Hindu Polity: A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times c49.13

c49.13

§ 359. Laws of war and conquest were incorporated into the Civil Law as one of its limbs. So much so that the question of conquest was often discussed from the point of view of municipal law, the standard being the standard of the morality of law. If a state was conquered its government was to be re-entrusted into the hands of the old ruling house. This was what the Mānava Dharma-Śāstra² laid down after an experience of a nearly all-India, one-king empire, extending 'from sea to sea,' from Madras to the Hindu Kush. It was based on the analogy of the legal theory of 'legitimacy.' It was not a mere theory which was once preached as a pious opinion and then forgotten. It was largely followed from the 4th to the 10th century A. C. In the Allahabad pillar inscription of the great conqueror Samudra Gupta of the Imperial Gupta dynasty we find the same principle acted upon. Kālidāsa records the same practice. The earliest Muhammadan writer bears witness to it. "The wars they wage with the neighbouring princes are "not usually undertaken with a view to possess themselves with "the adjoining dominions......When a prince makes himself "master of some kingdom, he confers the government upon "some person of the royal family," (851 A.C.—*Account of the* merchant *Sulaiman recorded by Abu Zaid*, trans. (1718) by the Abbé Renaudot). In the age of Hindu Rationalism which formed the palmiest days of Hindu history, the theory existed in the form noticed by the Greek writers with regard to Hindu attitude to foreign politics. Arrian drawing upon Megasthenes records in his *Indika* (IX):