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 ||
‘വിപ്രദുഷ്ടാ’ (ഗുരുതരമായി ദോഷിണി/കലുഷിത) എന്നു കണക്കാക്കപ്പെടുന്ന ഭാര്യയെ ഭർത്താവ് ഒരേ വസതിയിൽ തടഞ്ഞുവെക്കണം; കൂടാതെ മറ്റൊരാളുടെ ഭാര്യയോടുള്ള ബന്ധത്തിന്റെ കാര്യത്തിൽ പുരുഷനു നിർദേശിച്ചിരിക്കുന്ന വ്രതം (പ്രായശ്ചിത്താചരണം) തന്നെയവളെയും അനുഷ്ഠിപ്പിക്കണം.
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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