Our Notes & References

The first Portuguese translation of “the most authoritative and the best-known legal text of ancient India” (Olivelle).

An uncommon Nova-Goa imprint: we could trace only three copies passing through auctions in recent decades (incl. one in 1971). OCLC locates 7 copies in the US (Yale, Harvard Law, Penn, Syracuse University, University of Texas, Newberry, Berkeley Law (missing the last leaf)) and a few elsewhere (National Library of Australia, BL, Leiden University Libraries, and Biblioteca de Arte – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian).

The ‘Laws of Manu’, also known as ‘Manu-smriti’, are “attributed to the legendary first man and lawgiver, Manu, [… and are] the most authoritative of the books of the Hindu code (Dharma-shastra) in India” (Britannica). Written in Sanskrit around 100 CE, this “seminal Hindu text […] is important for its classic description of so many social institutions that have come to be identified with Indian society. It deals with the relationships between social and ethnic groups, between men and women, the organization of the state and the judicial system, reincarnation, the workings of karma, and all aspects of the law” (Olivelle).

This first Portuguese edition selected some Laws of Manu and was initiated by José de Vasconcelos Guedes de Carvalho (1822-1892), the judge of the Nova Goa Court, in response to the yellow fever outbreak that afflicted Lisbon in 1857. José de Vasconcelos appealed to local solidarity by proposing the publication of the book, with the profits intended to support the families of the victims. By the end of January 1859, the volume was printed at the National Press in Nova Goa, now known as Panjim or Panaji, the capital of Portuguese India since 1843.

As indicated by the list at the end of teh volume, the edition was funded by over a thousand subscribers from “the scarce metropolitan civil service and the Goan elite, including people of Portuguese descent and native Catholics and Hindus” (Ataíde Lobo, our translation here and below). The magistrate based the Portuguese translation on Guillaume Pauthier’s 1840 collection ‘Les Livres sacrés de l’Orient’, which itself relied on Auguste Loiseleur-Deslongchamps’ 1833 translation of William Jones’ 1776 English version, the first European translation of the text.

The translation of the Hindu legal code into Portuguese was long overdue. Disorientation within the judicial system was growing, as state agents had little to no knowledge of local legal references or languages. Initial, unsuccessful attempts to create codes of local rules and customs occurred in 1824 and 1853, relying on surveys with local informants who often appeared to reinvent the regulations daily to suit their own interests (Ataíde Lobo).

José de Vasconcelos’ translation and commentary of Manu-smriti are “of particular interest for the study of nineteenth-century Portuguese orientalist discourses” (Ataíde Lobo). In the preface, the magistrate expressed his disapproval that, “given that Portugal has thousands of followers of the religion of Brahma, nothing had been written in the vernacular about this religion” (Vasconcelos). The resulting annotated translation, made “as Portuguese as possible” (Vasconcelos), attempts “to define the [Hindu] community through a careful selection of its precepts, in order to […] characterise [it] by the falseness and fantasy of its beliefs, by barbaric customs, particularly with regard to the female condition, devoid of moral standards, driven by greed [.. and that] only through fear and an illiberal system could this people be governed” (Ataíde Lobo).

Bibliography

Ataíde Lobo, Sandra Maria Calvinho. “Ensaio panegyrico sobre a obra do Sr. Vasconcellos’: o hindu no orientalismo e no colonialismo português oitocentista” // ACT 27 – Goa portuguesa e pós-colonial: literatura, cultura e sociedade, Machado, Everton V; Braga, Duarte D. (eds.). V. N. Famalicão, Húmus, 2014; Olivelle, Patrick. The Law Code of Manu, Oxford University Press, 2004; Shankar, Pratyush. History of Urban Form of India: From Beginning till 1900’s, Oxford University Press, 2023; The editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Manu-smriti”, Britannica.