A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c12.s2.1

c12.s2.1

In the course of our survey of Hindu political thought in the preceding chapter, we have brought down its history to the period of the great catastrophe which overtook the land in the eleventh and twelfth centuries A. D.,—we mean, of course, the conquest of Northern India by the arms of Islam.∗ The works that we have to consider in the present place,—the Śukranīti no less than the commentary of Mādhavāchārya and the two great mediaeval Digests incorporating separate sections on the rules of polity (Nīti),—belong to a time when the foreign conquerors had established their unquestioned sway over some of the fairest and largest provinces of India. Yet it is noticeable that the chain of continuity in this case was not broken at all, that the authors of this period, in other words, follow however modestly the track laid down by their great predecessors. Indeed if we have to look for any direct trace of the influence of foreign rule in the field which we are now treating, we shall find it perhaps merely in the scantiness and the pronounced dogmatic tendency of the latest phase of the indigenous thought.