Manusmriti-era law punished sex across caste lines by the woman’s caste, not by consent

Evidence

Brihaspati was a Brahmin law-giver of the sixth or seventh century CE. Brihaspati’s major work, the Brihaspati Smriti, survives only in fragments. It has been published in The Minor Lawbooks (1889), translated by Julius Jolly. Brihaspati is considered the first Hindu law-giver to separate civil law from criminal law, and his views concerning women’s rights are considered liberal. Nonetheless, he confers the death sentence on a man who has a sexual relationship with a ‘high’-caste woman, while merely assigning fines for men who have a sexual relationship with a woman of equal or of ‘lower’ caste. Consent (or the absence of it) on the woman’s part does not alter the severity of the punishment. See G.S. Ghurye (1969, 245). — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1163

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to caste-punishment themes in Things Fall Apart’s social-order logic and to the caste-annihilation reading purpose — the punishment severity encodes the woman’s caste position, not the act’s character.