The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c15.s4.2

c15.s4.2

"A joy is it to be killed in war," says the *Mahâbhârata*,⁶ "painless is the soldier's death, and heaven is his goal." The poets of the Great Epic were but continuing the tradition of the Vedas pervaded as they had been by *śakti-yoga*, the spirit of *pouvoir* or *Machtpolitik*. For, nothing short of a world-conquest was the ideal of Young India of the Vedic period. "Mighty am I," as the earliest Hindu political philosophers set the creed of life for man, “Superior by name, upon the earth, conquering am I, all-conquering, completely conquering every region.”¹ Thus began the conception of war as a “categorical imperative” in Hindu thought, which found its most complete expression in the doctrine of *niskâma karma* preached by Kriṣṇa in the *Gîtâ*.² And naturally the militaristic philosophy of the *Gîtâ* was further popularized by works like the *Agni Purâṇa*³ for mediaeval India, when we find that the *Gîtâ* is virile enough to be cited even in 1911 by an English general in the introduction to Clausewitz’s German classic on War.