The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c7: Chapter II. Hindu Political Development
The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c7
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- English
Contents
- c7.s1 Section 3. Pax Sârva-bhaumica — 35 parts
Chapter II. Hindu Political Development
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The Tenacity of Monarchy in the West.
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Modern mind, especially in the United States, is so deeply grounded in the republican ideal that scholars are invariably disposed to forget the fact that in the western world the norm of political development is to be sought not in the republic but in the monarchy, and in that, again, generally of an irresponsible autocratic character. At the threshold of a scientific study of oriental polity it is essential, therefore, for a clarification of fundamental ideas, to recapitulate the trend of Western political experience.
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Americans won their independence by defeating the British. When they had to think of constructing a sovereign government, the most natural form that suggested itself to them was a *popular* polity. None of the thirteen colonies was bossed by a prince of royal blood. Their society from the very beginning had known only of councils, assemblies, courts, and clubs. A dynasty of kings was thus absolutely out of the question. Besides, in 1782 Washington, the hero of the field, magnanimously rejected, “with great and painful surprise”, the crown and the supreme power offered to him by some discontented officers. The most important problem before the Yankees after 1783 was therefore not the form of government but the form of union. The republic (no matter whether democratic or otherwise)¹ was with them an accomplished fact, one of the socio-political *data*, so to speak; their sole struggle was over the nature of the federation. America’s record thus really stands apart from the story of the evolution experienced by those peoples who by the term ‘government’ are used to mean the rule of a king.
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¹ Beard’s *Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy*, pp. 309—316, 464, 465.
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This norm is represented by France. The French revolution followed close upon the American revolution, and was to a great extent inspired by its theories and achievements. Besides, there is an interesting coincidence between the two. Americans in the first stage of their resistance to England’s control did not think of actual separation or declaration of independence. The French people likewise in their opposition to Louis XVI did not at first contemplate an abolition of the monarchy. Like the American “independence” the French republic was a second thought, an aftermath of painful necessity, and like some of the great discoveries of the world a real “accident” of history.
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The revolution began in France with the conversion of the “third estate” into the National Assembly under the influence of Siéyes on June 17, 1789. The monarchy was abolished and France declared a republic by the Convention (the third revolutionary government) on September 22, 1792. But during these thirty-nine months neither the prominent leaders, Siéyes, Mirabeau, Lafayette, nor the demagogic journalists and ultra-radical “friends of the people”, Desmoulins, Marat, Danton, nor even the people themselves in the thousand and one *cahiers* (pamphlets on the grievances to be redressed) ever expressed any desire to do away with the royalty as an institution. Even the “rights of man” did not include the abolition of kingship.
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It was unexpectedly and virtually through friends and well-wishers of the king and the queen that royalty was abolished in France. The National Assembly’s Bolshevistic short cuts with the feudal privileges and hereditary nobility had made the country too hot for the aristocratic classes. The French nobles thereupon sought refuge in the Germanistic territories. The public opinion and military support of the continent were successfully canvassed by them against the revolutionists on behalf of the old royalist regime. Eventually the Austrian emperor and the Prussian king in coalition with this “emigrant” nobility invaded France to “re-establish the liberty and honour of the most Christian king and his family and place a check upon the dangerous excesses of the French revolution, the fatal example of which it behooves every government to repress”. It was this foreign invasion that led the National Assembly to declare the country in danger; and it was against this *tyrannie* of foreigners, and not against Louis XVI, that the famous *La Marseillaise* was composed.
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The attempt of Austria and Prussia on France could not but be interpreted by the Convention as an underhand measure of the King himself. He was therefore tried on a charge of “treason”, found guilty and executed (January 21, 1793). The same fate awaited the queen in October and on the same charge. Thus in France the abolition of monarchy was not accomplished as a matter of principle. It was a by-product of inevitable circumstances, over which the revolutionists had no control. Up to the last moment France was royalist at heart.
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What, again, is the lesson of Switzerland,¹ the oldest republic of the modern world, with regard to the inception of the republican idea? In early times the Swiss peasantry and nobility lived in forest cantons. In 1291 three districts, Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden, formed a league to defend themselves against powerful neighbours. They defeated the Austrian invader at Morgarten in 1315, and successfully fought against the laws of the Diet of Worms (1500). Freedom from Imperial interference was thus ensured by the strength of arms. The territory of the league was gradually extended by the voluntary accession of new cantons, and the complete independence of the Confederacy was acknowledged by the treaty of Westphalia (1648). The story of the Swiss republic is thus similar to that of the American. We have here republicanism developed among peoples that had never known kingship as an actual institution of social life.
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¹ Mc Crackan's *Rise of the Swiss Republic*, pp. 111—115.
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Holland was a republic for a short time during the seventeenth century. But as it is now a monarchy, the experience of the Dutch does not count in modern republicanism.
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The "glorious" English revolution preceded the French by a century. The people of England did not go mad over the magic name of republic. Virtually no *doctrinaire* principles guided them in the practical framing of their constitution of 1688. They replaced one king by another, but one with fetters on. Previous to this "great rebellion" there had indeed been a period when England was a republican commonwealth. But a kingless regime did not commend itself to the temperament of the English, and this in spite of the fact that they had a regicide to their credit (1649). Since the Reform Bills of 1832, 1866 and 1886, the monarchy of England has been a republic all but in name, a "crowned republic" in the words of Tennyson; but the republican form is not yet.
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The principles of the American and French revolutions were advertised and sown broadcast through the long wars of the Napoleonic era (1793—1815). The years 1830 and 1848 were the years of revolutions and risings against absolutism and privilegism all over Europe. But in spite of the steady progress in constitutional ideas, checks on royalty, and the assertion of popular rights, a formal republic did not make its appearance in any European country until yesterday (March 16, 1917).² The third republic of Europe has been born in Russia, the quarter where it was least expected. On the whole, however, Europe seems still to be chary of losing her crowned heads. Although the expulsion of Hohen- Shah Jahan and Aurangzib¹ (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). The Moghul period of Indian history is one of the most important epochs of civilization. For the people of India, it was an era of prosperity, material and intellectual. The epoch, known generally as the age of Indo-Saracenic renaissance, looms therefore as large in the consciousness of the Young India of today as does the age of the Vikramâdityan *sârva-bhaumas*. The policy of the Moslem states was always secular, and the personal bigotry and intolerance of some of the rulers were not more frequent than were the fanaticism and inquisitionism of Christian monarchs of contemporary Europe.² From Prithvî-râja and Mohammed Ghori of the twelfth century to Baji Rao and Haidar Ali of the eighteenth, Hindu and Mohammedan India can exhibit therefore as many Charles Vs, Gustavus Adolfuses, Louis XIVs, Fredericks and Peters as can the western half of Eur-Asia.
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² Lenin and Trotzky's *Proletarian Revolution in Russia*, pp. 17—23.
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¹ J. N. Sarkar's *History of Aurangzib*: Vol I (Reign of Shah Jahan), Vol. II (War of Succession), Vol. III (1658—1681); Law's *Promotion of Learning in India by Muhammadans*, pp. 139—193.
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² For Moorish toleration in Europe during the epoch of Christian fanaticism, see McCabe's *Peter Abelard*, 227—229. Turkish liberalism was appreciated by Bodin in his days (*vide* Bluntschli's *Geschichte der neueren*); *cf.* also Toynbee's *Nationality*, p. 415, and Macdonald's *Turkey and the Eastern Question*, p. 34. Vide Voltaire's *Lettres Philosophiques* (1734).
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In the foregoing account no notice has been taken of autonomous city-sovereignties and independent clan-commonwealths. They were in existence off and on during the extensive ages that gave birth to Vedic literature, the *Jâtakas*, the early Jaina and Buddhist books and the *Mahâbhârata*, down to the beginnings of the Gupta Empire (c 350 A. C.). Some of them are described in the Greek and Latin literature on India and Alexander. These nationalities were republican in type, more or less aristocratic or oligarchic in character, and thus resembled in general features the states of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the mercantile towns of medieval Italy and of the Hanseatic League.
Section 3. Pax Sârva-bhaumica
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(Peace of the World-State).
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[It is clear that political development in India was not a continuous growth.] Students of history will not find in it the simplicity and unity that characterize, generally speaking, the dynastic history of Japan, or still better, of China from the days of Tsin Shi Hwang-ti (B. C. 222). We have here all the complications and intricacies of the Byzantine empire and the Caliphate.¹ The inextricable cobwebs of diplomatic intercourse that Europe witnessed in the Middle Ages owing to the rivalry among the Christian empires and kingdoms on the one hand, and their relations of intrigue with the competing Moslem nationalities on the other, repeated themselves in the military annals of Hindus also and subsequently of Hindus and Mohammedans. Nay, from the standpoint of the political centre of gravity and *status quo*, the picture of India’s state-systems is as bewilderingly varied and diversified as is that of the western world from the armageddon of the Homeric epics down to the world war against Germany. Nothing short of the kaleidoscopic changes in Freeman’s *Historical Geography of Europe* can therefore fitly portray the multitudinous ups and downs of “races” and “classes” in India through the ages.
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¹ Bury’s *Later Roman*, Vol. II, pp. 510—511.
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The fallacy of sociologists from Bodin to Buckle, Montesquieu to Maine, and Hegel to Huntington² equipped as this last is with “energy-charts” and “maps of civilization”, as well as of indologists from Max Müller to Vincent Smith has, however, been broadening down “from precedent to precedent”. Fundamentally, it consists in their not recognizing this essential parallelism and pragmatic identity in the development of *Realpolitik* in the East and the West. As a rule, they are obsessed by the postulate of Eur-American “superiority” to, or at any rate, difference from, the oriental races. The shortcomings of Hindu politics are thus assumed by them to be "characteristic" of India.
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² While not prepared to be a “monist” or “absolutist” in the conception of *Kultur-geschichte*, the present author accepts with certain limitations the general thesis as to what Bagehot would call the influence of “physics” upon “politics”. A recent summary of the geographical interpretation of history is to be seen in Huntington’s *Pulse of Asia* (Ch. XVIII). It will be noticed that the philosophical analysis attempted by “physicists” is invariably based on too many *assumptions* in regard to the historical data themselves, especially to those bearing on the Orient. The hemispheroidal generalizations are therefore reared on erroneous premises. Some of the worst specimens of the mal-application of the comparative method, so far as the selection of sociological facts is concerned, are furnished in the writings of Huntington. In the *Pulse of Asia* this neo-climatologist takes for granted in the newspaper style that “Mohammedanism favors immorality” (pp. 128, 232) and that Persians are “prone to lying” (pp. 364—366). The postulate of the “white man’s burthen” is, moreover, the pervading philosophy of this book (p. 323) as also of his *Civilization and Climate* (pp. 35, 201, 259, 262). His appreciation of Japan in the latter volume (pp. 255—256) is accordingly explained by a corollary to the same logic, viz, that “nothing succeeds like success”. From the obverse side the identical *idola* is illustrated in the chapter on the “Problem of Turkey” in his *World Power and Evolution*, which *en passant* is inspired more by political propagandism than devotion to science. A short but comprehensive criticism of the prevailing fallacies in comparative culture-history is set forth in Sarkar’s “Futurism of Young Asia” in the *International Journal of Ethics* for July 1918. See also the section on “Asians *vs.* Latins and Slavs” in the author’s article on “Americanization from the viewpoint of Young Asia” in the *Journal of International Relations* (July 1919) for an examination of the alleged social and cultural distinction between the oriental and European laborers in regard to their assimilability to American conditions.
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But any body with the sense of historical perspective must have to admit that none of the alleged failings of Hindu culture, e. g. weakness of military organization, lack of patriotism, absence of national solidarity, and so forth, are the attributes exclusively of Indian, or for that matter, of Asian *Weltanschauung*. The "southern" and "sub-tropical" climate of India and the caste-system of Hindus cannot be rationally invoked to explain socio-political and socio-economic phenomena that are almost universal and world-wide in their range. Genuine "comparative history" is the only solvent of false explanations and unscientific hypotheses.
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Hellenes, notwithstanding the temperate zone of their "isles of Greece", were not more remarkable for unity than were Hindus of the time of Alexander. Nor did their character display any enviable patriotism when put to the test of Macedonian gold¹ and arms. The crushing defeat inflicted on Seleukos and Menander by Chandra-gupta Maurya (B. C. 303) and Puṣyamitra Sunga (B. C. 153) respectively was not less decisive a feat of Hindu *vîriya* or *parâkrama* (i. e. energism) which served to keep European military power away from India than were the victories of the Greeks over Persians at Marathon and Salamis which saved Hellas from the "expansion of Asia". The failure of Hindu nationalities before hordes of Scythians, Tartars or Huns was no worse specimen of military incompetency, social disintegration, moral corruption and political instability than was the disruption of the Roman empire by the "barbarians".²
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¹ Bury's *History of Greece*, Vol. II, pp. 303, 305—306.
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² Dill's *Roman Society of the Last Century of the Western Empire* pp. 303—345; Bury's *Later Roman*, Vol. I, pp. 25—36; Young's *East and West through Fifteen Centuries* (B. C. 44—1453), Vol. II, pp. 131—137.
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The processes by which during the seventh and eighth centuries Saracens³ made themselves masters of Sicily, Southern Italy, Spain and southwestern France and converted the Mediterranean Sea into an Asian lake do not by any means prove that the organizing ability of Christians, although they had no caste restrictions, was appreciably superior to that of Gurjara-Pratîhâras who fell equally before other inroads of Islam. Nor did East-Europeans exhibit extraordinary physical vigor and martial qualities because of the physiography of Russian snows when in the thirteenth century they had to capitulate to the avalanche of Buddhist-Shamanist Mongols¹ of Central Asia inch by inch as far to the interior of Europe as the Carpathian Mountains. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, again, Christians of the Balkans, Greece, Italy, and Spain persisted in their antagonistic relations² even in the face of Ottoman invasions. Certainly they did not appear to be more alive to the fact of the common danger, and failed not less ignominiously to present a united front against the peril from "Greater Asia" than did Hindus and Mohammedans in the eighteenth century while confronting the menace from the "expansion of Europe". What, then, are the counts on which the climatological or any other "monistic" interpretation of history seeks to base the alleged distinction between the West and the East?
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³ Scott's *History of the Moorish Empire in Europe*, Vol. II, pp. 35—37; Young, Vol. II, pp. 567—570; *Cambridge Mediaeval History*, Vol. II, pp. 379—385.
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¹ Howorth's *History of the Mongols*, Vol. I, pp. IX---XI, Vol. II (*The so-called Tartars of Russia*), pp. 25—183; Yule's *Book of Ser Marco Polo*, Vol. I, pp. XL—XLIII.
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² Depping's *Histoire du commerce entre le Levant et l'Europe*, Vol. II, pp. 207---214, 222—224.
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In order to understand the strength and limitations of Hindu politics it is essential, moreover, to realize that the historic state-systems of Europe have neither been long-lived nor built up on "*national*" principles such as are defined by Ratzel in his *Politische Geographie*. The classical institutions were notoriously ephemeral, and in the Middle Ages dynastic revolutions were plentiful. This discontinuity of political life was not the special feature of the imperial area alone. It affected all the provinces of Europe in the north, south, east, west and centre.
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Even if we take the individual peoples like Franks, Goths, Saxons, Danes, Swedes and others and confine our attention to small territories we find the same checquered career, the same multiplicity and polystatal heterogeneity as on the Indian sub-continent. England, because of her insular position, as Frederick List explains it in his *Das Nationale System der politischen Ökonomie*, has managed to enjoy the longest period of continuity as a "nation-state". And yet the little land of Angles, Saxons and Jutes (excluding Wales and Scotland) had to pass through the *mâtsya-nyâya* of a heptarchy and the aliendom of Scandinavian and Norman aggressions. Chronologically the next nation-state to evolve in Europe is France. And yet here, even so late as on the eve of the Revolution, notwithstanding the previous centralizing efforts of *le grand monarque* there were about three hundred and sixty distinct bodies of law,³ in force sometimes throughout a whole district, sometimes in a much smaller area. Besides, the peace of Westphalia (1648) and the congress of Vienna (1815)⁴ are standing commentaries on the absence of nationality-states conceived as linguistic or cultural units. It is only by the Bolshevik dismemberment of Russia (1917–1918) according to the doctrine of self-determination that nationalism has been ensured in Eastern Europe. But in Central Europe, although the Congress of Versailles (1919) sat with the object of achieving it, the creation of half a dozen German “irredentas” in foreign states has but added to the list of the world’s erstwhile Alsace-Lorraines.
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³ *Cambridge Modern History*, Vol. VIII, p. 49.
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⁴ Phillimore's *Three Centuries*, pp. 13---61.
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The sole unifying factor in medieval European development was the magic name of Rome and the halo of the Roman empire. But, in practical politics, in spite of Bury’s special pleading in his *Later Roman Empire*¹ to demonstrate the existence of a theoretical unity, the name of Rome led to anything but unity in western life. Such a Rome Hindustan also had in its Pâtaliputra. Built about B. C. 450 by Udaya of the Śiśunâga dynasty the city remained the seat *par excellence* of historic empires under Mauryas, Sungas, Guptas, and Pâlas. In India, too, it was ever the ambition of powerful Charlemagnes to attempt achieving the glory of the Vikramâdityan *sârva-bhaumas*. Further, during the period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century Mohammedan Delhi occupied the place of the older Pâtaliputra and became a second Indian Rome, at once the crown of honor and bone of contention to all *vijigîṣus* or aspiring Siegfrieds, whether Hindu or Moslem.
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¹ Vol. II, p. 539; Vol. I (preface), Freeman’s *Comparative Politics*, pp. 333–335.
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Europe has continued to be what Dante described “slavish Italy” to be, the continent of warring nationalities and conflicting ambitions. The scheme of a unified Europe (really, western Europe) managed by a universal empire, of which the chief was to be both pope and caesar, was indeed elaborated by him in *De Monarchia*. He also prophesied very often in the *Inferno*, the *Purgatorio*, and the *Paradiso*, the advent of such a Caesar-Pope, poetically called the *Veltro* (the Greyhound), the Messiah or *Yugâvatâra*, the redeemer of Europe, who would restore the ancient glory of Rome. But this Ghibelline dream of Dante’s, fused no doubt with the “Italian” nationalism of the Guelphs, remained a pious wish. Besides, the ostensible continuity of that “Austrian imposture”, known in history as the Holy Roman Empire, until its overthrow by Napoleon should not mislead anybody as to the existence of centripetal forces in European polity, since it is too well known that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire as one should understand it. Such pious wishes and such legal fictions of empires have their “doubles” or replicas in the *nîti-śâstras* of the Hindus and in the Moghul-Maratha achievements of medieval India.
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Let us consider now the actual boundaries of states or territorial limits of nationality in the history of European polity without being biased by the principles of Curzon's *Frontiers* or Supan's *Politische Geographie*. In terms of population and area, ancient and medieval Hindu polities present specimens and types that can well stand comparison with the contemporary western units. The Athens (including all Attica) of Pericles had only twenty five thousand "free citizens" with three hundred thousand slaves. Men, women, and children of all classes were numbered at 400,000.¹ The population of France at the time of the Revolution was under twenty five millions. At the same time England and Wales had only eight millions and a half.² And today the average of first class powers is between forty-five and fifty millions. Besides, there exist a score of lesser sovereignties, including the new "self-determined" states born out of the Russian Leviathan through drastic Bolshevik surgery and those carved out of the old Germanistic empires, which have to maintain themselves virtually as buffer-states, at least as theatres of intrigue, for powerful neighbours.
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¹ Dickinson's *Greek View of Life*, p. 73; Tucker's *Life in Ancient Athens*, 23, 62.
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² Traill, Vol. VI, p. 84.
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Now, India is as large in size as Europe *minus* the Russia of the Czars. If, therefore, in ancient and mediæval India there were as many rival nationalities in the "state of nature" as in Europe, Indian history need not be condemned,³ as it has been done *ad nauseam*, as a horrible record of anarchy, bloodshed and internecine civil war, or barbaric raids of military adventurers. Mankind may legitimately expect within Indian boundaries (accommodating, as they do, three hundred and fifty million people) as many first class powers of the Mazzinian or Leninian pattern, lower-grade nationalities and neutralized states, with their balance of power, *entente cordiale*, and what not, as one witnesses on a continent of the same area, or peopled by the same number of men and women.
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³ Smith's *Early Hist.*, pp. 356—357. The same fallacy is to be noticed in Banerji, Vol. I, pp. 225—228, 307, 308, in Banerjea's *Public*, pp. 235—239, and even in the poet Yogindranath Basu, whose recent epics in Bengali, *Prithvî-râj* (1915) and *Shivaji* (1918), are intended to be history in verse. All of them have an extraordinary conception of the importance of political unity in national life. It is evidently forgotten that the *élan de la vie* of mankind is not unity so much as freedom (*sva-râj*), be it the freedom of five thousand or of five million.
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If, roughly speaking, forty or fifty million people can be conceded to be the human basis of great powers in modern Eur-America, each enjoying eternal openings to prepare for "the next war", no student of political science or international relations should shudder in the name of world-peace if the same phenomena come to happen in China or India. An impossibly high ideal of unity or the *ignis fatuus* of federation that Europe has failed and refused to consummate must not be forced on the peoples of the orient. There should not be one standard for the West and another standard for the East in the ethics of political development or nationalistic upheavals. Logically, therefore, the attempt of Young Asia to organize "unities" embracing sub-continents is as absurd an anachronism in the twentieth century, pervaded especially, as it happens to be, by the pluralistic and separatistic doctrine of self-determination or *sva-râj* for culture-zones, as was the Hildebrandine project of a west-European Christendom under one theocratic monarchy.
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Be that as it may, comparative sociology must have to declare that the political annals of mediæval India do not offer greater insecurity and worse absence of peace than such as were exhibited by the Welsh, Irish and Scotch wars of England, the Hundred Years' War between France and England, the wars of the Hapsburgs, the wars of the innumerable German baronies, the wars of the Italian kingdoms and cities, the English civil war, the French wars of the Fronde, the meteoric acquisitions of Sweden's Gustavus Adolphus and of the Polish Kingdom, the expansion of Turkey to the gates of Vienna, the courting of Moslem alliance by Christian monarchs against brother-christians, the annexations of Peter and Frederick, and the steady decline and fall of the Holy Roman Empire. In regard, specifically, to the relations between Mohammedan states and original Hindu states or between Mohammedan empires and their Hindu citizens or between Hindu empires and Mohammedan citizens, Eur-American historians have yet to prove, item by item, that the picture was in any way darker than was the story of the contest between Roman Catholics and Protestants culminating in the horrors of the Thirty Years' War.
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So far as the ancient period is concerned, the historian has to observe that the records of Hindu imperial power are not usually marked by the accession and disappearance of dozens of puppet emperors such as were chosen and slain by the army in Rome. No generation was without its *sârva-bhauma*, *chakravarti*, or *châturanta* i.e. "world-ruler", whose regime was signalized by peace and security for the people. This *pax sârvabhaumica* was the result of a well-regulated administrative machinery, and was helped forward to no small extent by remarkably long reigns, two or three of which sometimes covered a whole century. In any case no Eur-American scientist can legitimately congratulate himself on the superiority of the trend of occidental history if only he remembers a mediæval statement cited in Engelbert's *De Ortu et Fine Romani Im-* *perii*.¹ "The Roman Empire", ran the opinion, "was and is always troubled by wars and rebellions; hardly ever were the gates of the temple of Janus shut; the greater number of Roman emperors have died violent deaths; and the Roman Empire has been the cause rather of disorder than of peace."
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¹ Woolf's *Bartolus*, 286.
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This must not be summarily dismissed as only the view of a radical anti-imperial propagandist. For, the duration and geographical extent of peace given by "Romans" were not really of a remarkable order. From the oriental platform, besides, the claim may be advanced that not more than once did European history exhibit the formation of a "unitary" state (of an "inorganic" character, of course, to use Seeley's phrase) with the size and area of the Maurya Empire (third century B. C.). This was the Roman Empire at its height during the second and third centuries A. C.² Even the less extensive Gupta Empire of the fifth century, the Vardhana Empire of the seventh century, and the Chola Empire of the eleventh century were barely approached by the Franco-German Empire of Charlemagne, or by the haphazard European possessions of the Spanish Emperor Charles V or by the ephemeral conquests of Napoleon.³
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² *Atlas of Ancient and Classical Geography*, pp. 16—17. *Vide* infra, pp. 133, 135.
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³ Atlas to Freeman's *His. Geo*; *Early Hist.* (maps facing pp. 284, 340); *Ox. His.* pp. 211—212.
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While, therefore, for purposes of comparative politics it is necessary to conclude that *pax sârva-bhaumica* or *federation de l'empire* is at least as conspicuous an achievement⁴ of Hindu statesmanship as *pax Romana* of occidental, it is on the other hand to be admitted on scientific grounds that the political unity of India is, historically speaking, as great a myth as is the political unity of Europe. India furnishes but another illustration of the universal sway of *mâtsya-nyâya*, the Hobbesian "state of nature", which can lead but to pluralism, whether anarchic or well-ordered. The East has reproduced the same *Naturprozess* of Gumplowicz's *Der Rassenkampf*⁵ as has the West.
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⁴ See the summary of inscriptions in Mookerji's *Fundamental Unity of India*, pp. 116—127.
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⁵ Chapter IV.
Linked texts (4)
- Jātaka — Pāli
- Mahābhārata — Vyāsa, Sanskrit
- Pāṭaliputra
- Uri