State and Government in Ancient India c13.3

c13.3

Some writers have averred that monarchy was the only form of government known to ancient India. They maintain that what are claimed to be republics were nothing more than tribal states. According to this view the Māłava-*gaṇa* and the Yaudheya-*gaṇa*, for instance, were not the Mālava and the Yaudheya republics, but the tribes of the Mālavas and the Yaudheyas respectively. This view, however, is obviously untenable ; for there is ample evidence to show that even if we grant that the Mālavas and the Yaudheyas were tribes, they had also a republican form of government. It can be proved beyond all doubt that *gaṇa* indicated a certain type of state, sharply distinguished from monarchy. When some merchants from Madhyadeśa, travelling in the Deccan, were asked by a local ruler as to who the kings were in their respective homelands, they replied, 'Sir, in the countries of some of us there are kings, but in those of others, there is *gaṇa* or republican government.'¹. A Jain work warns a monk that he should avoid visiting a country which has no king, or has a crown prince as the ruler, or two kings fighting with each other, or is governed by the *gaṇa* form of government.² These two passages make it clear that *gaṇa* had a definite constitutional meaning and denoted a form of government, where the power was vested not in one person, but in a *gaṇa* or group of people. Saṅgha was another term used precisely in the same sense, because it was sharply distinguished from monarchy.¹ When, therefore, we get coin legends on hundreds of coins, referring not to the kings of the Yaudheyas, the Mālavas and the Arjunāyanas, but to their *gaṇas* it is clear that they refer not to their tribes but to their *gaṇa* or republican states, which had authorised the coin issue.