Political violence in ancient India / Upinder Singh.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 555-584) and index.

Description :
Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru helped create the myth of a nonviolent ancient India while building a modern independence movement on the principle of nonviolence (ahimsa). But this myth obscures a troubled and complex heritage: a long struggle to reconcile the ethics of nonviolence with the need to use violence to rule. Upinder Singh documents the dynamic tension between violence and nonviolence in ancient Indian political thought and practice over twelve hundred years.

Political Violence in Ancient India looks at representations of kingship and political violence in epics, religious texts, political treatises, plays, poems, inscriptions, and art from 600 BCE to 600 CE. As kings controlled their realms, fought battles, and meted out justice, intellectuals debated the boundary between the force required to sustain power and the excess that led to tyranny and oppression. Duty (dharma) and renunciation were important in this discussion, as were punishment, war, forest tribes, and the royal hunt. Singh reveals a range of perspectives that defy rigid religious categorization. Buddhists, Jainas, and even the pacifist Maurya emperor Ashoka recognized that absolute nonviolence was impossible for kings.
By 600 CE religious thinkers, political theorists, and poets had justified and aestheticized political violence to a great extent. Nevertheless, questions, doubt, and dissent remained. These debates are as important for understanding political ideas in the ancient world as for thinking about the problem of political violence in our own time.

Political Violence in Ancient India argues that the idea of a nonviolent India is an artificial twentieth-century construct deeply influenced by Gandhi and Nehru. Ancient Indian history is marked by considerable violence of various kinds, as is the history of other parts of the world. However the issue of violence was debated in India with greater intensity than elsewhere. There was a recognition of the possibility of necessary force veering into violence, and of the strong tension between violence and nonviolence in the political sphere. This book looks at the evolution of the theory and practice of kingship and the attitudes towards political violence between c. 600 BCE and 600 CE by examining a vast array of texts, inscriptions, artistic representations, and numismatic and archaeological material. These include the ideas of Buddhism and Jainism; the emperor Ashoka; the Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata; the political treatise, the Arthashastra; and the poetry of Kalidasa. The book examines how the problem of the relationship between kingship and violence was addressed in general as well with reference to punishment, war and the forest.-- Provided by publisher