Introduction to Political Violence in Ancient India by Upinder Singh

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Book No. – 50 (History)

Book Name – Political Violence in Ancient India (Upinder Singh)

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1. Modern India’s Search for Her Ancient Roots

2. Words and Meanings

3. Argument and Its Limits

4. Kingship and Political Violence

5. The Investigation

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Introduction to Political Violence in Ancient India

Upinder Singh

Harshit Sharma

Alumnus (BHU)

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In late July 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru introduced the new national flag to the Constituent Assembly of India.
The flag was a tricolor with saffron on top, green at the bottom, and white in the middle, featuring a navy-blue, twenty-four-spoked wheel (cakra) in the center.
In the emotional debate following the introduction, members explained the symbolism of the flag and its significance for various social or religious groups.
Nehru clarified that the wheel represented the abacus of the Sarnath lion capital of Ashoka and the teachings of Buddha.
The wheel symbolized aspirations for the new republic to gain prestige among modern nations.
A more direct incorporation of Ashokan symbolism occurred when the Sarnath pillar capital was adopted as the national emblem.
The Sarnath capital consists of four lions on a circular abacus, featuring carved animals (elephant, horse, bull, and lion) in high relief.
The abacus is supported by an inverted lotus, and there were wheels separating the animals, with traces of a wheel suggesting it once supported one.
For the national emblem, only three lions are visible, and only two animals (the bull and horse) are visible on the abacus.
Below the abacus in the Devanagari script, the legend Satyameva jayate (Truth alone is victorious) was added.
The phrase Satyameva jayate from the Mundaka Upanishad connected the Ashokan symbol with ancient Indian philosophy.
The national motto for the Lok Sabha was Dharmacakra-pravartanaya (for turning the wheel of dharma), symbolizing the promotion of righteousness.
The iconography connected the new Indian nation to its ancient past, with dharma at the center of the symbolism.
The national flag and emblem, associated with Buddhism and Ashoka, were closely linked to the principle of nonviolence.
This connection was significant as India achieved nationhood primarily through nonviolence, and adopted emblems reflecting this principle.

Modern India’s Search for Her Ancient Roots

Indian intellectuals and political leaders turned to ancient India for solutions to contemporary issues before independence.
The search for ancient roots led to multiple historical narratives with varied interpretations, though some themes like violence and nonviolence were common.
Jawaharlal Nehru, in The Discovery of India, saw India’s culture as focused on synthesis, absorption, and rejuvenation.
Nehru believed that despite caste and social inequality, Indian history was marked by social harmony and lack of conflict.
Influenced by Western ideals of Buddhism, Nehru admired Ashoka’s cosmopolitanism, renunciation of war, and efforts for the people’s welfare.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi interpreted Indian history as part of his political thought and practice, focusing on dharma, sacrifice, nonviolence (ahiṁsā), and renunciation.
Gandhi saw modern capitalist civilization as based on greed, exploitation, and violence, and believed nonviolencewas India’s unique contribution to the world.
Gandhi read the Bhagavadgita as a manifesto for nonviolence, seeing it as rejecting acts performed with attachment, including killing and lying.
Bhimrao Ambedkar interpreted ancient Indian history, particularly Buddhism, as a solution for India’s oppressed scheduled castes.
Ambedkar viewed the Buddha as a rationalist and social revolutionary, and saw Buddhism as advocating peaceful, democratic social equality over violence.
In contrast, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar saw violence and war as necessary and laudable for Hindus, particularly in defense against foreign aggressors.
Savarkar’s history emphasized righteous war (dharma-yuddha) and glorified aggressive leaders like Chandraguptaand Chanakya, criticizing Ashoka’s nonviolence as harmful.
Despite various interpretations of ancient India, the Nehruvian model—focused on Buddhism, Ashoka, and nonviolence—became central to India’s national flag and emblem.
This Nehruvian model reflected Gandhian nationalism and projected aspirations for India’s future.
The model was based on a selective reading of India’s history, overlooking the violence present in ancient times.
Political violence and nonviolence were central themes in ancient Indian thought, marked by intense debate and diversity of views not seen elsewhere.
The book aims to explore the debate over political violence in ancient Indian thought.

Words and Meanings

Ancient Indian thought does identify and discuss several political issues related to power, kingship, governance, and the state.
These political topics were studied under specialized terms like daṇḍanīti, arthaśāstra, and nītiśāstra.
The English concept of violence generally refers to actions using physical force to harm or kill, whereas nonviolencehas been influenced by Gandhian nonviolence as a resistance strategy.
Violence should not be limited to physical force, as it can also involve words or thoughts.
Nonviolence can also be seen as an end in itself, rather than just a means for achieving political or social change.
Violence is understood as excessive, unjustified, illegitimate, or morally wrong force.
Modern debates on violence often involve issues like war, torture, terrorism, animal rights, and euthanasia, framed in terms of rights (e.g., individual, civil, animal, fetus).
Ancient Indian ideas of violence were rooted in a different set of metaphysical and epistemological ideas, focused on the cosmos, human existence, merit, sin, and the relationship between self and society.
Ancient Indian and modern Western concepts of violence have some similarities, especially in the intersection of means and ends and the connection to law, justice, and order.
The book argues that ancient Indian perspectives on violence should be studied in their own diverse historicalcontexts, avoiding oversimplification or essentialism.
The Sanskrit term hiṁsā refers to violence and the excessive, unjustified infliction of harm or injury.
Ahiṁsā (nonviolence) is the negation of hiṁsā, focusing on the absence of harm, including killing, and is often linked to the absence of injury to others, whether human or animal.
In Vedic texts, ahiṁsā originally meant “for the safety or security of,” but evolved to represent nonviolence.
Ānṛśaṁsya is another key term, overlapping with ahiṁsā, and refers to an attitude of non-cruelty and compassion, often viewed as a more practical or achievable goal than absolute nonviolence.
The relationship between ahiṁsā and ānṛśaṁsya is debated: one view sees ānṛśaṁsya as an amplified form of ahiṁsā, while another sees it as a lesser, more practical form.
Ancient Indian texts, like the Manusmriti, present contradictory or paradoxical ideas, such as the concept of hiṁsābeing sanctioned by the Veda, yet still regarded as nonviolence in certain contexts (e.g., animal sacrifice).
Such texts suggest that violence may be justified depending on the ends, showing that the context of actions (and their necessity) must be considered.
The terms violence and nonviolence must be understood through contextual analysis and historical exploration.

Argument and Its Limits

Disciplinary boundaries existed in ancient India, but knowledge and ideas flowed across them, with ideas on dharmaand polity sharing concepts like the goals of human life (trivarga or caturvarga), duty based on social class and life stage(varṇāśrama dharma), rebirth, and karma.
The boundaries between philosophy, metaphysics, and political thought were permeable, with dialogue between political and medical treatises.
Literature displayed a great receptivity to ideas from various disciplines and drew freely from them.
Amartya Sen wrote about the argumentativeness and dialogue in Indian culture, highlighting the importance of debate.
The texts primarily recorded the arguments of upper-class males, with voices of others often harder to find.
Many ancient Indian texts are polysemic, containing multiple sometimes contradictory ideas due to their compositional history and the nature of Indian intellectual tradition.
Indian intellectual traditions tended to juxtapose different views rather than reject them, as seen in Dharmashastratexts which had a flexible perspective on dharma.
Vitriolic debates often existed within opposing traditions, but internal debates were more about contrasting views rather than replacing one with another.
Limits to flexibility were seen in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, where Yajnavalkya ended an intense debate by warning a woman, Gargi, about the consequences of her persistent questioning.
The Buddha also sometimes ended debates abruptly, leaving doctrinal issues unresolved when the dissent could not be contained.
When arguments within a tradition could not be contained, new traditions were born, like Buddhism, which positioned itself as a counter to Brahmanism.
Many scholarly writings have touched on violence and nonviolence in political spheres, but many questions remain.
Key questions include the Indian approaches to political violence, how violence of the state and against the state is understood, and whether there is a purely political response or if perspectives are always tied to metaphysics or religion.
Further questions explore whether there is a cultural consensus or radical differences in attitudes toward violence and if there is a relationship between historical violence and the intensity of discussions on the topic.
The impact of religious doctrines emphasizing nonviolence and compassion on political violence is also a crucial area of inquiry.
The distinction between elite and popular responses to political violence needs to be explored.
Comparison of how ancient Indian intellectual traditions dealt with political violence can be made with other ancient cultures like those of Persia, China, and Greece.

Kingship and Political Violence

Violence lies at the heart of the state, with dominant control over mechanisms of force being crucial in the transition from pre-state to state societies.
The control, threat, and perpetuation of violence were essential to the origin and sustenance of state structures.
In the modern nation-state, discussions focus on the changing technologies of state violence, how its justification renders it invisible, and the relationship between politics, sovereignty, and the power to dictate who may live and die.
Issues such as the escalation of state violence toward citizens, other states, and the environment, and the rise of transnational terrorist networks highlight the contemporary relevance of exploring political violence.
Rejecting the privileging of the modern and western views, there’s a need to focus on premodern, non-westerntrajectories for a more comprehensive understanding of political violence.
Political violence in ancient India can be approached from two perspectives: the actual incidence of violence and how it was dealt with at the intellectual level.
Violence in ancient India is evident in inter-dynastic and intra-dynastic power struggles, warfare between states, and violent encounters with forest people.
The royal hunt symbolized political prowess and mastery over nature, while discussions of punishment for crimes like treason reflect the political engagement with violence.
The quantum of political violence cannot be easily charted, as statistics are lacking, but the focus is on how the issue of violence and nonviolence was discussed in the political sphere.
This historical investigation is grounded in the political history and theory and practice of kingship, which had a central role in controlling, defining, and justifying political violence.
The traditional Indological/philological approach has focused on early Brahmanical texts and royal rituals, but it has often essentialized kingship and religion, missing the diversity of perspectives.
The Brahmana kingship perspective was complex, with the king needing the Brahmana to legitimize his power, but the priest was supposed to avoid associating with the king.
Kingship remained suspended between sacrality and secularity, divinity and mortality, with varying views in political theorists like Kautilya who contrasted dharma and artha.
Brahmanical views on kingship should not be seen as a singular or universal Indian view, as perspectives varied, and there was a range of approaches between the dharma view and artha view.
Expressions of kingship in texts or inscriptions should not be mistaken for the historical realities of the institution.
The idea of a highly centralized Maurya empire was critiqued, and Indian feudalism was proposed for the Gupta empire, emphasizing political, social, and economic fragmentation.
State-centric histories have neglected political ideas, and political violence was often overlooked in such historical narratives.
Anthropological models are useful for understanding transitions from tribes to kingdoms, but there is an overfocus on evidence of standing armies and bureaucratic systems, which are rarely clear.
To understand ancient states, it’s important to move beyond statist and non-statist extremes, recognizing the existence of autonomous spaces within state structures.
The political imagination is again gaining attention, acknowledging that ancient polities had distinct political ideas and expressed them through actions and material traces.
Political ideas and practice can be understood through a sophisticated intertextual analysis, studying sources in their detail, genre, and context while tracking the complex interaction between political ideas and practice historically.
Cross-cultural comparisons are useful not for genealogies but to sharpen understanding of historical and cultural uniqueness.
A focus on political history, process, and thought raises many questions: How are political ideas expressed in various historical sources?
The influence and pervasiveness of certain political ideas across different states and regions should be examined.
Political thought played a significant role in creating civilizational space, and marginalized or dimly hinted political practices should be considered.
Violence and reflections on it can enhance understanding of ancient political processes, and breaking out of Indian history insularity is key in discussing Indian political ideas.
The place of ancient Indian political thought in the ancient world context is important, as is exploring its relevance for understanding political violence today.

The Investigation

This book is a history of ideas, focusing on how violence in the political sphere was discussed in ancient Indian political discourse from circa 600 BCE–600 CE.
The intellectual engagement with the problem of political violence offers insight into the larger conceptual universe of ancient states.
Political thought must be anchored to its historical context, revealing not just the ideologies but also the practical actions of rulers.
The primary focus is on kingship and its relationship with violence at both general and specific levels.
Ancient texts may not frame all the issues discussed in the book within political violence, but the aim is to investigate arenas involving the use of force, punishment, or killing.
While the Harappan civilization and Vedic corpus are touched upon, the primary focus is on the period between 600 BCE and 600 CE.
Chapters 1-3 provide an integrated overview of the theory and practice of kingship and empire, with a focus on how political violence was addressed through texts, inscriptions, coins, and artistic representations.
The book draws from major Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jaina texts, focusing more on northern intellectual and cultural traditions, while also considering South Indian evidence.
Chapter 1, “Foundations” (circa 600–200 BCE), covers early historic states and the Maurya empire.
Chapter 2, “Transition” (circa 200 BCE–300 CE), examines the violent end of the Maurya dynasty and the emergence of new kingdoms like the Indo-Greeks, Shungas, Pahlavas, Shakas, Kushanas, and others.
Chapter 3, “Maturity” (circa 300–600 CE), focuses on the Gupta empire and other states in the subcontinent, marking the classical Indian model of kingship and politics.
Topics discussed in Chapters 1-3 include state and empire, theories of kingship, violence and nonviolence in religious and political thought, the dharma of the king, the king-god relationship, power, renunciation, and the relationship between governing the state and the self.
Justice, punishment, and the use of force against adversaries within the kingdom are also key aspects of the discussion.
The dating of texts is debated, but they are categorized into three main phases for the purpose of discussion.
Chapter 1: Foundation (circa 600 BCE–200 BCE): Early Buddhist and Jaina texts, Ashoka’s inscriptions, Mahabharata, Ramayana.
Chapter 2: Transition (circa 200 BCE–300 CE): Arthashastra, Manusmriti, Bhasa’s plays, Buddhist texts(Ashvaghosha’s Buddhacharita, Ashokavadana, Jataka), inscriptions of Kharavela, Rudradaman, Satavahanas, and Ikshvakus.
Chapter 3: Maturity (circa 300–600 CE): Vakataka and Gupta inscriptions, Kamandaka’s Nitisara, Kalidasa’s Abhijnanashakuntala, Raghuvamsha, Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa, Panchatantra.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on two areas of conflict and violence: warfare against other states and the conflict with the wilderness and its inhabitants.
Chapter 4, “War”, discusses war in statecraft, war and dharma, the heroic ideal, righteous war, critiques of war, and the aestheticization and celebration of war.
Chapter 5, “The Wilderness”, examines the relationship between the state and the wilderness, focusing on the classification of forest, exploitation of resources, attitudes toward forest people, animals as political symbols, and the royal hunt.
The larger argument is that violence or the threat of violence formed the basis of the state’s interaction with the forest.
The Epilogue explores the long-term impact of the ideas discussed, the circulation of influential Indian political texts and ideas beyond the subcontinent, and how these debates on political violence spread to other lands.
The book closes by reflecting on when and to what extent ancient Indian discourse on political violence made it invisible, essential, or even desirable.
The book raises questions about how these ancient debates help us rethink India’s ancient history and provide a resource for reflecting on the problem of political violence in both ancient and modern contexts.