It seems to be the fashion nowadays to decry á la Lord Parekh the nonexistence of an Indian Hobbes, or generally speaking, a tradition of political philosophy that is truly and inalienable Indian. Yet, studies of Indian political philosophy in recent years have focused almost exclusively on modern Indian thinkers, particularly those of a certain bent — Ram Mohan Roy, Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Nehru. Ancient India is even more forlorn, marked by a desert whose glory may be occasionally acknowledged and more often commemorated through fantastical and absurd defences of the sort that claim nuclear weaponry finds its origins in texts of vintage, or in the positivism of Kautilya and the works of Manu, whose original meaning is more or less transformed into some species of a reductio ad absurdum to reflect the revolutionary and progressive pieties of the present.

The study of the history of Indian political philosophy is still conducted in that vein: it is anachronistically modern, and certainly guilty of distortion and impiety. But there is also a distinct clamour for a ‘secular’ philosophy of Indian politics, one that cannot be ancient; those who advocate for Platonic politics or of some other sort of modernised version of ancient Greek political philosophy forgot rather quickly the importance of civic theology in the schema of the polis. There are significant similarities in Greco-Indian thought and language, which I am neither qualified nor desirous to write on, but it is only my contention here to seek to rehabilitate the other ancient Indian texts — particularly the Upanishads and the two major epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, in some small part, to recommend that the ancients thought in a complex and sophisticated manner on the essential questions of political philosophy: obedience, legitimacy, sovereignty, and jurisprudence.

The first question is, why is this important? The answer, as I have often referenced before, is an unshakeable belief that reason is the same everywhere, and that complex societies, on the whole, show a remarkable similarity in thought. The philosopher (and the second President of India) Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan remarked in the preface to his translation of the Upanishads that “human nature is not altogether unchanging but it does remain sufficiently constant to justify the study of ancient texts.”¹ In his preface, he dispels the poorly conceived idea that the ancient Indians were most interested in renouncing the world rather than living in it, and that the richness of their spiritual experiences did not mean that they ignored the going-ons of everyday life and experience, but rather sought out the former to enrich the latter.

The Ramayana, generally considered to be the earlier of the two Indic epics, is in essence the story of a ruler preoccupied with virtue, and like the Illiad, has as its dramatic premise the abduction of a queen, though in somewhat different circumstances. It seeks to tell the story of a prince, his queen, and his step brother, exiled to the forest and stripped of their inheritance for fourteen years, and their trials and tribulations. The king of Lanka, Ravana, a great scholar, is unable to differenntiate between right and wrong, and is of the opinion that might makes right, whilst our hero, Rama, harbours no such pretensions, and is the embodiment of a good king who subordinates his will to the duties befitting a ruler; even today, the phrase ‘Ramarajya’ (lit. trans. the rule/kingdom of Rama) is used to describe a just and righteous regime in commonplace Indian political thought. While it is a story about the abduction and recovery of a queen, it is more significant as a repository of knowledge about the philosophy and theology of ancient India. In broader strokes, it questions the legitimacy of a usurped government, the relation of the family to the kingdom and the importance of custom and tradition to the state when things seem to be falling apart and nothing makes sense anymore. In another way, through the figure of Bharata, Rama’s step-brother whose mother exploits the king’s love for her to make him the king, we see the standard of ethical action when the stakes are high and doing the right thing incurs a substantial opportunity cost: instead of usurping the throne for the fourteen years Rama is in exile, he places Rama’s slippers on the throne and rules as a trustee, even though he has the opportunity to rule.

At this juncture, perhaps I ought to qualify my thoughts above: the historical veracity of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the surviving Vedic and Upanishadic texts, have nothing to do with their history, but only their antiquity and their usage of a proto-Indo-European language, Sanskrit. The similarities between Greek and Indian thought, accidental or intentional, does not imply anything except that both civilisations enjoyed and benefited from the profitable study of the soul, and that philosophy manifested itself in similar forms in both places. Whether the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and the Iliad and the Odyssey actually took placed as described by Vyasa and Valmiki has no interest to me or to Plato, who takes pleasure in extended criticisms of Homer as poet and philosopher (cf. Republic III). As works of philosophy as much as works of poetic sublimity, they do not draw their power and authority from the historicity of the events they describe. Consequently, questions of historicity are neither of interest nor of any concern whatsoever; only the content of the text is.

The Mahabharata, too, is a remarkable text, which has as its centrepiece the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita is a remarkable work: it deals with the ethics of fighting a war where the opposing side is one’s own family. It is a remarkably complex work, but the following posts include my thoughts on its first two books. It can be read politically, too, as a statement of political philosophy, and that is my intention: but more on that tomorrow. I do not think I have all the answers to the questions raised above, but it is my hope that the following posts can establish beyond a certain degree of doubt that the ancient Indians had an important theological-philosophical tradition which deals with similar concerns as the Western tradition started by Plato, and consequently, that their methods, aims, and conclusions were remarkably similar.