The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c16.s2.t2.17

c16.s2.t2.17

The *sârva-bhauma*, *chakravarti*, *samrât*, or *châturanta* of Hindu political theory is identical with the *dominus omnium*, or lord of univer- *sitas quaedum* in Bartolus’s terminology,¹ the *hwangti* of the Chinese.² He is “the monarch of all I survey.” He rules a state whose limits extend from sea to sea (*âsamudra-kṣitîśa*), and his chariots have free passage up to the skies (*ânâka-ratha-vartma*), as Kâlidâs, the Virgil of India, puts it in his *Raghu-vaṁśa* (“The House of Raghu”). The pretensions of the doctrine of *sârva-bhauma* thus bear close analogy with the universal authority claimed by Hildebrand (c1075) for the Papacy, or with that rival conception of his opponents, the Ghibelline imperialism of the Hohenstaufens. Herein is to be perceived the Hindu counterpart of the doctrine, albeit from the monarchical angle, of a single state for entire humanity, the futurist version of which has embodied itself from time to time in diverse forms, — in the visions of “permanent peace,” or in the pious wishes for a “parliament of man” or for the now almost discredited “league of nations,” or for its antithesis, the communist “Third International” of the proletarian world.