History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v4.c62.34

v4.c62.34

It would be impossible to go into all details about Government and Politics within the space at my disposal. What is proposed is to indicate and dilate upon only the fundamental ideas and principles of the several matters falling under rāja-dharma. Nor is it possible to enter here into formal and lengthy refutations of the several views propounded by Western and Indian writers about the forms and functions of Government and the state of society in ancient India. Most of the modern works referred to in note 19 above are more or less based on the same material in Sanskrit and Pāli, but the emotional or subjective element is different in each case. Some western writers have without very solid foundations indulged in a facile and sweeping generalization that the great Empires of antiquity such as those of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Medians and Persians and the Indians were mainly tax-gathering institutions (vide Sir Henry Maine's 'Early History of Institutions' 1875, pp. 384 and 390; and Prof. Rangaswami Aiyangar's 'Ancient Indian Polity' 1935, pp. 5-6 and pp. 66-69 (where passages from T. H. Green and others are cited); while some Indian writers vehemently assert that the Government in Ancient India was always some form of limited monarchy. Both characterisations are in my opinion misleading. An endeavour will be made to present from the original texts as true a picture of the polity of ancient and medieval India as it is possible for me to do. It will do no good to label the ancient institutions of India with concepts and terms current in the West during the last one hundred and fifty years or so. Even in the West true democracies or real democratic governments did not exist and the masses in no country had elective popular assemblies or councils before the last quarter of the 18th century. Such assemblies do not exist even now in several countries of Europe. Even in the ancient Greek city states the number of slaves who had no voice in the government was several times as large as the free citizens and those states were no democracies at all in the strict sense.19a Indian polity has a recorded history of over two thousand years from at least the 4th century B. C. Its growth was gradual but its aims and ideals and its main elements have been the same throughout the centuries. India need not feel ashamed or fear a comparison of its ideals and theories of State with the ideals and theories of western countries in ancient and medieval times. If western countries could boast of so-called republics and city states in ancient Greece and Rome, India also had several republics in ancient times. The ancient Hindus made their own contributions to political thought, though unfortunately Western scholars of the 19th century like Max Müller, Weber and Roth were concerned most with the Vedic and allied literature and either did not know or ignored the vast literature on politics contained in Sanskrit and Pāli works. Vide 'Some Aspects of ancient Hindu Polity' by Prof. D. R. Bhandarkar (1929) pp. 2-3 for views of Max Müller and others and criticism thereof, also Dr. Beni Prasad's 'Theory of Government &c.' p. 1, U. Ghoshal 'History of Hindu Political Theories' pp. 3-4.