Manusmriti — Chapter on Expiations and Ritual-Juridical Remedies, Shloka 176
विप्रदुष्टां स्त्रियं भर्ता निरुन्ध्याद् एकवेश्मनि यत् पुंसः परदारेषु तच् चैनां चारयेद् व्रतम् //
vipraduṣṭāṃ striyaṃ bhartā nirundhyād ekaveśmani | yat puṃsaḥ paradāreṣu tac caināṃ cārayet vratam ||
According to the text’s penance framework, a husband should confine a wife deemed to have gravely transgressed to a single dwelling; and he should cause her to undertake the same observance (vrata) that is prescribed for a man in relation to another man’s wife.
विप्रदुष्टाम् (vipraduṣṭām): gravely corrupted/seriously transgressing; स्त्रियम् (striyam): woman, wife; भर्ता (bhartā): husband; निरुन्ध्यात् (nirundhyāt): should restrain/confine; एकवेश्मनि (ekaveśmani): in one house/single dwelling; यत् (yat): which; पुंसः (puṃsaḥ): of a man; परदारेषु (paradāreṣu): with respect to another’s wife (lit. in others’ wives); तत् (tat): that; च (ca): and; एनाम् (enām): her; चारयेत् (cārayet): should cause (to be practiced)/should have her undertake; व्रतम् (vratam): observance, vow, penance-regimen
FAQs
This verse occurs in Adhyaya 11, a section largely devoted to prāyaścitta—ritual and disciplinary expiations for transgressions. In the historical Dharmaśāstra milieu, sexual and marital violations are treated as matters of both social order and ritual impurity, and the text frames responses through confinement, vows (vrata), and expiatory observances rather than through a single uniform penal code.
The verse links a woman’s alleged grave marital transgression to a specified expiatory regimen by explicitly equating it with the vrata assigned to a man in cases involving another man’s wife (paradāra). This reflects a classificatory method typical of Dharmaśāstra: mapping different agents to parallel expiations within a shared moral-ritual taxonomy.
Key legal-ritual terms include nirundhyāt (“should restrain/confine”), indicating a household disciplinary measure, and cārayet (“should cause [someone] to undertake”), a causative construction that marks the husband as the enforcing agent of the observance. The compound paradāreṣu (“in/with respect to others’ wives”) is a standard Dharmaśāstra term for sexual transgression involving a married woman, and vrata functions here as a technical label for an expiatory observance rather than a generic ‘vow.’
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