A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c6.19.1

c6.19.1

We have, lastly, to examine the influence exercised upon Hindu political thought by certain specific types of polity to which the conditions in Northern India gave a peculiar prominence. Though republican constitutions figured, as we have said, upon the stage of Indian history, it was the monarchic State that dominated the scene. In the paucity of other data the most complete account of the Indian monarchies is to be derived from the literature of the sacred canon and the secular Arthaśāstra which reflects, as we have seen, actual and not ideal conditions of political existence. It is not our intention in the present place to mention all the distinctive features of the standard Indian polity, but to specify those characteristics alone that stamped themselves upon the system of Hindu thought. The monarchic States, to begin with, ranged in size from governments of small extent to large empires stretching, in the hyperbolical language of the conventional description, to the boundary of the whole earth as far as the sea. It was however an index of the strong disruptive forces constantly at work that the small States comprised in the traditional States-system (maṇḍala) preponderated over the empires. Further, the monarchic governments usually involved a central administrative machinery superimposed upon the subordinate administrations of the district, the town, and the village.