Manu

The oldest Indian flood narrative is short and domestic. Manu is washing his hands and a small fish comes into the water, asking to be kept and promising to save him. He rears it in a jar, then a ditch, then the Ganges, then the sea, and it warns him of the year the flood will come and tells him to build a ship. When the water rises he ties the rope to the fish's horn and is towed to the northern mountain, where he makes the ship fast to a tree and comes down as the water falls.

What follows is the part that later tellings drop. Manu is alone. He performs a sacrifice, pouring an offering of clarified butter, curds, whey and milk into the water, and from the offering a woman comes up, and she is Ida. Through her he begets the race, so that the human line begins not from a rescued family but from a rite correctly performed by a single survivor.

The Puranic retelling reorganises all of this. The fish becomes explicitly the Matsya avatar of Vishnu, the seven great seers come aboard, the seeds of all plants are taken along, and the ship is bound with the serpent Shesha, so that the story is now about preserving a world rather than restarting one. Both versions are current in Hindu tradition, and the difference between them is a good measure of the distance between Vedic ritual thinking and Puranic devotion: in the first, a man survives by knowing how to make an offering, and in the second, a god arrives to make sure he does.

Manu is a title as much as a person. Hindu cosmology divides a kalpa, a day of Brahma, into fourteen manvantaras, and each is presided over by its own Manu with his own set of seers, gods and Indra. The first is Svayambhuva, born of the self existent, and the present age belongs to the seventh, Vaivasvata, son of the sun and the Manu of the flood. Seven more are to come. The scheme makes humanity's founder a recurring office rather than a unique origin, which is a different shape of time from a single creation followed by a single fall.

The name also carries a book. The Manusmriti, the Manava Dharmashastra, is ascribed to him and is the most cited of the Sanskrit legal treatises, setting out varna, the stages of life, the duties of kings, rules of marriage and inheritance, and penance. The ascription is traditional. Modern scholarship dates the text as it stands to roughly the last centuries BCE and the early centuries CE, and reads it as a composed work of a school rather than a revelation from the first man.

That distinction became politically live. On 25 December 1927, at Mahad in the Bombay Presidency, B. R. Ambedkar and his colleagues publicly burned a copy of the Manusmriti as a protest against the caste order it sanctions, and the date is still observed by parts of the Dalit movement. A figure who begins as the survivor of a flood therefore also stands, in modern Indian argument, for a text about hierarchy that he almost certainly had nothing to do with.