Manusmriti’s journey through time reads like a detective novel, with modern scholars acting as sleuths piecing together clues from scrappy manuscripts, linguistic shifts and historical footprints. The first step often involves gathering as many surviving copies as possible—from palm‐leaf scrolls in South India to paper codices tucked away in Tibetan monasteries. By comparing variations, experts trace different redaction layers, spotting insertions that hint at shifting social norms or regional influences over centuries.

Language, too, serves as a time‐stamped fingerprint. Sanskrit’s evolution—word choices, grammatical quirks or borrowed Persian terms—helps pinpoint when certain verses might have been tacked on. For instance, references to land‐revenue systems resembling Mughal-era practices raise eyebrows: those passages probably postdate the text’s core. Computational tools, gaining traction since 2023, now accelerate this process, letting researchers run stylometric analyses across thousands of verses in a flash.

Cross‐referencing with other Dharmashastra works—like those attributed to Yajnavalkya or Vishnu—reveals shared passages and unique spins. When Manusmriti echoes earlier codes but tweaks punishments or social hierarchies, it suggests a continuous conversation among jurists adapting rules to fresh realities. Epigraphic records—royal decrees and temple inscriptions—offer additional checks, confirming whether certain legal or moral prescriptions actually guided day‐to‐day life.

Colonial‐era scholarship, once fuelled by British administrators keen on codifying “Hindu law,” left its own legacy of biases. Contemporary researchers now unpick those layers, aware that 19th‐century editions sometimes emphasized aspects of caste hierarchy to justify imperial governance. Recent symposia (notably the 2024 Dharmashastra conference in Delhi) have spotlighted these distortions, stressing a more nuanced reading.

All this detective work converges on a consensus: Manusmriti isn’t a monolithic, single‐author creed but a living tapestry woven over many centuries. Its core likely crystallized around the early Common Era, with successive hands reshaping it in response to political, social and religious winds. Whether as a legal handbook, moral compass or tool of social control, its authenticity lies less in a pristine origin story and more in the layered evolution that reflects the ever-changing fabric of South Asian society.