ABSTRACT
Each society evolves its own mechanisms and instruments for guiding individual actions and for regulating its own activities, including the protection of the weak. For the most part, these purposes have been served by religion, which provided a means for individual salvation and for the orderly management of society. The individual was sought to be given innate activities and individual conditions in accordance with the scriptures, the Vedas. Manu's system was, in modern terms, a holistic one that had, in the main, three components - a political system, an economic system, and a social system. Any analysis of the post-Manu developments in Hindu society is confronted by a series of formidable problems. First, any attempt at providing a discussion in chronological terms is fraught with problems. Second, Hinduism was never an organized religion in the sense of having an anointed or elected head equivalent to the pontiff who came to be at the head of the Roman Catholic Church.
