The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c11.t2.1

c11.t2.1

About A. C. 360 Hari-ṣeṇa, a *mahâdanda-nâyaka* (high grade military or judicial officer) of the Gupta Empire, composed in Sanskrit what he called a *kâvya*.² It was an ode, in verse and prose, in eulogy of Samudra-gupta’s conquest of “all the world”. That panegyric “in one single gigantic sentence”, which half a century later furnished Kâlidâsa with an epigraphic precedent for his own romantic account of Raghu’s *digvijaya* (“conquest of the quarters”) is at present the only contemporary account of a Hindu military enterprise that has satisfactory details as to the names of nations and rulers. Hari-ṣeṇa exults over the “violent extermination” of old states, and describes how kings were “captured and then liberated” by his hero. We are told that Samudra-gupta’s “officers were always employed in restoring the wealth of the various kings who had been conquered by the strength of his arms”.