DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

216 THE INNER CONTRADICTION [7.5
undoubtedly is “ crooked “ from the brahmin niti point of view, though
even brahmins did not avoid following the abhorred precepts whenever
convenient. The writer was not a pre-bourgeois Bismarck inditing
memoirs in disgruntled retirement, nor a Machiavelli advising some
greater Cesare Borgia how to unite renaissance Italy. He had behind
him a paying administrative tradition that had resulted in visible
expansion which needed just a few more aggressive steps to complete
or consolidate the ‘ universal empire’.
The society in which the book was written engaged in
large-scale commodity production and trade over long distances.
However, the work does not describe a state of the commodity
producers. The reason was that the king, as the successor to chiefs of
many different tribes, and as the recipient of great revenues in kind
from harvested grain and from local manufacture, had to convert a
substantial part of these gains into commodities to pay the army and
bureaucracy. Tfie state, therefore, was itself the greatest trader, the
supreme monopolist. While it liquidated all tribal customs that had
become hindrances to commodity production, it looked upon the
private trader with the utmost suspicion. The merchant is, along with
the artizan, guild-actor (ku&lava), beggar, and sleight-of-hand
juggler, listed among the “ thieves that are not called by the name of
thief” (Arth. 4.1), and treated accordingly. Thus, there was a
fundamental contradiction in the political theory and therefore in the
administrative policy of the Arthasastra which blocked the road to
further progress.
7.5. The Arthasastra state regulated and profited from
everything down to the last detail. Fines take up nine full columns of
the index to Shamasastry’s English translation, not to speak of other
types of punishment. The law applied to all, though the higher castes
were allowed some class-privilege against the lower. Only in matters
of inheritance was any concession made to local custom : “ The laws
of inheritance should be adjusted suitably according to usage of the
caste, tribe, or village”. Women had full rights — though carefully
regulated — including that of remarriage and their own property
(stridhana) which appears for the first time (Arth. 3.4). In its endless