The Manusmriti.
The dharmashastras are smriti — remembered, human, revisable — and Manu was one text among many until the British made it the code. Ambedkar burned a copy in public at Mahad on 25 December 1927, and the date is still observed.
The Manusmriti's reputation and its historical role do not match, and both matter. As a text it is one of many dharmashastras, was never universally authoritative, and was moderated in practice by local custom, which Hindu jurisprudence explicitly recognised as a source of law. What changed everything was colonial administration: British courts wanted a code, commissioned translations, and Sir William Jones's 1794 rendering of Manu became the reference for Hindu personal law across the subcontinent, giving one brahminical text a reach it had never had. Its contents on women and on shudras are what its critics say they are — hierarchical, punitive, and graded by birth. Ambedkar's public burning at the Mahad satyagraha in 1927 was a deliberate act of political theatre, and Manusmriti Dahan Din is still marked. Defenders argue variously that the harshest verses are interpolations, that the text is descriptive rather than prescriptive, or that no Hindu today lives by it — the last of which is largely true and does not settle the argument about what it did.
Her father protects her in childhood, her husband in youth, her sons in old age; a woman is never fit for independence.
Manusmriti 9.3 (rendered)The most quoted verse in the argument against the text, and one reason Ambedkar burned it in 1927.
The same ground, other faiths
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