A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c6.17

c6.17

We have endeavoured to consider the factors that were at work in the upbuilding of the fabric of Hindu political ideas. We may next examine the consequences of the regional and cultural influences under which these theories grew up into a system. And first we have to observe that Hindu political thought found throughout its history its chosen seat in Northern India and the Deccan, the home-land of Indo-Aryan culture. It was a singular irony of fate that the Dravidian races of the South, who built in the later Hindu period powerful States founded on the bedrock of self-governing village assemblies, failed to make any notable original contribution to the stock of political ideas. Indeed the Southern races would appear in the light of their earliest literary records to have been from the first profoundly impressed with the ideas of the political thinkers of the North. Thus the Hindu theories of the State bore the stamp of the creative genius of the Indo-Aryans and were coloured by their distinctive ideals and experiences. Now a remarkable feature of the Indo-Aryan culture was, as we have said above, the enormous, though not exclusive, hold acquired by religion over the thoughts and actions of men. To the Hindu, however, religion was not merely a code of dogmas or a system of religious exercises, but it was a synthesis of life. It therefore followed that the rules of public administration along with their underlying theories formed an integral part of the Brahmanical canon. But further, the Brāhmaṇa sacred literature presented from first to last the only continuous record of Hindu political speculation. The other systems were either, as in the case of the political sections of the Buddhist canon and the Arthaśāstra, finally swamped or merged in the ocean of Brāhmaṇa thought after enjoying a brief span of existence, or else they were like the Jaina works on polity virtual copies of some of the more advanced phases of Brāhmaṇa speculation.