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Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s6: Royal Power

Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s6

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Royal Power

c11.s6.1

In an epoch of great monarchies, it was natural to exalt the power of the monarch. According to the general theory of Hindu Polity, the king was only the guardian of the law, not its maker ; laws depended for their validity on their intrinsic conformity to the standard of equity (*dharma*) and on the sanction of social usage ; and every decree of the king had to conform to both these sources of legal right.² With Kauṭilya, on the other hand, the royal decree has an independent validity of its own ; moreover, its validity is of so overriding a character that it must be taken to prevail against equity, private treaty or contract, and social usage.³ This view of the supremacy of the royal decree is exceptional among Indian writers ; it comes in first with Kauṭilya, and is traced only in Nārada among subsequent texts. Kauṭilya also exalts reason (*nyāya*) above the prescription of texts (*śāstra*) in cases of conflict between the two, and boldly justifies the course on the plea that texts become corrupt with lapse of time. These statements placed by Kauṭilya at the head of the section on the administration of justice

c11.s6.2

² Thus Kātyāyana :

c11.s6.3

³ *KA*., III. 1 verses at end.

c11.s6.4

*nyāya-śāstra-virodhena deśadṛṣṭer tathaiva cha I*
*yaṃ dharmaṃ sthāpayedrājā nyāyam tad rājalaśanam* II

c11.s6.5

cited in *Parāśara-Mādhavīya*, *Vyavahāra*, III. p. 13.

c11.s6.6

in the *Arthaśāstra*, clearly mark an attempt to evolve a new norm in civil law in the establishment of which the royal authority would be actively exerted both directly by the king himself, and indirectly by the judgements and rulings of the higher officials of state delivered in the name of the king. The same feature obtained in all the contemporary Hellenistic monarchies, and it is by no means unlikely that Kauṭilya was influenced by contemporary foreign practice when he put forward this new principle in his work.

c11.s6.7

Mauryan monarchy, however, was by no means a mere copy of foreign institutions any more than Mauryan art was an unthinking imitation of foreign models; in either case specific features were borrowed but assimilated to the indigenous scheme so as to produce a harmonious whole; that these efforts left no permanent results in Indian tradition is another matter.

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