, it had little industry, and colonial rule had shaped its economy to serve another country. Controls followed, and over the decades some of them became counterproductive. Licences rationed what could be made and how much, and in much of public life profit came to look suspect. Neither Kauṭilya nor the Upaniṣad supports that suspicion.
The apology did not end when the licences went. It changed shape. It survives as a suspicion of scale, and as a romance of the small and the improvised, with jugāḍ, the clever patch, made into a national virtue. The first practical lesson is short, and still needed. There is nothing to apologise for in wanting India to be rich.
Rich for what?
The same texts insist just as firmly on order. Artha comes second, after dharma. Wealth pursued within right order builds. Wealth pursued against it consumes. "Rich" is not a complete aim, because four questions hang on it. Rich through what, making or taking? Rich for whom, the many or a few? At whose cost, the next generation's, the river's, the worker's? And toward what end?
The Īśa Upaniṣad answers the last of these in its first verse:
īśāvāsyam idaṃ sarvaṃ yat kiṃca jagatyāṃ jagat / tena tyaktena bhuñjīthāḥ, mā gṛdhaḥ kasyasvid dhanam All this, whatever moves in the moving world, is to be dwelt in by the Lord. Enjoy by letting go. Do not covet. Whose, after all, is wealth? Īśa Upaniṣad 1²⁸
The first line is theology. It says that everything is pervaded by, or belongs to, the Lord. The second line has been read in more than one way. Śaṅkara read tena tyaktena as the renunciation of desire by one who has turned from worldly action, and took bhuñjīthāḥ to mean "protect".²⁹ Gandhi, who called the verse the essence of Hinduism, read it as "renounce and dedicate all to Him", then use the portion that falls to you.³⁰ His writings on trusteeship carry the same phrase: "Enjoy thy wealth by renouncing it."³¹
I follow the trustee reading, knowing it is one reading among several. On it, the verse is not a command to be poor. The verb bhuñjīthāḥ can mean "enjoy", "consume", "make use of". Wealth is to be held as a trustee holds what belongs to others, without gṛdh, the grasping greed that turns wealth from a tool into a master. In a modern economy, that disposition has institutional forms: fiduciary duties, taxes on inheritance, liability for environmental damage, trusts and endowments.
Can the Upaniṣads say anything about a budget?
They can, if they are used as constraints and not as answers. The museum-keeper calls that decoration, so here is a real budget line to test the claim. Punjab began giving its farmers free electricity in 1997.³² Free power makes pumping groundwater almost costless. In the 2024 national assessment, Punjab was drawing 156 per cent of the groundwater that is recharged each year, the highest share of any state.³³ The state's power subsidy is now around ₹20,000 crore a year, about half of it for farms.³²
Treat the two verses just quoted as constraints, and they force two questions.
The trustee of the Īśa asks whose water it is. On this reading, the aquifer is held in trust, including for farmers not yet born, and an aquifer drained over decades does not refill within a lifetime. The trustee also asks who is enjoying it. Much of the benefit goes to farmers who can afford the deepest borewells. Much of the cost falls on smaller farmers whose shallow wells run dry, and on the taxpayers who carry the losses.
The Cāṇakya chain asks whether those who hold power can master their own appetite. In 2002 a new government imposed a charge on farm pumps. Under political pressure it restored free power in 2005.³² A subsidy that no government can afford to withdraw is a precise case of the failure the chain names at its root, rulers who cannot restrain themselves. Here the appetite is for the next vote.
None of this tells Punjab what tariff to set, how to meter pumps or how to pay farmers who switch crops. Those are numbers, and they need economists, hydrologists and politics. But the two texts turn a subsidy that looks like generosity into a question of trusteeship and self-restraint. That is not decoration.
Part Nine — Six Aims for a Developed India, and Only One Is Money
A development plan that measures itself by income alone is pursuing one puruṣārtha. The śāstras name four, and none of the four is legitimate when it swallows the others.
For a development framework I use six. The six are a modern diagnostic lens built from the classical four, not a claim that the śāstras taught six. The two additions are my construction. Jñāna, knowledge, comes first. Saśaktīkaraṇa, empowerment, comes last. I have argued the full case elsewhere, in The Six Puruṣārthas.
Why six, and not four or ten?
The six are a lens, not a complete theory of development. Health, security, justice and trust could each claim a place. My rule for admitting an aim was double. It must name something a person pursues for its own sake. And a plan must be able to sacrifice it visibly while its income figures improve. On that rule, health and security are conditions of all six rather than aims beside them. Justice and trust are what dharma means in a republic. Others could draw the line differently. The test of an instrument is what it shows, and these six show what a GDP figure hides.
Put to a Viksit Bharat, each aim asks one question.
Jñāna. Does the country produce knowledge, and does it teach its children to read? Both halves are Indian facts at once. On 23 August 2023 the Indian lander of Chandrayaan-3 touched down near the Moon's south pole, and India became the fourth country to land a craft on the Moon.³⁴ In ASER's survey of rural India the next year, fewer than half the children in Class V of government schools, 44.8 per cent, could read a text meant for Class II.³⁵
A country can have the first fact without the second only for a while. A developed India would not have the gap.
Dharma. Can citizens trust that rules will be applied as written, contracts enforced, and disputes settled within a lifetime? Dharma comes from the root dhṛ, "to hold". It is what holds a society together. In institutional terms, one mark of it is predictability, rules applied as written. Predictability is not enough. A predictable unjust order is still unjust, so dharma in a republic also asks whether the rules are fair to the people they bind.
Artha. Is there enough, is it growing, and for whom? Part Eight argued that this aim needs no apology and every scrutiny.
Kāma. Is life in this country worth wanting, within dharma? Development plans forget this aim first, and it is not a luxury. People stay loyal to a place, and invest in it, when it is beautiful and alive. Kanchipuram still weaves its famous silk saris, and the craft has carried a geographical indication, a legal mark of its place, since 2005–06.³⁶ It lasts because people still want what the looms make. A subsidy could not create that pride.
In the śāstras, kāma was never only appetite. It was also refinement, the cultivated enjoyment of beauty and of other people. The other side of the question is whether desire is being served or farmed. An economy that grows by selling cheap stimulation and consumer debt to its young is pursuing kāma against dharma.
Mokṣa. The schools do not agree on what liberation is. Advaita Vedānta, Sāṃkhya, Nyāya and the Buddhists, who speak of nirvāṇa, each describe it differently. I use the word in my own sense, which is not any one school's. Mokṣa is the freeing of the will from the three things that capture it: innate tendencies, acquired conditioning, and the momentum of past action. For a person, that is a spiritual matter.
A society cannot have mokṣa. Its social use here is an analogy, and only an analogy. In plain words, I mean a society's capacity to revise what it inherited when evidence shows it no longer serves. A society that cannot change its mind cannot develop, whatever its income.
Saśaktīkaraṇa. Does each generation leave the next more capable than it was itself? Empowerment is an elastic word, so here is what I mean. It is not only more resources. It is more effective choice over the conditions of one's own life: the ability to learn, to earn, to move, to speak, to refuse and to leave. It also means power handed over, not only property. This aim turns a successful generation into a successful civilisation. It is also another name for succession, the handing on of working institutions, which is the subject of the later volumes.
How the aims check one another
The six regulate one another. Knowledge without dharma becomes technique for hire. Artha without dharma becomes extraction, and dharma without artha becomes powerless idealism. Kāma without restraint becomes consumption. Mokṣa without artha can become withdrawal from the world. Saśaktīkaraṇa without jñāna hands over power without competence.
Who holds the balance?
"They regulate one another" is still a metaphor, and a framework that cannot say who decides is a sermon. In a republic the aims conflict every day, and someone must hold the balance.
When artha threatens to buy dharma, as when a project would bend a law, the referee is the courts, and behind them the fundamental rights of the Constitution.
When the present threatens to spend the future's share, the referees are the Finance Commission, the Comptroller and Auditor General, and the legislatures that vote budgets in public.
When kāma is being farmed, or a city is about to lose its lake to a builder, the referee is a municipal council with real powers, if one exists.
When a household's dharma, as its elders read it, denies a daughter her education, her inheritance or her choice of husband, the referee is the Constitution and the courts that enforce it. The household is not the referee.
Behind all of these stands public argument. When it is vāda, argument aimed at truth, and not jalpa, argument aimed at winning, a society can see a trade-off before it makes one.
The referees are themselves fallible. Courts are slow. Auditors can be ignored. Councils can be captured by the builder they are meant to restrain. A list of referees is not a guarantee. It is a list of the places where capture must be watched for. The six are a diagnostic for these institutions to use, not an algorithm that replaces them.
Were these aims open to women?
Not equally, and a volume about sifting cannot leave that folded inside the word "birth". The dharmaśāstras that set out the aims also restricted women's access to the study of the Veda. The Manusmṛti directs that a girl's life-cycle rites be performed without Vedic mantras (2.66).³⁷ Its best-known line on women is na strī svātantryam arhati, "a woman does not deserve independence" (9.3).³⁸ An empowerment that does not count daughters is only the succession of a household. Saśaktīkaraṇa, in my sense, means nothing unless it applies to every child in the house.
Part Ten — "Not the Others" and How to Sift an Inheritance
Return to the verse at the head of this article.
The Taittirīya Upaniṣad's eleventh lesson is a teacher's address to students at the end of their training. It is among the oldest surviving addresses of its kind, and it reads like a list of duties. Speak the truth. Practise dharma. Do not neglect your own study and your teaching: svādhyāya-pravacanābhyāṃ na pramaditavyam. Do not cut off the line of your family. Treat your mother, your father, your teacher and your guest as gods. Give, with faith and with modesty.¹
Then the teacher says something no ceremony requires:
yāny anavadyāni karmāṇi tāni sevitavyāni, no itarāṇi. yāny asmākaṃ sucaritāni tāni tvayopāsyāni, no itarāṇi. Whatever actions are blameless, those you should do. Not the others. Those of our deeds that are good, you should follow. Not the others. Taittirīya Upaniṣad 1.11.2¹
No itarāṇi means "not the others". Strictly, the text says to follow good conduct and not bad.
I read it as more than a moral commonplace. It tells students that some of what their teachers' generation did should not be copied, and that they will have to judge which. For cases of doubt, the passage goes on, look to the thoughtful, devoted, gentle brāhmaṇas, members of the priestly class, who are committed to dharma, and do as they do.¹ The judges it names are drawn from one class. That too belongs to its century. But the teacher does not ask to be reproduced whole. He asks to be sifted.
Three layers, kept apart
The teaching has to be handled in three layers. If they are run together, the whole argument becomes flattery.
Layer one is what the texts say about their own revisability. It is a textual matter, and the record is real. Besides the teacher's address there are two more witnesses. The Parāśara Smṛti, as the widow's story showed, assigns different law books to different ages of the world (1.24). Manu's code belongs to the first age, Gautama's to the second, Śaṅkha and Likhita's to the third, and Parāśara's own to the Kali age.⁵
Its frame is a cosmic theory of ages, not a theory of legal reform. That law codes can expire is my inference from it, not its doctrine. Still, a law book assigned its own predecessors to the past.
The grammarians supply the third witness. Sanskrit grammar has three founding sages: Pāṇini, Kātyāyana who corrected him, and Patañjali who commented on both. A maxim of the later tradition, yathottaraṃ munīnāṃ prāmāṇyam, holds that the later sage's view carries more authority. The maxim is first used explicitly by the eleventh-century commentator Kaiyaṭa.³⁹ It shows a discipline that ranked its founder below his correctors, and kept its continuity by permitting correction. I wrote about the maxim at length in The Machine Arrived Late.
Layer two is what institutions actually did with those sentences. It is a historical matter, and the record is poor. A teacher's verse, a law book's scheme of ages and a grammarians' maxim did not, by themselves, retire any rule about who could own land, learn, draw water or enter a temple. Custom outlived the sentence. The widow's verse was there for centuries, and commentators moved it into another age. A text that contains a corrective principle is not a society that practises correction. A civilisation should not be credited with a corrective principle it failed to apply.
Layer three is what I am doing with the teacher's instruction now. It is an inference, and it is mine. I am using his sentence as a licence to sift the inheritance, including parts the teacher himself would have kept. He did not intend that use.
Five tests for telling a method from its container
Sifting needs a rule. Without one, every embarrassing inheritance can be dismissed as "only the container", and every flattering one kept as "the method". By method I mean a principle that can serve any society. By container I mean the old social arrangement it once lived inside.
A rule needs a judge, so name the judges first. The authority to sift the tradition cannot come entirely from the tradition. If the tradition were the only judge of itself, it would acquit itself, as for many centuries it did. The bench must include what the texts did not supply: reason, evidence, the experience of those who bore the cost, and human dignity and equality as the Constitution states them.
Then come the tests. They are of two kinds. The first three only authenticate. They show that a principle is really in the tradition, not read into it.
Is the principle stated explicitly, not read in?
Does it recur in more than one text or setting?
Did anyone build an institution around it?
Recurrence is weak evidence even for that. Law books borrowed from one another, as the widow's verse, found in two of them, shows.⁴ Ten books repeating a rule may be one voice repeated, not ten witnesses agreeing.
The last two tests evaluate. They ask whether the principle deserves keeping, and here the outside judges decide.
Did it produce the result it claims, when it was practised?
Does it still make sense once the old social arrangement around it is removed?
A method passes all five. A container may pass the first three and still fail the last two.
Kālidāsa, the great poet of classical Sanskrit, put the attitude in the prologue of an early play:
purāṇam ity eva na sādhu sarvaṃ na cāpi kāvyaṃ navam ity avadyam / santaḥ parīkṣyānyatarad bhajante mūḍhaḥ parapratyayaneyabuddhiḥ Not everything is good because it is old, and no poem is to be blamed because it is new. The wise test both and choose. The fool lets other people's belief make up his mind. Mālavikāgnimitra 1.2⁴⁰
He was talking about plays. I am applying his line to law and custom.
The first sift, the chain of teachers
The paramparā, the chain in which a teacher's worth is measured by what survives in his students, is authentic. It is stated, it recurs across disciplines, and it was built into schools and lineages. It fails the last test in three ways. It admitted people by birth. It kept knowledge secret inside the lineage. And it demanded an obedience that made it hard for a student to correct a teacher in public.
The modern university that admits students without asking their caste did not simply open the old chain. It is a different mechanism. It preserves learning by publication, open examination and the power to replace a bad teacher, not by a student's duty to the lineage. It kept one function of the old chain, the measure of a teacher by what students go on to do. It dropped the gate, the secrecy and much of the obedience, though I think caste still shapes, in quieter ways, who reaches a university and who finishes. Keep the function. Drop the rest.
The sift has a price on the other side, and it should be stated. Locked knowledge is not only unjust. It is expensive. Every craft that died with a family forbidden to teach outsiders, every result that stayed in a palm-leaf lineage while others rediscovered it, was capability the country paid for and lost. The crucible steel is one such loss. A gate on learning taxes everyone, including those inside it.
The second sift, the honour of wealth and the glamour of scarcity
The case made in Part Eight, that wealth honestly made is honourable, passes the tests. It is explicit in Kauṭilya and the Upaniṣad, and it recurs across the śāstras. Guilds and endowments were built around it, and it survives the removal of kings.
The glamour of scarcity fails them. It is not explicit in these texts. It reached modern Indian policy mainly through the planning state, which drew on Fabian socialism and the Soviet model, and it borrowed prestige from the honour that renunciation carries in Indian religious life. Gandhi's ideal of limiting wants is a separate thing. It was a personal ethic, and it did not design the licences. As a principle for a national economy, the glamour of scarcity produced shortage. Keep the honour. Drop the glamour, including its modern form, the romance of staying small.
The largest sift, birth and sex
The largest thing that fails these tests is the ranking of human beings by birth. Occupation and status hardened into heredity, and exclusion followed: from learning, from temples, from wells and tanks, and from the village's common life. Alongside it came the ranking of women beneath men, stated in the texts themselves. The tradition contains more than one account of how society should be ordered. Historians disagree about how and when the hardening happened. It is not in dispute that it produced exclusion on a vast scale, and that antiquity is no defence of it.
The tests should be run in public on one of these rules, so a reader can see that they cut both ways. Take na strī svātantryam arhati, Manu 9.3.
Is it stated explicitly? Yes. It is one of the plainest sentences in the book.
Does it recur? Yes. Versions of the guardianship of women appear across the dharmaśāstras.
Was an institution built around it? Yes. The law of inheritance, marriage and property that governed Hindu women until the 1950s carried it.
Did it produce what it claims? It claims to protect women. The record of widows, of women without sons and of daughters without shares does not bear that out.
Does it make sense once the old household arrangement is removed? No.
The rule is authentic, and it fails evaluation. That is what a container looks like. Explicit, recurrent and institutionalised is not the same as sound. The tests do not let a hard rule be explained away as a misreading. They make it be judged.
The strongest case against me
Isn't caste simply part of the tradition, so that keeping the tradition means keeping caste? The strongest form of that objection came from B. R. Ambedkar. In Annihilation of Caste (1936), he argued that caste was not a corruption the śāstras had suffered. The śāstras taught it. Hindus who observed caste, he wrote, were not cruel but religious, so:
"...the enemy you must grapple with is not the people who observe Caste, but the Shastras which teach them this religion of Caste."⁴¹
The remedy could not be a better reading of the same books:
"You must therefore destroy the sacredness and divinity with which Caste has become invested. In the last analysis, this means you must destroy the authority of the Shastras and the Vedas."⁴²
He wanted reformers to take the stand that the Buddha and Guru Nanak took: "You must not only discard the Shastras, you must deny their authority."⁴¹ On his view, reformers who say the "true" tradition was never hierarchical are keeping the house and repainting one room. The texts' corrective machinery never corrected this, in many centuries of opportunity.
What I concede, and what I still claim
Is Ambedkar right? On most of it, yes. The self-correcting texts did not correct caste. The correction, when it came, came largely from people outside the orthodox bodies. Bhakti poets set the low-born devotee above the learned priest, and Buddhist and other traditions had rejected birth-rank from the start. In the modern age it came from Jotirao Phule, who opened a school for girls of the excluded castes in Pune in 1848, and from Savitribai Phule, Narayana Guru, Ayyankali, Periyar and Ambedkar himself.⁴³ A civilisation cannot claim it corrected itself if it leaves out the people who forced the correction.
My own position should be named plainly. It is constitutional reconstruction. The Constitution is not one more text in the inheritance, to be weighed beside Manu. It changes the rules by which the inheritance is judged. Its Article 17 declares that "Untouchability" is abolished and its practice in any form forbidden.⁴⁴ It abolished untouchability. It did not, and could not, abolish caste by declaration.
What I claim is narrower than what defenders of a "true" tradition claim. The teacher's instruction does not need the śāstras to have been right about birth or about women. It needs only to be applied. Applied honestly, with judges from outside the texts, it licenses a reader to deny the śāstras the authority Ambedkar was right to deny them. The licence does not do the work. The movements and the law did the work. The licence asks only that the same scrutiny fall on everything else.
The tradition is not completing itself here. Its best sentence is being turned against its worst practice. What the future inherits, then, is not the old text alone. It inherits the text, the rejection of parts of it, and the argument between them.
Can the present be wrong about the past?
Yes, and the sift is not finished without that warning. Descendants can be wrong about what their ancestors got wrong.
Tamil Nadu's irrigation tanks are the case. Each tank had a catchment, channels, and village maintainers who desilted it by shared labour, a custom called kuḍimarāmattu. As private wells and then borewells spread from the 1960s, tanks' share of the state's irrigated land fell from about 38 per cent in 1960–61 to 27 per cent by 1984–85, while wells' share rose from 24 to 38 per cent.⁴⁵
Many tanks were left to silt. In one river system studied in 1991, some tanks had come to act mainly as percolation ponds that recharged the nearby wells.⁴⁵ The old system was still feeding the new one.
In 2017 the Tamil Nadu government launched a scheme named after the old custom, paying for villagers to desilt tanks again.⁴⁶ The tank was never superstition. It had only been treated as obsolete. Some things embraced as modern turned out to be harmful, as Punjab's groundwater shows. The past supplies the inheritance and the present supplies the judgment, but the present is not the last judge either.
Part Eleven — What the Old Texts Cannot Tell Us, and What They Can
A tradition that asks to be sifted also deserves to be asked plainly what it cannot do. There is a long list of questions India must answer before 2047 to which no text in this article has an answer. Pretending otherwise is the trophy cabinet again.
Principle, mechanism, architecture, number
It helps to separate four things every policy needs.
A principle says what must be respected. No one should fall below a floor. Damage that cannot heal must not be done.
A mechanism says how the principle is served: a pension, a tax, a regulator, a committee, a market.
An institutional architecture says who measures, who enforces and who hears appeals.
A parameter says how much, how fast and at what scale: the carbon price, the tax rate, the inflation target.
Punjab's groundwater shows why the third layer matters. The principle is trusteeship of the aquifer, and a mechanism could be a metered charge for farm power. But unless some body measures what each pump draws, some authority can enforce a limit, and a farmer has somewhere to appeal, the best tariff stays a number on paper.
The texts in this article are strong on principles. They are sometimes useful on mechanisms and architecture, and the next volume shows several in Kauṭilya. They never supply parameters. Those come from measurement, economics, engineering and democratic choice.
The texts also supply two things besides principles. They supply questions. Who bears the cost? Who benefits? Can the damage be undone? What debt is being passed to the unborn? And they supply warnings about what people and institutions reliably get wrong: greed in those who handle money, capture by those who hold office, the short horizon, the founder who will not leave, the failure to hand on. A good question and an accurate warning are capital a developing country can use.
Here is what that means, question by question.
Schooling
The texts cannot design a curriculum, set teachers' pay or build an examination system. They can say that teaching and learning are one duty, shared by teacher and student: svādhyāya-pravacanābhyāṃ na pramaditavyam, do not neglect study and teaching.¹ And the chain of teachers offers a measure. Judge a school by what its students can do after they leave, not by its building.
Public argument
The texts cannot regulate the media or design parliamentary procedure. They can supply the difference between vāda and jalpa, argument for truth and argument for victory. They can also supply the rule of the pūrvapakṣa, the opponent's case. No decision is made until the strongest case against it has been stated in full.
What the rich owe
The texts cannot set a rate of tax on income, wealth or inheritance. They can supply the trustee of the Īśa, wealth held as if for others, without grasping. And the Cāṇakya chain adds a warning. Prosperity rests on the self-restraint of those who hold power, including power over the tax code.
Language
The texts cannot write a national language policy. They can sharpen a question from kāma. Can a country be fully developed if its children are ashamed of the languages they speak at home? The hymn to the Earth in the Atharvaveda praises her for "bearing folk of many a varied language with divers rites".⁴⁷ A plural country is old news on this soil.
Artificial intelligence
The texts cannot write the rules, and what follows is my extrapolation. From Kauṭilya comes a design rule. Assume that whoever controls something valuable will be tempted to misuse it, and build for that. From saśaktīkaraṇa comes a test. Does the technology leave people more capable and more free to leave, or more dependent and more captured?
A central bank
The texts cannot set monetary policy or an inflation target. The Arthaśāstra can state the stake: kośapūrvāḥ sarvārambhāḥ, "all undertakings depend upon finance" (2.8.1).²³ How to steward public money, with its trade-offs among prices, jobs and stability, is a matter for economics.
The price of carbon
The texts cannot give the number. The hymn to the Earth can give the limit. "Let what I dig from thee, O Earth, rapidly spring and grow again," the poet asks, and he prays not to pierce her vitals or her heart (12.1.35).⁴⁷ Take only what can grow back, and never strike where a wound will not heal. Ethics supplies the limit. Science supplies the measurement.
Hospitals
The texts cannot design or finance a national health system. They can state the duty. The Arthaśāstra says the king shall maintain orphans, the aged, the infirm, the afflicted and the helpless (2.1.26).²³ The emperor Aśoka, in his second rock edict, recorded that he had provided two kinds of medical treatment, for people and for animals, and had wells dug and trees planted along roads.⁴⁸ That edict is evidence of a policy announced, the second level of evidence. It does not show how well the treatment worked.
What a modern republic must look like
Here the texts are weakest. Universal franchise and the equal citizenship of every person came from the modern constitutional tradition and the freedom movement, not from these texts. India's Constitution did not find them in the śāstras.
What the old sources can give are principles and techniques. The Arthaśāstra holds that the king's happiness lies in the happiness of his subjects, and that his good is what pleases them, not what pleases him (1.19.34).⁴⁹
In the tenth century, the village assembly of Uttaramērūr in the Tamil country used selection by lot, terms of about a year, bars on serving again too soon, and disqualification for failing to render accounts.⁵⁰
Centuries earlier, the Buddhist monastic code, the Vinaya, set procedures for the saṅgha, the community of monks. A decision began with a formal motion, ñatti. A dispute could be settled by majority vote, with voting tickets, salākā, handed out by a ticket-distributor chosen for being free of partiality, malice, folly and fear.⁵¹ Acts had quorums. An ordination in the central lands needed ten monks, and the reinstatement of a disciplined monk needed twenty.⁵² These are techniques. They can be studied without importing the narrow orders they served, the landholding Brahmin men of one village and a body of monks.
The pattern
The texts are weakest where 2047 needs quantities. They are strongest where it needs limits, duties, questions and warnings. They cannot tell a finance ministry how much. They can tell it what it owes, to whom, and what it must never do to get it. They cannot design an institution. They can say what any institution will face, which is temptation, decay, capture and the departure of its founders.
The reader of old texts therefore has a job different from those of the trophy-keeper, the museum-keeper and the weapon-wielder. The job is not to find an answer in the texts. It is to take a principle, a question or a warning from them, and then find the answer by measurement and trial. The texts do not replace trial and error. They constrain what a trial may do.
Ending — Where Did the Numbers Come From?
One question is left that the texts cannot answer by themselves. If they gave principles but not parameters, how did people on this soil ever find the parameters?
Someone had to decide how much a village should pay for its tank, and who should keep the accounts. Someone had to decide how long a committee member could sit, what disqualified him, and what to do when the first set of rules failed. A verse cannot do that. Only people can, by trying an arrangement, watching it fail and writing down a better one.
The commentators who moved Parāśara's verse out of its own age left a record of how a society refused to correct itself. If the other kind of record exists, the record of a society correcting itself, it will not be in scripture. It will be in what people built, wrote down and changed, in treatises of administration and on the walls of temples. The next volumes go there to look.
Words to keep
Artha: wealth, prosperity and the means of a good life, and the science of economy and statecraft.
Bhakti: devotion. The devotional movements whose saints often set the low-born devotee above the learned priest.
Brāhmaṇa: a member of the priestly class.
Cārvāka or Lokāyata: the Indian materialists, who denied the authority of the Vedas and life after death.
Dharma: right order and duty, what holds a society together. From the root dhṛ, "to hold".
Gṛdh: grasping greed, the craving that turns wealth from a tool into a master.
Indriyajaya: mastery of one's own senses and appetites.
Jalpa: argument aimed at winning, not at truth.
Jñāna: knowledge. The first of the author's six aims.
Jugāḍ: a clever improvised fix. Useful in a pinch, poor as a national strategy.
Kali: the present age of the world in Indian cosmology, for which the Parāśara Smṛti says it was written.
Kalivarjya: things forbidden in the Kali age. Lists that retired older rules without deleting them from the books.
Kāma: the fulfilment of desire, including the cultivated enjoyment of beauty and of other people.
Kuḍimarāmattu: the Tamil village custom of maintaining tanks and channels by shared labour.
Mokṣa: liberation. In the author's sense, the freeing of the will from innate tendencies, acquired conditioning and the momentum of past action.
Ñatti: the formal motion that opened a decision of the Buddhist monastic community.
No itarāṇi: "not the others". The teacher's instruction to follow only the good in his generation.
Paramparā: the chain of teachers and students through which knowledge is handed on.
Puruṣārtha: an aim of a human life. The classical list has four: dharma, artha, kāma and mokṣa.
Pūrvapakṣa: the opponent's case, stated in full before one argues against it.
Salākā: a voting ticket used in Buddhist monastic decisions.
Saṅgha: the community of Buddhist monks.
Saśaktīkaraṇa: empowerment. In the author's sense, more effective choice over the conditions of one's own life, and power handed to the next generation.
Śāstra: a classical treatise or body of teaching, especially on law, duty or statecraft.
Smṛti: a text of law and custom, such as the law books of Manu or Parāśara.
Vāda: argument aimed at finding the truth.
Vinaya: trained discipline. Also the name of the Buddhist monastic code.
Vṛddhopasevā: sitting with and serving those older and wiser than oneself.
Sources
Taittirīya Upaniṣad 1.11.1–4 (Śikṣāvallī, the teacher's address). Sanskrit text and transliteration at Shlokam, https://shlokam.org/texts/taittiriya-1-11-1/ . Translation of 1.11.2 by the author, following A. Mahadeva Sastri, The Taittirīya Upanishad (Mysore, 1903).
Īśvaracandra Vidyāsāgar, Hindu Widow Marriage (Bengali tracts of 1855), trans. Brian A. Hatcher (Columbia University Press, 2011). Review by Protima Pandey, Parabaas, https://parabaas.com/translation/database/reviews/brProtimaPandey_Vidyasagar.html
P. V. Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, vol. I (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1930), section 35, "The Parāśara Smṛti", on its date. Digitised text: https://vishvasa.github.io/kalpAntaram/dharmaH/nibandhaH/en/kANe/history/v1p1/35_the_parAshara_smRti
P. V. Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, vol. II part 1 (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1941), chapter "Remarriage of Widows", citing Nārada Smṛti (Strīpuṃsa) 97, Parāśara Smṛti IV.30 and Agni Purāṇa 154.5–6, the reading of the Parāśara-Mādhavīya, and the Act's limited take-up. Digitised text: https://vishvasa.github.io/kalpAntaram/dharmaH/nibandhaH/en/kANe/history/v2p1/14_Remarriage_of_Widows
Parāśara Smṛti 1.24 (the four ages and their law books) and 4.28 in this edition's numbering (the five calamities). English translation, Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/ParasharaSmriti/SriParasharaSmrithiPdf_djvu.txt
Summary and quotation of Vidyāsāgar's argument from the Parāśara-saṃhitā, Grin, "How Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar used an ancient Hindu text to make widow remarriage legal in the 19th century", https://grin.news/radical-kindness-ishwar-chandra-vidyasagar-in-the-19th-century-a557bc71b4a0
Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856 (Act XV of 1856), passed 16 July and enacted 26 July 1856; the counter-petitions; and Lucy Carroll, "Law, Custom, and Statutory Social Reform: The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856", Indian Economic and Social History Review 20, no. 4 (1983), on castes that permitted remarriage. I could not open the Act's official text or Carroll's article, and rely here on the summary at Wikipedia, "Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_Widows%27_Remarriage_Act,_1856
Live History India, "Marking a Milestone: The Hindu Remarriage Act", https://livehistoryindia.com/story/eras/marking-a-milestone-the-hindu-remarriage-act
Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856, section 2 (forfeiture "as if she had then died"), quoted in Bhondu Ganpat Kirad v. Ramdayal Govindram Kirad, Madhya Pradesh High Court, 15 September 1959, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/191737/
J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson, "A history of Zero", MacTutor History of Mathematics (University of St Andrews, 2000), https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Zero/
J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson, "Brahmagupta", MacTutor History of Mathematics (University of St Andrews), https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Brahmagupta/ ; Brahmagupta, Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta (628 CE), chapter 18. See also Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India (Princeton University Press, 2009).
J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson, "Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi", MacTutor, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Al-Khwarizmi/
J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson, "Leonardo Pisano Fibonacci", MacTutor, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Fibonacci/
H. S. Mukunda, S. M. Deshpande, H. R. Nagendra, A. Prabhu and S. P. Govindaraju, "A Critical Study of the Work 'Vyamanika Shastra'", Scientific Opinion (1974), https://cgpl.iisc.ac.in/oldwebcontent/site/Portals/0/Publications/ReferedJournal/ACriticalStudyOfTheWorkVaimanikaShastra.pdf
Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India (Princeton University Press, 2009), chapter 7, on the Kerala school of Mādhava and his successors.
"Printing in Goa", Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_in_Goa (on the Jesuit press of 1556, the end of Tamil printing after 1612, the decree of 1684 and the Tranquebar press of 1706). The standard study, A. K. Priolkar, The Printing Press in India (Bombay, 1958), could not be opened.
Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–1947 (Oxford University Press, 3rd ed., 2011), on nineteenth-century deindustrialisation and the debate around it.
Angus Maddison's estimates of shares of world GDP (24.4 per cent for India in 1700, 4.2 per cent in 1950), as tabulated in Arvind Panagariya, "India at 125: Reclaiming the Lost Glory and Returning the Global Economy to the Old Normal", 18th C. D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture, Reserve Bank of India, 15 December 2023, Table 1, https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/PublicationsView.aspx?id=22341 . Original: Angus Maddison, The World Economy (OECD, 2006).
"Chinese civil service", Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-civil-service
J. D. Verhoeven, A. H. Pendray and W. E. Dauksch, "The Key Role of Impurities in Ancient Damascus Steel Blades", JOM 50, no. 9 (1998), https://tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/9809/verhoeven-9809.html
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (Yale University Press, 1984), from his 1983 Jefferson Lecture. Quoted in the Christian Science Monitor review, 4 January 1985, https://csmonitor.com/1985/0104/btrad.html
P. V. Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, vol. III (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1946), chapter "Kalivarjya", on reading rules as meant for another age and on the Āditya Purāṇa list, quoted by writers of the twelfth century and later, that includes Parāśara Smṛti IV.30. Digitised text: https://vishvasa.github.io/kalpAntaram/dharmaH/nibandhaH/en/kANe/history/v3/3_sadAchAra/34_Kalivarjya
Kauṭilya, Arthaśāstra, ed. and trans. R. P. Kangle, The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra (University of Bombay, 1960–65), numbering 2.1.26 and 2.8.1. English of Book II in R. Shamasastry's translation (1915), chapters 1 ("Formation of Villages") and 8, at Frances Pritchett's site, Columbia University, https://franpritchett.com/00litlinks/kautilya/book02.htm
Kauṭilya, Arthaśāstra 1.7.1 and 1.7.6–7, Kangle numbering (R. P. Kangle, The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra, University of Bombay, 1960–65). Sanskrit text and verse division at https://www.siva.sh/arthashastra/vinayadhikarika/7/6-10 and https://www.siva.sh/arthashastra/vinayadhikarika/7/1 . Translation by the author.
Bimal Krishna Matilal, "Cārvāka", in Mircea Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan, 1987), https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/carvaka ; and, for the view that they allowed inference grounded in perception, Ramkrishna Bhattacharya, Studies on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata (Anthem Press, 2011), publisher's description, https://anthempress.com/studies-on-the-carvaka-lokayata-hb
Cāṇakya-sūtra 1–6, in Cāṇakya-sūtrāṇi, Sanskrit text with Hindi commentary by Ramavatar Vidyabhaskar (Swadhyaya Mandal, Pardi, 1946), Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/Chanakya_Sutrani_Sanskrit_Text_with_Hindi_Commentary . Translation by the author.
Taittirīya Upaniṣad 3.9.1 (Bhṛguvallī, ninth anuvāka), in A. Mahadeva Sastri, The Taittirīya Upanishad (1903), at Wisdom Library, https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/the-taittiriya-upanishad/d/doc79856.html
Īśa Upaniṣad 1, trans. Patrick Olivelle, Upaniṣads (Oxford World's Classics, 1996). Translation here by the author.
Śaṅkara, commentary on Īśa Upaniṣad 1, trans. S. Sitarama Sastri, The Īśa, Kena and Muṇḍaka Upaniṣads and Sri Śaṅkara's Commentary (Madras, 1905), at Wisdom Library, https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/ishavasya-bhashya-by-sitarama/d/doc145018.html
M. K. Gandhi, Harijan, 30 January 1937, in My Religion, comp. Bharatan Kumarappa (Navajivan), chapter "Renunciation", https://www.mkgandhi.org/my_religion/33renunciation.php
M. K. Gandhi, Harijan, 1 February 1942, in Trusteeship, comp. Ravindra Kelkar (Navajivan), https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/trusteeship.pdf
"Explainer: Growing burden of free power", The Tribune, 22 April 2025, https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/explainer-growing-burden-of-free-power (introduction in January 1997, the per-horsepower charge of 2002, restoration in November 2005, and the 2025–26 subsidy of about ₹20,500 crore, nearly ₹10,000 crore of it for farms).
Central Ground Water Board, Dynamic Ground Water Resources of India, 2024, as reported in ThePrint, 24 January 2025, https://theprint.in/science/indias-groundwater-recharge-went-up-in-last-7-yrs-but-5-states-extracting-over-100-of-their-share/2460378
"India's Chandrayaan-3 lands on the moon", collectSPACE, 23 August 2023, https://www.collectspace.com/news/news-082323a-india-chandrayaan-3-moon-landing.html
ASER Centre, Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2024, national findings, https://asercentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/ASER-2024-National-findings.pdf
Kancheepuram District Administration (Government of Tamil Nadu), "GI Tag Product: Kancheevaram Silks and Sarees" (application 2005, recognised from 2005–06), https://kancheepuram.nic.in/about-district/gi-tag-product-kancheevaram-silks-and-sarees/
Manusmṛti 2.66, trans. Patrick Olivelle, Manu's Code of Law (Oxford University Press, 2005). Sanskrit text: https://enjoylearningsanskrit.com/scriptures/manu-smriti/chapter-2/verse-66
Manusmṛti 9.3, trans. Patrick Olivelle (2005). Sanskrit text: https://enjoylearningsanskrit.com/scriptures/manu-smriti/chapter-9/verse-3
Madhav M. Deshpande, on the first explicit use of yathottaraṃ munīnāṃ prāmāṇyam by Kaiyaṭa in his Pradīpa on the Mahābhāṣya (on Pāṇini 1.1.29), Indology list, August 1999, https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/1999-August/018062.html ; and Deshpande, "Evolution of the Notion of Authority (Prāmāṇya) in the Pāṇinian Tradition", Histoire Épistémologie Langage 20, no. 1 (1998), 5–28.
Kālidāsa, Mālavikāgnimitra, prologue, verse 1.2 in the usual numbering. Prose translation by C. H. Tawney (Calcutta, 1875), https://distantreader.org/stacks/trust/uc2/uc2_ark+=13960=t73t9h74m.txt . Verse translation here by the author.
B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936), section 20, paragraphs 9 and 12, ed. Frances W. Pritchett (Columbia University), https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/section_20.html
B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936), section 21, paragraph 3, ed. Frances W. Pritchett, https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/section_21.html
Mahatma Phule Chair, Savitribai Phule Pune University, "Life sketch" of Jotirao Phule (school for girls of the Shudra and Atishudra castes, 1848, and the Satyashodhak Samaj, 24 September 1873), https://unipune.ac.in/chairs/mahatma_phule_chair/mphule_webfiles/life_sketch.htm
Constitution of India, Article 17, at Constitution of India (Centre for Law and Policy Research), https://www.constitutionofindia.net/articles/article-17-abolition-of-untouchability/
S. Janakarajan, "The Extent and Impact of Ground Water Irrigation in Tamil Nadu: Some Macro and Micro Evidences", Working Paper 102, Madras Institute of Development Studies, March 1991, https://www.mids.ac.in/assets/doc/WP_102.pdf
Press Trust of India, "TN revives traditional participatory water resource mgmt", Business Standard, 13 March 2017, https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/tn-revives-traditional-participatory-water-resource-mgmt-117031300450_1.html
Atharvaveda (Śaunaka) 12.1.35 and 12.1.45, trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Atharva Veda (1895–96), at Sacred Texts, https://sacred-texts.com/hin/av/av12001.htm
Aśoka, Rock Edict II, trans. Ven. S. Dhammika, at Livius, https://www.livius.org/sources/content/ashoka-s-rock-edicts/ . Standard edition: E. Hultzsch, Inscriptions of Asoka, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum vol. 1 (1925).
Kauṭilya, Arthaśāstra 1.19.34, Kangle numbering, as cited and translated in N. Siva Senani, "Arthaśāstra", e-PG Pathshala (INFLIBNET), https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/icp05/chapter/arthasastra
V. Venkayya, "Two Inscriptions at Uttaramallūr", in John Marshall (ed.), Archaeological Survey of India, Annual Report 1904–05 (Calcutta, 1908), pp. 131–145, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.35485 ; and Emmanuel Francis (ed.), DHARMA project edition of the year-14 inscription (921 CE), https://erc-dharma.github.io/tfa-uttiramerur-epigraphy/texts/htmloutput/DHARMA_INSUttiramerur00002.html
Cullavagga IV.9 (Vinaya Piṭaka), trans. T. W. Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenberg, Vinaya Texts part III, Sacred Books of the East vol. 20 (Oxford, 1885), at Wisdom Library, https://www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/vinaya-3-the-cullavagga/d/doc370230.html
Mahāvagga IX.4 (Vinaya Piṭaka), trans. T. W. Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenberg, Vinaya Texts part II, Sacred Books of the East vol. 17 (Oxford, 1882), at Sacred Texts, https://sacred-texts.com/bud/sbe17/sbe17102.htm
How this was written
I read the revision-5 draft of this volume and checked its claims against the texts, studies and records listed above, opening each source online where one exists. This revision also answered outside critiques.
I could not open a full critical edition of the Arthaśāstra or the Cāṇakya-sūtra. Verse numbers follow Kangle and the cited edition. The Parāśara Smṛti verse is numbered 4.30 by Kane and 4.28 in one printed translation. The Uttaramērūr rules were checked against Venkayya's translation in the earlier research for this series, not reread for this volume.
Some details still rest on secondary summaries, because I could not open the primary: the petitions against the 1856 Act and the castes that allowed remarriage (Wikipedia, citing Carroll), the Goa printing dates (Wikipedia, not Priolkar), and the 2024 groundwater figure (a news report of the Central Ground Water Board assessment).
The six aims, my definition of mokṣa and its social analogy, the five levels of evidence, the five tests and their split into authentication and evaluation are my own constructions. The account of why India fell behind is a hypothesis about a contested debate. The economic readings of the Taittirīya and Īśa verses are my applications.
What would change the conclusion: evidence that institutions living by these texts regularly retired their own unjust rules, without pressure from outside them, would weaken the concession about Ambedkar. Evidence that the texts do supply workable parameters would weaken the account of what they cannot do.
No imagined people appear in this article.
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