The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c14.s3.16

c14.s3.16

The difficulties of appreciating the *nîti-śâstras* at the present moment can be understood if one were almost to imagine what would have been the value of Plato's *Republic* if only one of his *Dialogues* were accessible to modern scholars as the sole document of a period of, say, two hundred years, for which no other evidence of a political, economic, literary or numismatic character were available, or how much of the Renaissance in Europe would be intelligible today, if the sole evidence for it were More's *Utopia*. In the absence of trustworthy historical data, indologists, both Hindu and foreign, supposing that they were unbiased, have been led to understand or rather misunderstand a complex and varied culture-history of several thousand years from the popular verses of a few poets, or the traditional sayings of one or two religious teachers. But at least during the last ten or fifteen years archeology has been able to cry halt to this sort of uncritical over-valuation or under-valuation of India's achievements; for, the "positive background" of Hindu sociology is becoming clearer every day.¹