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A Tryst with Fury

Written by Pratap Bhanu Mehta | Published: October 28, 2017 12:52 am

Orlando Patterson once argued that the Greeks were conceptually obsessed with
freedom in part because of slavery. In a similar vein, one could argue that in India the
conceptual obsession with non-violence is a way of acknowledging the pervasive
reality of violence. In both cases the centrality of a value is an acknowledgement that
reality veers in the opposite direction. The sustained reflection on non-violence is
actually a deep acknowledgment of the reality of violence. Indian texts are obsessed
with the reality of violence: texts like the Satapatha Brahamana are obsessed with the
problem of “containing” violence; even for Gandhi, who is often accused of giving
India a misleading self-image of violence, the obsession with ahimsa was a way of
acknowledging how violence is always ready and close at hand.
Upinder Singh’s erudite, engaging and compelling book takes one entry point into the
problem of political violence in ancient India: the problem of kingship. It is not a
reflection on the problem of violence in general; nor is it an empirical study of
violence. But it is a landmark study of thinking about and representations of political
violence in ancient India. It ranges over a wide range of sources: the epics, literary
texts, texts in the Arthashastra tradition, and more creatively, representations of
violence in epigraphic evidence and art. There is no comparable study that brings
together these sources in one synthetic gaze and the result is impressive.
The book is organised in two different ways. The first three chapters are
chronological, and organise material from 600 BCE to 600 CE in three phases. The
foundations deal with early Buddhist and Jain text, Ashoka’s rein and the
Mahabharata and Ramayana; the transition phase from 200 BCE to 300 CE deals with
the Arthashastra, Dharmashastra, plays, later Buddhist texts and inscriptions of
several kingdoms; and the maturity phase deals with the Guptas and in literary texts,
including Kalidasa. The second mode of organisation in chapter four and five is more
thematic. They deal with two kinds of violence: violence in war and the taming of
wildernesses. It is possible to quibble about an occasional translation or interpretation.
I am not convinced, for example, that the Kautilyan state was omniscient and
omnipotent. Quite the contrary, for Kautilya violence is necessary because everything
is always contingent and liable to spin out of control. But the chapters on war and
wilderness are, in some ways, the most dazzling in the book. One of the interesting
asides in these chapters is the persistent puzzle: despite the fact that there were so
many invasions from India’s Northwest, there are almost no details on Indian analyses
of these wars.
The chronological schema in the book from foundations to maturity is more a schema
that refers to the maturing of state forms rather than the maturing of thought. In many
ways the existential and literary treatment of the dilemma of kingship in the texts in
the foundation period remains far more profound than what follows later. But as the
nature of states and empires gets more complex, so do the sources of political violence
and the instruments to respond to them. The book is stunning on these taxonomies.
You begin to see the emergence of a tension between older vocabularies of the
problem of violence that focussed largely on the qualities of the king, to a problem of
balancing between different forms of power. But the theme that remains common is
the abiding tension between the intellectual legitimation of non-violence on the one
hand, and the dire necessity of violence on the other. No ideology quite escapes this
tension, and even Buddhism and Jainism succumb to the violent imperatives of
kingship. The real issue in intellectual history has not been the question, “which
traditions promote ahimsa?” A more fruitful question is: How do traditions define
necessity? How do they draw boundaries of consideration? This book is a vivid and
detailed account of that question.
It is tempting to conclude, as Upinder Singh does, that there are no coherent theories
of violence or just war in the Indian tradition — there is instead a complex and
insightful assemblage of elements that get reconfigured differently. But Indian
political theory is hardly unique in this respect. Almost no political thought has a
“coherent” theory of violence; arguably Christianity or Kant end up in the same
position of condoning it, despite themselves. The challenge about violence is that the
world is ethically irrational and veers out of control. What you get in this book is a
fascinating intellectual and literary history of a culture wrestling with the problem of
kingship, making its peace with violence, and finding its most powerful intellectual
resources unable to cope with the depth of evil in the world.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is vice-chancellor, Ashoka University