Customary morality cannot be a guide to modern life

The Lamp and the Inheritance

In 1811, so the story of his life is usually told, a young Ram Mohan Roy watched his elder brother's widow being placed on the funeral pyre while drums drowned out her cries. Everyone around him believed they were doing the right thing. The priests cited scripture, the relatives cited family honour, and the village cited what had always been done. Nobody in that crowd was a villain by the standards of the day; they were simply following custom. Eighteen years later the Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829 made the practice a crime, and Roy's campaign became one of the first victories of reason over inherited habit in modern India. The episode captures the problem at the heart of this topic. Custom carries the moral wisdom of the dead, but it also carries their blind spots. Customary morality can be a valuable inheritance, yet in a plural, changing and rights-based society it cannot be the guide; that role belongs to reason, conscience and constitutional morality, which must sift custom rather than obey it.

To begin, the two ideas must be separated. Customary morality is the body of norms a community follows because they are old and widely shared: rules about food, marriage, dress, caste, gender roles and the treatment of elders. Its authority comes from repetition and from the fear of social sanction. Modern life, by contrast, is marked by mobility, individual choice, scientific knowledge, diverse neighbours and problems no ancestor ever faced. The Dharmashastras themselves listed achara, or custom, as one source of dharma, but only as one source among several, alongside scripture and the inner assent of conscience, never as the sole authority. The question, then, is not whether custom has value but whether it can steer us.

The first reason it cannot is that custom often hardens injustice into habit. Sati, the ban on widow remarriage that Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar fought until the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856, untouchability and child marriage were all customary, and all were defended as morality by those who benefited from them. Their echoes have not vanished. NFHS-5 (2019-21) found that nearly one in four Indian women aged 20 to 24 had been married before 18, and dowry persists more than six decades after the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961. In Shakti Vahini v Union of India (2018), the Supreme Court had to issue guidelines against khap panchayats that ordered so-called honour killings of couples who married by choice. A morality that punishes love and rations dignity by birth cannot guide a republic of equals.

Building upon this, sociology explains why custom loses its grip in modern conditions. Emile Durkheim argued in The Division of Labour in Society (1893) that small, similar communities are held together by mechanical solidarity, a shared conscience enforced by custom, whereas complex societies depend on organic solidarity, the interdependence of different people doing different work. A migrant worker in Surat, a software engineer in Bengaluru and a nurse in the Gulf live among strangers who do not share their village norms. A single customary code cannot arbitrate between them. John Stuart Mill saw the danger in On Liberty (1859):

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.

Moreover, modern life throws up questions that custom simply cannot answer. Tradition has no rule for the privacy of data stored on a phone, for surrogacy, for gene editing, for an algorithm that decides a loan, or for a carbon budget shared by eight billion people. The Supreme Court in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017) had to reason from dignity and autonomy, not from precedent in village practice, to declare privacy a fundamental right. Psychology offers a parallel: Lawrence Kohlberg described a conventional stage of moral development, in which people do right because society expects it, and a post-conventional stage, in which they reason from universal principles. A society facing new dilemmas needs citizens capable of the second.

This is precisely why the Constitution chose a different compass. B.R. Ambedkar told the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948 that constitutional morality "is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated." Article 13 subjects even "custom or usage having in the territory of India the force of law" to the Fundamental Rights. The courts have applied this repeatedly. Shayara Bano (2017) set aside instant triple talaq, and in a single year, 2018, Navtej Singh Johar decriminalised consensual same-sex relations, Joseph Shine struck down the adultery law, and the Sabarimala judgment held that exclusion of women by custom could not override equality. In each case the Court placed dignity above the majority's inherited sense of propriety.

Yet it would be shallow to treat custom as mere superstition. Much of it encodes ecological and social wisdom that modern life has forgotten. In 1730 Amrita Devi Bishnoi and 363 members of her community gave their lives at Khejarli to protect khejri trees, a sacrifice rooted in Bishnoi custom that later inspired the Chipko movement. Sacred groves across the Western Ghats and the Northeast have conserved biodiversity for centuries. The langar of the gurdwara, care of the elderly within the family and community obligations of mutual help are customs that a lonely, consumerist modernity would do well to keep. The Constitution itself respects this through Article 371A, which protects Naga customary law, and through the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, which empowers gram sabhas to safeguard tribal customs and community resources.

Furthermore, custom carries the force of legitimacy that law alone often lacks. Reform that ignores people's lived norms tends to fail or provoke backlash, while reform that works through them endures. Gandhi fought untouchability not by mocking Hindu tradition but by appealing to its deeper ideals, and Narayana Guru consecrated a Shiva idol at Aruvippuram in 1888 to show that the sacred belonged to all. Today, campaigns against child marriage succeed fastest where village elders and religious leaders are persuaded to lead them. Custom, in other words, is a powerful vehicle even when it is a poor driver.

The synthesis, therefore, is neither blind obedience nor blind rejection. Custom should be treated as evidence, not as authority: a store of experience to be tested against reason, empathy and the constitutional values of liberty, equality and fraternity. Practices that pass the test, such as respect for elders, hospitality and reverence for nature, deserve to be kept and even strengthened. Practices that fail it, such as caste exclusion, dowry and control over women's choices, must be retired, however old they are. This sifting is a task for families, schools and civil society as much as for courts. Value education that cultivates critical thinking, and leaders who model reasoned change, can turn inherited habit into examined conviction.

Ram Mohan Roy did not reject his civilisation; he went back to the Upanishads to argue that sati had no true sanction, using the best of tradition against its worst. That is the path the topic points to. Tagore prayed for a land

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Customary morality is an inheritance to be audited, not a map to be followed; the guide for modern life must be a conscience shaped by reason and anchored in the Constitution. A society that learns this distinction can keep the warmth of its traditions while leaving their cruelties behind, and give every citizen, not only the custom-keepers, an equal claim to dignity.