PHILOSOPHY OF HINDUISM 31
XI. 130. “If he kill without malice a Vaisya, who had a good moral character, he may perform the same penance for one year, or give the priests a hundred cows and a bull.”
XI. 131. “For six months must he perform this whole penance, if without intention he kill a Sudra; or he may give ten white cows and a bull to the priests.”
VIII. 381. “No greater crime is known on earth than slaying a Brahman; and the king, therefore, must not even form in his mind an idea of killing a priest.”
VIII. 126. “Let the king having considered and ascertained the frequency of a similar offence, the place and time, the ability of the criminal to pay or suffer and the crime itself, cause punishment to fall on those alone, who deserves it.”
VIII. 124. “Manu, son of the Self-existent, has named ten places of punishment, which are appropriated to the three lower classes, but a Brahman must depart from the realm unhurt in any one of them.”
VIII. 125. “The part of generation, the belly, the tongue, the two hands, and, fifthly, the two feet, the eye, the nose, both ears, the property, and, in a capital case, the whole body.”
How strange is the contrast between Hindu and Non-Hindu criminal jurisprudence? How inequality is writ large in Hinduism as seen in its criminal jurisprudence? In a penal code charged with the spirit of justice we find two things—a section dealing defining the crime and a section prescribing a rational form of punishment for breach of it and a rule that all offenders are liable to the same penalty. In Manu what do we find ? First an irrational system of punishment. The punishment for a crime is inflicted on the organ concerned in the crime such as belly, tongue, nose, eyes, ears, organs of generation etc., as if the offending organ was a sentient being having a will for its own and had not been merely a servitor of human being. Second feature of Manu’s penal code is the inhuman character of the punishment which has no proportion to the gravity of the offence. But the most striking feature of Manu’s Penal Code which stands out in all its nackedness is the inequality of punishment for the same offence. Inequality designed not merely to punish the offender but to protect also the dignity and to maintain the baseness of the parties coming to a Court of Law to seek justice in other words to maintain the social inequality on which his whole scheme is founded.
So far I have taken for illustrations such matters as serve to show how Manu has ordained social inequality. I now propose to take other matters dealt with by Manu in order to illustrate that Manu has also