The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c14.s1.7

c14.s1.7

For obvious reasons, in India as in Europe accounts of socio-political life and theory are to be met with in almost every branch of literature, prose and verse. Even literary epics like the *Raghu-vamśa* and the *Kirâtârjunîya*, and story-books like the *Pancha-tantra* and the *Daśa-Kumâracharita* can be exploited by sociological art-critics for the political message of the authors exactly in the same way as Virgil, Dante, Vondel and Milton have been used as interpreters of their ages. And of course in the two so-called epics, the *Râmâyaṇa* and the *Mahâbhârata*,² which according to the *Sâhitya Darpaṇa* ("Mirror of Literature"), a mediaeval work on rhetoric, are not poems at all but books of history, especially in the latter the serious student of politics would not have to labor hard in order to find rich material. To the same category belong also the *Purâṇas*, the storehouses of every conceivable information about India and Hindu culture. Nor would the *Brihat-Samhitâ* of Varâhamihira, the *Natural History* of the Hindu Pliny, fail to furnish important facts about polity and political speculation compiled, as they were, for a manageable *Encyclopedia Sanskritica*, by a distinguished scientist of Gupta India. Similarly the treatises on archery known as the *dhanurvedas* and the sexological works like the *Kâma-sûtra* of Bâtsâyana may be consulted for the subject matter of economics and politics, and of secular knowledge generally.