Brahmins and Kings, political philosophy in the Sanskrit Narratives (a guest post by John Nemec)

John Nemec has just published a new book (see here). He kindly agreed to present it to our audience in the post below.

How much philosophy is there in story?  How do stories relate ideas?  How do they animate them and what can they communicate that is particular to their media? 

These and related questions are a matter of central concern in my new book, Brahmins and Kings.  This work examines royal counsel as it is represented in some of the most well-known and widely circulated narratives in the history of Sanskrit literature, including the Mahābhārata (ch. 1), the Rāmāyaṇa (ch. 2), Viṣṇuśarman’s famed animal stories, the Pañcatantra (ch. 6), Somadeva’s labyrinthine Ocean of Rivers of Stories (the Kathāsaritsāgara) (ch. 4), Kalhaṇa’s Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir (the Rājataraṅgiṇī) (ch. 3), and two of the most famous plays in the history of Sanskrit literature, Kālidāsa’s Abhijñānaśākuntala and Harṣa’s Ratnāvalī (ch. 5).  In doing so, the book queries the types of ethical counsel weighed and offered in story to those who wield political power.  

I argue that the narratives, taken as a set (about which more in a moment), show cognizance of three ethical theories for political action and settle on one as the best among them.  The three theories are those of Deontology, Consequentialism, and Virtue Ethics.  While of course these are etic categories and are not referred to in this manner in the Sanskritic tradition, it is nevertheless the case that, as a set of contrasting concepts and modes for governance, they all are weighed and compared in these works. 

The reason for this is that there is a heavy influence, found in the narrative themes traced in this book, of both the technical literatures on Hindu Law and on Statecraft, the Dharmaśāstras and the Arthaśāstra and related works.  I argue that the texts collectively and repeatedly offer what they consider to be good counsel for political action, by which is meant counsel that produces results.  But the counsel in question is by and large defined by Brahmins and meant for kings, and this in a context in which royal power was such that kings had the capacity to do largely as they pleased.  And so the counsel was meant to persuade, and in doing so it sought to combine the ethical modes in question in a kind of synthesis of the three, and meant to be embodied in the very person of the royal sovereign.  For kings could not reliably be asked to do the right thing for its own sake, because their power was such that they could ignore the strictures of a deontological ethic; and the free reign of a pure consequentialism was held to be fraught, for it offered no restraint or check on the (martial) power of kings—what was a desideratum in a sometimes violent and brutish world.  Thus, the advice conceived blended both these ethical models into a recommendation of personal disposition and conduct, the call for kings (and in some cases queens, also princes, and in fact also all those of the court who surrounded and counseled the royal sovereign) to act in a highly cultivated manner, to be “good” in order to do well in the world.  

“Being good” is defined as being restrained in one’s desires, in action, in favoring one’s own preferences and loved ones over and against fair treatment, all of this on the theory that restraint leads to clarity of mind, which in turn cultivates the capacity to make wise choices in the oft-dangerous political arena.  The deontology of the Dharmaśāstras, I argue, was thought to assume too much good-faith on the part of kings whose power was unmatched; the consequentialism of Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra (for example) in turn offered no check on just that power.  But even so, results were ever vital and necessary—kings were only as good as the prosperity, security, and felicity they could furnish—and so the counsel given sought to balance consequentialism with deontology, to suggest there was a way to be in the world such that one could do well by being good.  Indeed, the advice is exclusive: the narratives imply and argue that royals sovereign can only expect todo well in the world (for themselves and their subjects) if they pursue just this synthesized ethic.  As I argued in Brahmins and Kings (p. 7):

If we can boldly generalize and suggest that Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra in effect argues that being good is unimportant if one does well in the world, and that the Mānavadharma-śāstra intimates both that one must be good if one is properly to take one’s place in the world (and beyond) and that being thus is of intrinsic value and reward, then the narrative literatures, taken together, rather suggest that inasmuch as doing well results from being good—being chastened in desire and emotion—there is no conceivable reason to be otherwise, with the caveat that being good in this sense sometimes also involves deploying acts of cunning.

This in a nutshell is the ethical position explored and recommended in these works.  Now a word on how it is explored in the book, also the scope of that advice as conceived in story.  

About the former: this book looks across texts.  It seeks to reconstruct how these works—many of them Kashmiri productions—might have been received at a time when they were all in existence, somewhere around the end of the twelfth century, for example.  What is more, I read the narratives as story, which is to say I examine their major plotlines and seek to ascertain how the stories would have gripped their audiences, drawn them into the “dreamworld” of story.

Doing this involves sustained, close, and intertextual reading of these works.  Reading across texts is necessary, I further suggest, not only because scholars have not much done this to date, but also because the works are intertextually formed.  Indeed, I argue that storytelling in premodern South Asia always involved the conveyance of stories in the context of other stories.  Thus, the epics evoke one another, and the Mahābhārata retells the Rāmāyaṇa within it.  The Kathāsaritsāgara contains a Pañcatantra narrative.  The Kuṭṭanīmata (also examined in chapter 5) depicts the performance of the Ratnāvalī.  The Pañcatantra tells stories within stories, as does the Kathāsaritsāgara.  And so on.

More than this, I argue that these works share common features, as well.  First of all, they all share a common frame, that of stories of the mutual relations of kṣatriya kings with Brahmins.  Secondly, they all depict Brahmins advising political figures.  Thirdly, I argue that they all implicitly or explicitly offer the counsel identified in this book, that of the Virtue Ethic.  And, fourthly and finally, they all not only narrate instances of royal counsel, but I argue they also are composed in a manner that renders the stories themselves as instances of counsel.

Why so?  Because stories are uniquely capable of capturing our attention and imagination.  Hearers or readers or, in the case of the dramas that are performed, audiences of story can identify with the characters in them, and they often adopt implicitly and subconsciously the mores and habits and preferences depicted in the same.  This is just what the narratives sought to do—to affect their audiences, to draw their audiences into their stories and, often, to allow the stories to “leak” their narrative actors into the world of their audiences.  In doing so, they could help to cultivate a world in which those who participated in the stories by hearing, reading, or seeing them performed could be touched and transformed thereby.  For the Virtue Ethic was meant to encompass all human action and practice.  It sought to engage the king, his princes, queens, and Brahmin and other courtiers across the spectrum of their subjective experience: intellectually, emotionally, humorously.

Ultimately, then, this book argues that, just as the rulers in these narratives receive moral instruction, their audiences do, as well.  (Indeed, king and members of the course were usually the primary inaugural and intended audiences of these works.)  The stories sought to put metaphorical flesh on the proverbial bare bones of doctrinal ideals and ideas, such that these texts would be able to shape and influence not just their audiences’ thoughts but also their emotions and cultivated instincts.  They intended, in a word, to transform their very way of engaging the world by way of immersing them in the dreamworld of stories, a dreamworld that counseled doing well in the world by being good.  And so, Virtue Ethics required stories to be persuasively recommended.  And thus, I argue, there is a kind of philosophy, recommended and practiced in the Sanskrit narrative literatures.

EF: Once again, you can order the book at this link.