Across the centuries, the Manusmriti has moved from being treated as a central dharmaśāstra to becoming a highly contested and largely historical text. In the ancient and medieval periods it was regarded as an authoritative scriptural guide to social order, law, and moral conduct, yet it was never the sole or uniformly applied code. Commentators such as Medhātithi, Govindarāja, and Kullūka Bhaṭṭa worked within a living interpretive tradition, softening harsh prescriptions, harmonizing contradictions, and adapting its ideals to regional customs and prevailing social ethos. Even where its authority was acknowledged, local practice and community norms often carried more weight than a literal application of its verses. The text thus functioned more as a normative ideal and scholastic reference than as a rigid, universally enforced legal manual.

A major shift occurred under colonial rule, when British administrators and Indologists elevated the Manusmriti into a kind of “Hindu law book,” using translations and selective readings to codify what they called Hindu law. This reified and simplified image ignored the plurality of dharma traditions and the flexibility of customary practices, and it tended to emphasize those portions dealing with caste hierarchy, inheritance, and family law. At the same time, Indian reformers engaged the text in complex ways: some highlighted verses that supported justice, morality, or ethical monotheism, while sharply criticizing or rejecting passages that sanctioned caste discrimination and gender inequality. Traditional pandits, for their part, often defended more orthodox readings, even as they navigated the pressures of colonial legal structures.

With the rise of modern reformist, nationalist, and constitutional thought, interpretations became even more diverse and self-consciously ethical. Many modern Hindu thinkers treated the Manusmriti as a human composition to be measured against higher moral principles such as nonviolence, truth, and equality, accepting what aligned with conscience and setting aside what did not. Dalit leaders, most notably B. R. Ambedkar, read the text as a foundational expression of Brahminical caste oppression, focusing on its justification of untouchability, rigid hierarchy, and patriarchy; the symbolic public burning of the text signaled a decisive rejection of its authority for structuring society. Feminist and anti-caste scholars further developed these critiques, using the Manusmriti as a key exhibit in analyses of structural injustice and “Brahminical patriarchy.”

In contemporary discourse, the Manusmriti stands at the crossroads of scholarship, tradition, and social critique. Indologists and historians tend to approach it as a layered, prescriptive project of a particular elite milieu, carefully distinguishing its idealized norms from the far more varied legal and social practices that actually prevailed. Many Hindus today either ignore it in daily life or treat it as a historical document, while some reform-minded readers seek to salvage universal ethical insights—such as self-control, compassion, and the duties of rulers—by reading caste and gender hierarchies as products of their time rather than eternal dharma. Traditionalists and conservative interpreters may still cite it as authoritative for certain ritual and social norms, sometimes arguing that the most troubling verses are later interpolations or meant for degenerate ages. Yet, as a framework for state law, it has lost its force, displaced by constitutional principles that explicitly override any ancient prescriptions which conflict with equality and fundamental rights.