Open Question
Scholars disagree on whether the Manusmriti was ever actually administered as binding law by a pre-colonial Hindu state, or whether it was always an aspirational, idealized ethical treatise. David Buxbaum wrote that it does not represent a set of rules ever actually administered in India and is in great part an ideal picture, and no historical evidence has been shown of any Hindu kingdom systematically enforcing its provisions. The question is sharpened by the text's own instability, with over fifty inconsistent manuscript versions surviving, and by the fact that its status as law was substantially the product of British colonial administrators, who from 1794 treated it as a legal code for their own administrative purposes and used it to construct Anglo-Hindu personal law.
What would resolve this A documented pre-colonial judicial record or royal decree citing Manusmriti provisions as the operative rule of decision, independent of the later colonial-era Anglo-Hindu law tradition, would show the text was administered as law rather than read as ethical instruction.
OpenLegal HistoryManusmriti (Wikipedia)
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