Colonial administrators often treated the Manusmriti as if it were Britain’s Magna Carta for Hindu society—assigning it the role of an all-purpose legal code. Early Orientalists like Henry Thomas Colebrooke produced the first English translation in the late 1790s, setting the stage for a cascade of interpretations. Samuel Warren’s narrative in “My School Days” may have romanticized Indian antiquity, but officials saw Manusmriti as a window into what they deemed a rigid, caste-driven social order.

By and large, the East India Company didn’t plunge straight into applying Manusmriti verbatim. Rather, it cherry-picked passages that matched British notions of propriety—marriage rules, inheritance laws, caste duties—while ignoring large swaths of ritual prescriptions. Sir William Jones famously mused that Hindu law was less fixed tradition than a “living” practice, yet colonial courts often treated those Sanskrit verses as gospel. This selective approach provided both an excuse and a thin end of the wedge for British intervention: if Hindus were so governed by a supposedly unyielding text, the Raj could step in to “modernize” Indian society.

Critics such as James Mill argued that the Manusmriti revealed an oppressive caste hierarchy, using it to justify British moral ascendancy. Lord Macaulay’s famed Minute on Education (1835) lambasted indigenous learning, painting texts like Manusmriti as backward compared to European enlightenment. At the same time, missionaries and reformers invoked its harsh prescriptions—against widow remarriage or female autonomy—to rally support for social reforms under colonial auspices.

Today’s debates around a Uniform Civil Code in India echo these colonial legacies. References to Manusmriti still surface—sometimes by traditionalists who see it as a cornerstone of Hindu identity, often by activists who regard it as emblematic of past injustices. Modern scholarship tends to view the text as one among many Dharmaśāstras rather than India’s definitive law, recognizing the colonial habit of overemphasizing a single work. The legacy of that selective colonial gaze remains, a reminder that texts gain power as much from who wields them as from what they actually say.