Eurocentric Interpretive Frames or Indigenous Political Ideas

Understanding the political in Western and Ancient Indian traditions

Abstract

In each epoch of progress of civilization human beings have strived to define and crystalize the idea of the political. The idea of the private and the political even today remain at the core of our intellectual undertakings. What is the nature of the political? Do culturally different contexts look at the political differently? Can we or should we define the political in a uniform and universalizing manner? These are some of the core questions that set the starting point of this paper. The Greek and the Western contributions to the construction of the idea of the political is celebrated worldwide. Nonetheless in last few decades research interest in non-western epistemic contributions to socio-political ideas have gained momentum. This paper purports to study, explicate and examine comparatively the western as well as non-western traditions’ contribution to theories, conceptualize and reflect on the idea of the political, the idea of rule and the idea of state. Methodologically the paper adopts a descriptive-analytical, historical, and comparative approach. The paper wishes to question and unsettle Eurocentric epistemic frames to examine and explicate the pre-modern/ancient Indian political ideas. This study carefully chooses to use indigenous (Indian) analytical categories and argues that ideas such as connectedness of human and non- human world, Dharma, Dand, Yogakshema and non-anthropocentrism emanate from unique cosmological, cultural, theological and historical trajectory of Indian society. The present paper takes a broad examination of the way in which political and social was conceptualized and was intertwined in ancient India while paying specific attention to Kautilya’s Arthashastra in some detail. This paper uses Stuart Gray’s Ideas of Stewardship and Rajanical thought to build the arguments. Such epistemic and intellectual exercises will liberate the unique political ideas of pre-modern India from oriental, colonial or Eurocentric intellectual hegemony and their reductive interpretations. The paper also consciously maintains a critical distance from hyper-national and ethnocentric conclusions about the ancient Indian concepts thus taking care not to contribute to any conservative, orthodox or exclusivist ideas for contemporary concept of state in India or elsewhere. Finally, the paper maintains that a close reading and re-examination of the idea of the political in the ancient India can fruitfully contribute to dealing with some of our contemporary political problems.