A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c12.s1.1

c12.s1.1

We have endeavoured in the preceding chapters to describe the more or less connected theories of politics that are presented by the Hindu authors. The writers who shall immediately occupy our attention in this chapter, namely, the commentators of the two great Smriti treatises of Manu and Yājñavalkya, fail from their very nature to formulate such theories. On the contrary they touch, in the course of their survey of the rājadharma sections of the original works, on some of the points raised therein. The scholiasts, moreover, are distinguished from the earlier authors by their peculiar method which involves, as we shall presently see, a curious admixture of verbal interpretation and reasoned argument. With all these disadvantages the authors whom we are now treating deserve to occupy an important place in the history of Hindu political ideas. To them belongs the credit of clarifying the conception of the king's duties which was in danger of being obscured by a narrow and pedantic interpretation of the canonical texts, and in the case of Medhātithi, the greatest of them all, that of amplifying as well the rights of the subjects beyond the point reached by the canonists.∗