Arthasastra and Hindu Equilibrium

The dynastic ascendancy by Chandragupta Maurya - with political guidance from the legendary Chanakya Kautilya - to the Magadhan empire of northern India around 324 BC denotes an early milestone in the two millennia period of Lal’s (1988) “Hindu Equilibrium”, extending from about 400 BC to 1600 AD. During this epoch, despite an anarchic state system, the decentralised, stratified, resilient Hindu social system of autarkic villages, the caste system and joint family was apparently able in reliance upon a technically advanced pan-Indian agrarian system and by delimiting external economic, political and cultural shocks, to both securely underpin its biosocial reproduction and keep its core cultural values and practices relatively stable and intact. Lal’s (1988, pp.31,64) assertions: (i) that the caste system was not economically dysfunctional; and (ii) that the structure of this socio-economic system based on the village was, ‘a second-best Pareto efficient adaption to the environmental and political constraints faced by earlier Aryans’, provide a convenient point of departure for this exploratory essay. North’s (1981) analytical approach to the structure and performance of economies over time is employed in conjunction with various compatible models and accounts of state formation and building, sources of social power and contract theory versus predatory, exploitation theories of the state. Their application to the posited composite Kautilya-Mauryan state/empire yields the adverse conclusion that in this early phase, the Hindu Equilibrium provided little more than a subsistence level existence for the vast majority of the rural populace. It was therefore a comparative failure given: (i) the abundance of natural resources and low population density; (ii) that society is not in any event a ‘suicide club’ (Hart 1961) but rather, is concerned with promoting its welfare as explicitly recognised by the Arthasastra, which can ‘be regarded as the sastra concerned with general well-being on earth’ (Kangle 2000 Part II, p.2); and (iii) that, as Aristotle (1952, p.445) observed, since all communities aim at some good, ‘the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than all the others, and at the highest good.' This conclusion coheres with Lonergan’s (1978, p.226) exegesis of the adverse consequences of ‘the distorted dialectic of community’ and North’s (1981, pp.6-7) commonsense observations that throughout history, stagnation and decline have been the rule with growth the exception and that, 'in a world of non-market decision making, inefficient forms of political structure do persist for long periods of time.