Giornate di studio sul mondo indiano

2 – 3 marzo 2011

Sala di Rappresentanza del Rettorato

via Festa del Perdono 7 – Milano

Da tempo specialisti di varie discipline (storia, letteratura, arte, cultura, scienze della politica) hanno dato vita, presso gli atenei lombardi, a gruppi di ricerca volti allo studio del  subcontinente indiano fra passato e presente. Negli ultimi anni, tuttavia, è mancato un momento di aggregazione di tutti questi ‘filoni’ di studio, non vi è stata in altre parole un’occasione per presentare i lavori di ‘area’ indiana in maniera interdisciplinare, garantendo una giusta visibilità agli studiosi – alcuni dei quali ancora piuttosto giovani – che vi si dedicano più o meno costantemente. Per questa ragione, in collaborazione con il Centro per gli Studi di Politica Estera e Opinione Pubblica, il Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità, il Dipartimento di Lingue e Culture contemporanee e il Dipartimento di Scienze della Storia e della Documentazione Storica dell’Università degli Studi di Milano, hanno deciso di organizzare due giornate di studi interdisciplinari che raccolgano gli specialisti di scuola lombarda interessati a quest’area geopolitica, così da condividere e discutere insieme i vari apporti alla ricerca.

Il programma

MERCOLEDÌ 2 MARZO

ORE 9.00

Indirizzi di saluto

Alfredo Canavero, Direttore del Centro per gli Studi di Politica Estera e Opinione Pubblica

Sanjay Kumar Verma, Console Generale della Repubblica dell’India a Milano

Prolusione

Donatella Dolcini (Università degli Studi di Milano): L’India fra letteratura, arte, storia e non solo…

L’India classica

Presiede Donatella Dolcini

Giuliano Boccali (Università degli Studi di Milano): Ricerche di letteratura classica: struttura e finalità dei poemi d’arte

Elena Mucciarelli (Università degli Studi di Milano): Tracce di rappresentazione femminile. I: la donna nel periodo vedico

Cristina Bignami (Università degli Studi di Milano): Tracce di rappresentazione femminile. II: la donna nella cultura artistica

Cinzia Pieruccini (Università degli Studi di Milano): Considerazioni sulla raffigurazione degli dèi dell’induismo

ORE 15.00

L’India fra storia e politica

Presiede Silvia M. Pizzetti

Simonetta Casci (Università degli Studi di Pavia): L’India cosmopolita come origine del multiculturalismo indiano (sec. XVI)

Massimiliano Vaghi (Università degli Studi di Milano): Note sulla politica francese in India: il ruolo di Charles-Joseph de Bussy (1718-1785)

Flaminia Nicora (Università degli Studi di Bergamo): Eroi e ribelli: la rivolta del 1857 nel romanzo inglese

Elisa Giunchi (Università degli Studi di Milano): L’interpretazione della sharia da parte dei giudici pakistani e l’eredità britannica

Rita Paolini (Università degli Studi di Milano): I Príncipi e la federazione pan-indiana: la parabola dello stato di Bikaner (1927-1947)

GIOVEDÌ 3 MARZO

ORE 9.00

L’India contemporanea. Cultura e società

Presiede Giuliano Boccali

Stefano Caldirola (Università degli Studi di Bergamo): Elwin, Ghurye e la ‘questione tribale’ tra storiografia ed antropologia

Maria Angelillo (Università degli Studi di Milano): Legittimazioni orientaliste, rielaborazioni turistiche, aspirazioni classiciste: l’itinerario di una tradizione in divenire

Silvia Staurengo (Università degli Studi di Milano): Śahara ke nāma: passato e presente, identità e conflitti negli scritti di Mridula Garg

Barbara Pozzo (Università degli Studi dell’Insubria): Diritto e letteratura nell’analisi dell’ordinamento giuridico indiano

Marco Restelli (Università degli Studi di Milano): Globalized Bollywood. Il cinema come specchio della nuova India

Fabio Corno (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca): L’esperienza della Summer School milanese a Bangalore

La coppia divina, Radhā e Kṛṣṇa

Organizzazione scientifica: Giuliano Boccali (giuliano.boccali@unimi.it); Donatella Dolcini (donatella.dolcini@unimi.it); Silvia Maria Pizzetti (silvia.pizzetti@unimi.it).

Coordinamento: Massimiliano Vaghi (massimiliano.vaghi@guest.unimi.it).

CENTRO PER GLI STUDI DI POLITICA ESTERA E OPINIONE PUBBLICA, Via Festa del Perdono 7 – 20122 Milano, tel. 0250312995, www.polestra.com.

Vuoi saperne di più? Ne hanno parlato anche qui.

“Ripensare la vita” è il tema di un ciclo di incontri che avranno luogo all’Istituto Niels Stensen di Firenze, tutti i sabati dal 5 febbraio al 12 marzo alle ore 16.00. Ingresso libero.

La vita: una questione vicina ad ognuno di noi e della quale le tradizioni religiose del mondo hanno dato una loro peculiare lettura. Tutte queste tradizioni, infatti, si sono pronunciate circa quello che ritenevano fosse il senso, la genesi e lo scopo della vita. In questo ciclo di incontri alcuni specialisti e studiosi di varie tradizioni religiose presenteranno il quadro di questi pronunciamenti, permettendo ai partecipanti di cogliere la ricchezza e la profondità delle diverse soluzioni e persuasioni attorno a quella che, senza dubbio, è una delle questioni più affascinanti con cui, ogni giorno, dobbiamo misurarci: la vita.

Sabato 5 Febbraio 2011 ore 16:30
1) L’idea di vita umana nell’India classica
Federico Squarcini (Univ. di Firenze)

Sabato 12 Febbraio 2011 ore 16:30
2) L’idea di vita umana nel Buddhismo
Francesco Sferra (Univ. l’Orientale di Napoli)

Sabato 19 Febbraio 2011 ore 16:30
3) L’idea di vita umana nell’Islam
Alessandro Vanoli (Univ. di Bologna)

Sabato 26 Febbraio 2011 ore 16:30
4) L’idea di vita umana nella Cina classica
Federica Casalin (Univ. ‘La Sapienza’ di Roma)

Sabato 5 Marzo 2011 ore 16:30
5) L’idea di vita umana nel Cristianesimo
Gaetano Lettieri (Univ. ‘La Sapienza’ di Roma)

Sabato 12 Marzo 2011 ore 16:30
6) L’idea di vita umana nell’Ebraismo

Scarica qui il pdf.

Danzatrice Maria, India Orientale (Chhattisgarh, Bastar), XX sec.

Il Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e il Museo Nazionale d’Arte Orientale Giuseppe Tucci in occasione della mostra (prorogata) India. I volti del sacro presentano un ciclo di seminari giovedì 11, 18 e 25 novembre alle ore 17 presso la sala conferenze del museo Tucci, via Merulana 248.

Programma

- Giovedì 11 novembre, ore 17, conferenza di Carmela Mastrangelo (“Sapienza” Università di Roma): Femminilità esaltata, femminilità costruita. La “polarizzazione” della divinità tantrica.

- Giovedì 18 novembre, ore 17, conferenza di Rosa Maria Cimino (Università degli Studi di Lecce): Amore e eros in India.

- Giovedì 25 novembre, ore 17, conferenza di Gloriana Bonanni (“Sapienza” Università di Roma): Aspetti del femminile in India. La Dea e il demone: mito e iconografia.

Si avvisano i gentili visitatori che la sala contiene 80 persone. Pertanto l’ingresso sarà consentito fino ad esaurimento posti.

Informazioni

Museo Nazionale d’Arte Orientale Giuseppe Tucci
Via Merulana, 248
tel. 06 46974832 (Biglietteria)
tel. 06 46974850 (Uff. stampa)

In questo articolo il lettore troverà un’esposizione generale ma precisa del pensiero materialista indiano (Cārvāka/Lokāyata), così com’esso può essere derivato dalle fonti primarie (i testi in sanscrito), passate al vaglio di uno scrupoloso quanto critico esame. Il testo di Bhattacharya permette di correggere, dunque, alcuni errori e certe imprecisioni che ancora oggi si ripresentano in contributi, divulgativi (ad esempio, la voce Cārvāka in Wikipedia) e non, sul medesimo argomento.

Per chi desiderasse saperne di più o avviare una discussione con l’autore, in fondo all’articolo troverete i vari recapiti del caso. Buona lettura:

R. Bhattacharya, "Studies on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata", Società Editrice Fiorentina 2009.

Materialism in India: A Synoptic View

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya

0. Many, if not most, people nowadays go straight to the internet rather than look up a book to know something about anything under the sun. There are hundreds, if not thousands of files on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system of philosophy there. Regrettably, many of them, though well-intentioned, are ill-informed and highly misleading. I am an old hand researching for decades on the history of materialism in India (see my Studies on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata, Firenze (Florence): Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2009; New Delhi: Manohar Books, 2010. A brief exposition will be found in my essay, “Lokayata Darśana and a Comparative Study with Greek materialism” in: Materialism and Immaterialism in India and the West: Varying Vistas, ed. Partha Ghose, New Delhi: Centre for the Studies on Civilizations, 2010, pp. 21-34). I, therefore, find it necessary to disabuse enquirers of several false notions.

1. Cārvāka or Lokāyata is not a “brand name” for all sorts of materialist ideas that flourished in India over the ages. There were several proto-materialist thinkers in India right from the time of the Buddha (sixth/fifth century BCE) or even earlier. The system that came to be known finally as the Cārvāka/Lokāyata did not flourish before the sixth century CE or a bit later. It is only from the eighth century CE that the name Cārvāka  is associated with a materialist school (some later writers such as Śāntarakṣita and Śaṅkara continued to call it Lokāyata). Both names, however, came to refer to the same school of thought after the eighth century CE. Neither of the two words occurs in Vedic literature. Lokāyata in Pali and Buddhist Sanskrit works means ‘the science of disputation’, or in a narrower sense, ‘point of dispute’, not materialism. The word is ambiguous. There are reasons to believe that the adherents of this materialist school themselves  called themselves Cārvāka, using it as a nickname. The word might have been chosen from the Mahābhārata but the demon in that work has nothing to do with materialism.

2. The Cārvāka/Lokāyata is the only systematized form of materialist philosophy in India that is known to date. There were other pre-Cārvāka  proto-materialist schools too that preached certain materialist views but their views were not systematically set down in the form of aphorisms as the Cārvāka-s did. Some of these pre-Cārvāka proto-materialist views are encountered in the Upaniṣad-s, Pali and Prakrit canonical works (of the Buddhists and the Jains respectively) and their commentaries as well as in the Jābāli episode in the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mokṣadharma-parvādhyāya in the Mahābhārata and some of the Purāṇa-s (particularly the Viṣṇupurāṇa and the Padmapuraṇa), and last but not least, in old Tamil poems such as the Manimekalai. All of these are not to be equated with the Cārvāka/Lokāyata. Some of the views recorded in them are authentic expositions of this or that proto-materialist view, but some are of dubious authenticity. There is a tendency in the Rāmāyaṇa and some Purāṇa-s to treat the Buddhists, the Jains and the Cārvāka-s as representing a single school of nāstika-s, that is, defilers of the Vedas, and to ascribe the views of one to the other quite inappropriately.

3.1. All the Cārvāka/Lokāyata works were lost before the fourteenth century CE, so much so that Sāyaṇa-Mādhava, aka Mādhavācārya and Vidyāraṇya, or whoever was the author of the first chapter of this digest of a compendium of philosophies (Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha), could not quote a single sentence from any Lokāyata text nor name a single authority other than the mythical Bṛhaspati. Yet this book, first edited and published by Iswarcandra Vidyāsāgara, better known as an educationist and social reformer, in 1853-58 from the Asiatic Society, Kolkata, has proved to be more influential than any other work. However, it is worth noticing that the reading of several lines of some verses attributed to the Cārvākas are willfully distorted in this compendium. The original reading of a line in a verse, for example, was as follows: “Live happily as long as you live; nothing is beyond the ken of death.” It is so found in all other works (no fewer than thirteen). The last part of the line was changed in this compendium to read: “eat ghee (clarified butter) even by running into debts.” To many educated Indians and maybe others abroad this distorted reading is granted to be the epitome of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata. It is amusing that the digest itself quotes the original reading at the beginning of the chapter but quotes the distorted reading at the end of the same chapter.

3.2. However, from the available fragments found quoted or paraphrased in the works of anti-materialist philosophers it is evident that the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system had developed along the same lines as Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika. This means:

(a) There was a base text, that is, a collection of sūtras or aphorisms, tersely phrased because they were meant to be memorized, and

(b) Several commentaries (and probably sub-commentaries) were written to explicate the aphorisms,

(c) Besides the above sources, a number of verses have traditionally been ascribed to the Cārvākas. Some of these epigrams make fun of the performance of religious rites, particularly sacrificial acts, and deny the existence of an extracorporeal soul which can survive the death of a person. Some other verses, however, might have originated in the Buddhist and Jain circles. The denunciation of ritual violence (killing of animals in a Vedic sacrifice) and condemnation of non-vegetarian diet accord better with the Buddhist and the Jain teachings than with any other school. There might have been some materialists who renounced both marriage and eating of animal flesh. In that case, the charge of promiscuity and indulgence in flesh and wine brought against the Cārvākas by Guṇaratna, a fifteenth-century Jain writer, loses its force.

3.3. The Tattvopaplavasiṃha by Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa is not a Cārvāka/Lokāyata work: it represents the view of a totally different school that challenged the very concept of pramāṇa (means of knowledge). The Cārvākas  did believe in pramāṇa and whatever else it entails (knowledge, the knower, and the object to be known). Even those who, like Eli Franco, prefer to call it the only surviving Cārvāka text do not claim that it is a materialist text. So the work is quite irrelevant to the study of materialism in India.

4. The basic plank of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata may be summed up as: i) denial of rebirth and the other- world (heaven and hell), and of the immortal soul, ii) refusal to believe in the efficacy of performing religious acts, iii) acceptance of the natural origin of the universe, without any creator God or any other supernatural agency, iv) belief in the primacy of matter over consciousness, and hence of the human body over the spirit (soul), and finally, v) advocacy of the primacy of perception over all other means of knowledge; inference, etc. are secondary, and acceptable if and only if they are based on perception, not on scriptures.

The first three refer to the ontology, and the rest to the epistemology of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata. As to ethics all that can be said is that the Cārvākas did not believe in practising asceticism and advised seeking of pleasure in this world rather in the next, for there is no such world. This teaching has been misinterpreted as a recommendation for unrestrained sensual enjoyment. Regarding their social outlook it may be said that the Cārvākas  were opposed to gender discrimination and caste (varṇa) distinctions (see the Prabodha-candrodaya by Kṛṣṇamiśra, Act 2 verse 18 and the Naiṣadha-carita by Śrīharṣa, Canto 17 verses 40,42, 58). They relied on human endeavour (puruṣakāra), not on fate (daiva), and rejected the concept of adṛṣṭa or karman.

This is how materialism as a full-fledged philosophical doctrine made its debut in ancient India.  It is evident that the issues are peculiarly relevant to the Indian context (rebirth being the most noteworthy). The Cārvāka/Lokāyata then obviously had an indigenous origin.

5. There was no continuity in the Cārvāka/Lokāyata tradition after the twelfth century CE or thereabouts. Whatever is written on the Cārvāka/Lokāyata after the twelfth century is based on second-hand knowledge, learned from preceptors to disciples, who in their turn could only teach what they had heard from their preceptors, not what they had actually studied. Some of their knowledge correspond to what the Cārvāka/Lokāyata philosophers had or might have really said, but much of their accounts are biased against materialism and are mere fabrications.

6. The Yogācāra Buddhists, Jains, Advaita Vedantins and Nyāya philosophers considered the Cārvāka/Lokāyata as one of their chief opponents and tried hard to refute materialist views. Such refutations were made even after all the authentic Cārvāka/Lokāyata texts had been lost. So, the representation of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata in the works of these schools are not always firmly grounded on first-hand knowledge of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata texts.

7. Because of this lack of acquaintance with original sources, the opponents, and many modern scholars, often confuse pre-Cārvāka and Cārvāka views, considering them as one and the same. This gives an impression that there were several kinds of Cārvāka-s while the fact is that there were several kinds of materialists,  but all of them were not Cārvāka-s. Some of them were definitely pre-Cārvāka and held different views. For example, regarding the number of natural elements, the Cārvākas  admitted four, namely, earth, air, fire and water, while others spoke of five, adding ether or space to the list.

8. We have no evidence of any post-Cārvāka materialist school in India, existing or flourishing after the thirteenth century CE. What Abul Faḍl (Fazl) had gathered from the North Indian pundits about the Cārvāka system (most probably from a Jain scholar) and recorded it in Persian in his Ain-i Akbari, betrays the same lack of information as evinced in his contemporary and later Sanskrit digests of Indian philosophy. Only a few highlights of the materialist system were known to all of them. In addition to this a few verses attributed to the Cārvāka-s had been orally transmitted from one generation to another. Their accounts therefore are removed from the original sources and should be taken with the customary pinch of salt.

9. Some Sanskrit poems and plays (particularly Naiṣadha-carita, Prabodha-candrodaya, Āgama-dambara and Vidvanmoda-taraṅgiṇī) and one prose work (Kādambarī) contain representations of the Cārvākas. The evidence is dubious, for the authors of these works were thoroughly opposed to materialism and tried to portray the Cārvāka in unfavourable light. Hence whatever is written there should not be accepted uncritically.

10. The commonest charge levelled against the Cārvāka-s is that they did not believe in any other means of knowledge except perception. But there is enough evidence to suggest that some of the pre-Cārvāka schools as well as the Cārvāka-s considered inference based on perception to be a valid means of knowledge, although it is of secondary importance. It was well known from the eighth century CE.. Nevertheless, the opponents continued to level the same charge almost in the fashion of Goebbels (“Repeat a lie ten times and it will sound like the truth.” Whether Goebbels had actually said so or not is irrelevant, since such strategy was followed by him in practice).

11. Another baseless charge made by the opponents is the alleged heedless hedonism of the Cārvākas. Of course, there is enough evidence to show that the Cārvāka-s did not consider human life to be full of misery but there is absolutely no evidence to prove that they prescribed sensual enjoyment to be the end of life. The case is similar to that of Epicurus, the Greek philosopher. Although he used to lead a very austere life, his name has been maligned as a spokesperson of an ’eat, drink and be merry’ view of life.  Ajita Kesakambala, a senior contemporary of the Buddha and one of the earliest proto-materialists known to us, had in fact made a cult of austerity. The Sāṃkhya doctrine too has been satirized as one advocating sensual enjoyment. No serious student of Sāṃkhya has ever paid any heed to this absurd charge. However, in case of the Cārvāka such a groundless allegation is repeated ad nauseam by the present-day textbook writers of Indian philosophy.

12. Yet another misconception circulated by many authors past and present is that there were several Cārvāka schools, believing in the mind as the spirit, life breaths as the spirit, the sense organs as the spirit, etc. Such doctrines might have been prevalent before the Common Era, for some of them are mentioned in several Upaniṣads. Such views, however, are not only pre-Cārvāka but also pre-philosophical. The Cārvāka/Lokāyata was systematized much later and there is nothing to show that its exponents drew anything from such older sources. Only the doctrine of bhūtacaitanyavāda or dehātmavāda is the doctrine of the Cārvāka-s. It was a unitary school although the commentary tradition is not uniform and the commentators are not always unanimous in their interpretation of certain aphorisms.

13.  All the commentators of the Cārvākasūtra were not Cārvākas themselves. Some of them are known to be adherents of Nyāya who, besides their works on Nyāya,  had also written commentaries on the Cārvākasῡtra. Quite naturally they had introduced a number of sophisticated Nyāya terms, quite alien to the original Cārvāka tradition. Nevertheless what is common to all the commentators is their firm adherence to the basic doctrine of considering the spirit to be nothing but consciousness in a living body and the rejection of the view that inference independent of perception and/or based on scriptures should be accepted as a valid means of knowledge.

14.  In brief, then, the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system emerged as the culmination of all previous proto-materialist views which, however, had never been systematized into the  prevailing sūtra-bhāṣya (base text and commentary) style before the sixth century CE. These views are mainly known to us as floating ideas current among some freethinkers, who were opposed to futile religious practices sanctioned by the Vedas and refused to offer gifts to Brahmin priests. The early materialists  did not believe in the existence of heaven and hell, and, therefore, in the immortality of the spirit. That is all there is to it in the pre-Cārvāka/Lokāyata tradition. Ontological issues seem to have been their chief preoccupation and this was their contribution to the later Cārvāka/Lokāyata system which inherited and assimilated all this. The epistemological issues might have underlain in their teachings, but no such formulation is met with in available evidence.

15. Whether the Cārvāka-s had any affinity with the Kāpālika-s or some such obscure folk cults (such as the Sahajiyā-s, Bāul-s, etc. in Bengal), is a vexed question. It is probable that the these cults had adopted some ideas from the pre-Cārvāka and/or the Cārvāka teachings, such as,  accepting perception to be the only means of knowledge, opposition to Vedism, caste system, gender discrimination, etc. But it should be noted that these cults are all guru-oriented, the adherents compose songs in local dialects as the vehicle of expressing their ideas (not write philosophical discourses), and all of them consider themselves affiliated to one or the other Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava or Śakti-worshipping community. They constitute themselves as the ’other’, belonging to the Little Tradition – similar in some respects to the Great Tradition religious communities but differing from them by virtue of abjuring Brahminical priesthood, avoiding the conventional places of pilgrimage, and setting up their own meeting-spots in village fairs. The Cārvākas, on the other hand, belong to the Great Tradition:  they redacted a sῡtra work and composed elaborate commentaries on it in Sanskrit, not in any vernacular. In short, the two belong to two different traditions – the Great and the Little – and their ends are more often than not quite different. While the Cārvāka/Lokāyata was interested in true knowledge (tattva), the Little Tradition cults aspire for liberation (mukti) alone. The former studiedly rejected all rituals based solely on faith but the latter had developed elaborate systems of worship and religious practice (sādhana-paddhati) as taught by their gurus. Thus there is a fundamental incompatibility between the two that cannot be resolved by juxtaposing them as reflecting the same approach in two different ways. It should, however, be borne in mind that the Little Tradition cults were very much present in India even in the Upaniṣadic times, as testified by the Maitrī (or Maitrāyāṇī or Maitrāyaṇīya) Upaniṣad.  Most probably both the traditions had a common source, but they diverged into two separate streams, one thoroughly rational and atheistic; the other, irrational and theistic. The Cārvāka/Lokāyata  is a system of philosophy but the anti-Brahminical folk cults are nothing but religious coteries outside the Brahminical (Vedist) fold. In spite of some similarities in approach (such as, insistence on sense perception, denial of the Vedas as authoritative texts, and rejection of Brahminical priesthood) they belong to two different domains. Philosophy and religion are not to be treated on a par with each other.

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya,
3, Mohanlal Street, Kolkata 700 004, India.
Phone 91-033-25551288

ramkrishna.bhattacharya@gmail.com

Il costo di partecipazione è di 10.00 euro ad incontro.

Ecco la nutrita bibliografia di base:

Per prenotazioni ed informazioni: e-mail emanuelaperucci@gmail.com, tel. 3402984539/3409686007.

F. Squarcini e D. Cuneo (a cura di), Il Trattato di Manu sulla Norma, pp. lx-382, Einaudi 2010, € 35,00, ISBN 9788806199777.

Dalla quarta di copertina:

Composto probabilmente nel II secolo avanti Cristo e per tradizione attribuito al mitico figlio di Brahmā, capostipite dell’umanità, il Trattato di Manu sulla norma è uno dei più celebri testi antichi di norme etico-politico-giuridiche del mondo antico. È stata una delle primissime opere in sanscrito a essere tradotta in una lingua occidentale (in inglese, nel 1794) e ha avuto lettori entusiasti come Nietzsche.
La sua fama è legata alla vastità delle sue trattazioni, che spaziano dai criteri per l’amministrazione della giustizia alle regole per la vita familiare, dalle dottrine cosmogoniche alle indicazioni pratiche sull’alimentazione. Ma è stato anche uno strumento ideologico e di controllo sociale prediletto dalle compagini brahmaṇiche ortodosse e viceversa contestato da coloro che, in vari tempi e per varie ragioni (buddhisti, classi subalterne), si sono sentiti oppressi dalla cultura dominante. Per la prima volta tradotto in italiano direttamente dal sanscrito (sulla base della più accurata edizione critica), il Trattato di Manu viene qui proposto come opera indispensabile per capire la cultura dell’India, al pari delle grandi saghe epiche del Mahābhārata e del Mahābhārata.

Dall’introduzione di Federico Squarcini e Daniele Cuneo:

«La fama del Manavadharmaśastra è senz’altro legata alla vastità e all’esaustività delle sue trattazioni in materia di condotta, regalità, criteri per l’amministrazione della giustizia, regole per la vita familiare, norme per la formazione degli intellettuali, dottrine cosmogoniche, pratiche ascetiche, etica religiosa, ecc. L’ampiezza e il carattere dei suoi contenuti hanno costituito la ragione del suo primato, riconosciuto sia dai commentatori classici indiani sia dai funzionari britannici ottocenteschi. Costoro se ne sono ampiamente serviti per costruire la cornice giuridica con cui hanno tentato di regolamentare e dominare il complesso orizzonte sociale e culturale delle colonie sudasiatiche.
Il Trattato di Manu sulla norma, per il suo statuto e la lunga storia della sua ricezione, è dunque un testo da cui non può prescindere chi si pone in una prospettiva comparativa consapevole della dimensione globale delle pratiche intellettuali».

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