A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c13.4

c13.4

Beginning, then, with the fundamental issues, it is obvious that the polity of the Hindu thinkers corresponds neither to the *polis* of classical antiquity nor to the nation-state of modern times, but may be rendered more vaguely as a country-state. We may, however, observe that this Hindu polity is doubtless charged with an ethical meaning and purpose: it is within its own limits a true partnership in a life of virtue. It is no doubt a fact that the king’s office as the grand instrument for repressing the evil tendencies of man’s nature is stressed in the Hindu theory as probably in no other system, while monarchy itself is conceived by some of the authors as arising out of man’s fall from a state of pristine purity.∗ But the monarch’s function is not limited to the protection of the people from anarchy. To him, above all, is assigned the task of enforcing the scheme of duties (dharma) which, it is conceived, is the means of fulfilment of individuals and classes along the path of earthly bliss and heavenly happiness. This conception of the function of the king or the State may suggest comparison with the well-known ideas of Plato and Aristotle, but it presents, we think, on closer inspection at least two peculiar features. For, in the first place, the State represented in the Hindu theory by the office of the king does not directly promote the good life and is not a positive maker of goodness: it promotes virtue indirectly by the agency of the prescribed scheme of duties (dharma). In the second place, the fulfilment of the individual through the State is not absolute, but relative: it is a stage, and a very necessary one, in a course of progressive perfection of which the goal transcends the discipline of organised existence and consists in complete self-realisation.†