Hindu Administrative Institutions c5.16

c5.16

According to our sources, the state seems to have originated in one of two ways, either by an appeal to a superior being who provided the actual man for shouldering the responsibility of Daṇḍanīti and administering the state; or, more secularly, by an agreement between the most powerful individual or group in society on the one side, and of the rest on the other. These two are the characteristically Brahmanical, and somewhat more secular and Buddhistic, account of the origin of the state as we have it in Indian sources. Whichever way the state originated, the state had the same function to discharge, namely, the prevention of social life lapsing into what they called mātsyanyāya, the greater or the more powerful destroying the lesser or the weaker. In both cases alike, the person responsible for Daṇḍanīti had to do his responsible work with unflinching impartiality, and had to be put upon a footing of independence to do that. The individual, or the group or organization, therefore, was provided with whatever may have been requisite for the efficient discharge of this onerous duty. That feature again is common to the two sources, namely, the sacerdotal as well as the lay, and was so clearly understood that, in later times, legal minded people could set about discussing whether the monarch for the time being, who, from another point of view, was regarded as invested with a very considerable amount of divinity, was more than a paid servant of the state discharging his duties and receiving his emoluments in return therefor. In the net result, therefore, society, as conceived in India, was constituted of groups of varying capacities and the object of the state was to order social life in such a fashion that each group may prosecute its own particular life according to its own special ideals unhampered in the pursuit thereof by a similar pursuit of life's ideals by other groups stronger and weaker alike. Naturally, therefore, the actual religious ideas relating to the other life underlying such a social organization could well be left to the separate groups, and the common organization may content itself with merely seeing to it that each group pursued its life according to its lights.