Chapter 3

Ancient India

Steven Muhlberger

In the period before ce 400, ancient India was home to a variety of self-governing
polities using quasi-democratic institutions comparable with those of the Greek city-
states of the same era. Indeed, Greek and Roman historians, relying on the reports
of Greek visitors, did not hesitate to say that the India they knew was largely
democratic. But although the evidence has been carefully analysed and the existence
of a multitude of republics has long been established, these republics and the political
culture that they represent are little known to anyone but specialists. The purpose of
this chapter is to set forth a brief summary of the history of republicanism in ancient
India.
There are good reasons for the obscurity of this Indian story. The ancient sources
for the life of the subcontinent are particularly difficult. Nearly all of them that
survive exist because they were religiously significant to some organised community.
There is no ancient historiography. The discovery of the ancient republican tradition
of India was a product of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Both
foreign and Indian scholars were systematically reading, translating and publishing
ancient sources. Research slowly revealed that the Indian past held more than passive
subjects ruled by absolute monarchs. At the turn of the twentieth century the British
expert, T. W. Rhys Davids, argued that the earliest Buddhist scriptures depicted
north India as a country in which there were many clans, dominating extensive and
populous territories, who made their public decisions in popular assemblies (Rhys
Davids 1903). This claim was all the more credible because investigation of
contemporary Indian village life by British officials had revealed an unanticipated
degree of popular government; at the same time early anthropologists had docu-
mented village self-government around the world (Maine [1889] 1974). The history
and nature of self-government in ancient India became a hot topic, with implications
not just for the subcontinent, but the entire world: the unchanging East was more
adaptable than it had been given credit for. For the next three decades, nationalist
historians and political scientists revisited and analysed the ancient sources and even
discovered new material. This effort did not result in consensus about the nature of
early Indian government, but has provided us with the bulk of our knowledge of
India’s republics and other manifestations of a strong non-monarchical tradition
(R. S. Sharma 1991: 1–13).
 ancient india 51

Vedic Councils and Post-Vedic Republics

It remains impossible to write a continuous history of the ancient subcontinent;
whatever aspect of Indian life we make our focus, we are dependent on difficult sources
that do not even provide a secure chronology. For instance, one relevant and very
ancient body of texts, Vedic literature, was created at various times over a thousand-
year span, c. 1500–500 bce. Vedic literature speaks directly only about the prayers,
rituals, incantations and sacrifices of the lost cultures of that vast period. Unsurpris-
ingly, scholars have come up with quite different reconstructions of ‘Vedic society’.
The most obvious political figures who emerge from the Vedas are rajas, who can be
seen as kings or (taking a less lofty view) elected war chieftains. Yet re-examination of
Vedic literature in the early twentieth century led some scholars to argue that Vedic
India was characterised by tribal societies which, like Greek, Roman or Iroquoian
societies, possessed a variety of assemblies and councils that not only expressed the
popular will, but also exercised a certain amount of authority in religion, war and
justice (R. S. Sharma 1991: 89–90). Experts have debated the definition and functions
of these bodies, notably those called the vidatha, the sabha and the samiti, but it seems
clear that even in monarchical communities, it was common enough to have a council
or an assembly or both. J. P. Sharma has argued that some non-monarchical
communities were led by a multitude of rajas instead of just one (J. P. Sharma
1968: 15–80). Today’s reader may not find these conclusions particularly exciting, but
in the 1910s this hint of self-government in the past was a subject for celebration.
India, even at a very early time, had participated in the common human pattern of
small-scale governance, what Walter Bagehot aptly called ‘government by discussion’
(Bagehot 1873: 158).
Between about 600 and 300 bce, sometimes called the post-Vedic period, sources
proliferate and we are much better informed about the politics and political geography
of the country. Unlike the kingdoms/chieftainships of early Vedic society, which give
the impression of being primitive, tribal, even nomadic, the post-Vedic kingdoms seem
much more substantial, with definite territories and rulers making claims to universal
domination. Important religious developments were underway. The theory of varna
(caste) had emerged, which gave divine endorsement to the position of the Brahmanas
(priests), Kshatriyas (warriors) and rajas drawn from the ranks of the Kshatriyas.
Varna asserted that Brahmanas and Kshatriyas were entitled to a hereditary lordship
over the Vaishyas (farmers, artisans and merchants) and the Shudras (labourers). At
the same time, there was a strong counter-current resisting this construct. There were
religious teachers who disputed the teachings of varna and the religious leadership of
the Brahmanas, and who preached equality before the divine. The most successful
movements of this sort evolved into Buddhism and Jainism (Wagle 1966).
Similarly, some communities rejected the claims of monarchy and its religious
justification. One manifestation of this opposition were the many corporate bodies
whose members enjoyed a certain equality and who governed themselves through
discussion and voting, in other words organisations that manifested varying degrees
of democratic practice. Panini’s Sanskrit grammar, an irreplaceable window into
ancient Indian life, indicates that there was at the dawn of the post-Vedic period a
52 pre-classical democracy

well-known terminology for the process of corporate decision making: Panini gives us
the terms for vote, decisions reached by voting and the completion of a quorum.
Another cluster of words indicates that the division of assemblies into political parties
was well known. Further, Panini and his commentators show that sometimes select
groups within a sangha had special functions: acting as an executive or perhaps as
committees for defined purposes. A specialised vocabulary described groups that ran
their own affairs: warrior bands, guilds and religious brotherhoods. The words gana
and sangha were the most important terms for such groups. Both words originally
meant ‘multitude’, but by the sixth century bce, they meant both a self-governing
multitude in which decisions were made by the members working in common, and
the style of government characteristic of such groups. The strongest of such groups,
which acted as sovereign governments, were the equivalent of the republics of the
contemporaneous Mediterranean (Agrawala 1963: 426–44; A. K. Majumdar 1980:
131; J. P. Sharma 1968: 8–14).

The Buddhist Evidence

The best account of the workings of quasi-democratic republics and other corporations
of this era concern the Buddhist monastic brotherhood, also called the sangha. The
earliest parts of the Buddhist scriptures, known as the Pali Canon, show us in detail
how the founder of this particular sangha was believed to have organised his followers
when he was preparing to die. The key organisational virtue was the full participation
of all the monks in the ritual and disciplinary acts of their group. To ensure that this
would be remembered, detailed rules concerning the voting in monastic assemblies,
their memberships and their quorums, were set down in the scriptures known as the
Mahavagga and the Kullavagga.
Business could be transacted legitimately only in a full assembly, by a vote of all the
members. If, for example, a candidate wanted the upasampada ordination, the question
(ñatti) was put to the sangha by a learned and competent member, and the other
members asked three times to indicate dissent. If there was none, the sangha was taken
to be in agreement with the ñatti (Rhys Davids and Oldenberg 1881: 169–70).
Of course, unanimity was not always possible. The Kullavagga provides other
techniques that were used in disputes especially dangerous to the unity of the sangha,
those which concerned interpretation of the monastic rule itself. If such a dispute
proved to be bitterly divisive, it could be decided by majority vote, or referred to a jury
or committee specially elected by the sangha to treat the matter at hand. If the members
of the sangha were concerned enough, the rules for taking votes sanctioned the
disallowance by the vote-taker of results that threatened the essential law of the sangha
or its unity (Rhys Davids and Oldenberg 1885: 20–65). Evidently, the usual principle
of full participation and the equality of the membership had to be balanced against
survival of the religious enterprise: disunity of the membership was the great fear of all
Indian republics and corporations (Altekar 1958: 129–30; A. K. Majumdar 1980: 140).
The rules of the Buddhist sangha are the best known of any gana or sangha of the
period. The exact structure and procedures used by political ganas are irrecoverable.
However, R. C. Majumdar’s early judgement remains convincing: the techniques seen
 ancient india 53

in the Buddhist sangha reflect a sophisticated and widespread political culture based on
the popular assembly (R. C. Majumdar [1918] 1969: 233–4).
That the Buddhist sangha and political gana shared similar principles can
be illustrated out of an important episode depicted in the early scriptures. The
story that begins the Maha-parinibbana-suttanta, among the oldest of Buddhist
texts, shows the Buddha outlining principles of measured self-government and
how they applied to his brotherhood and to the gana of the Vajjis (Vaggis), a
prominent republican confederation of northeast India. Asked by Vassakara the
Brahmana, the envoy of King Ajasastru, how the Vajjis could be conquered, the
Buddha answered indirectly, by discussing the strengths of their community with
his disciple Ananda:

‘Have you heard, Ananda, that the Vajjians hold full and frequent public assem-
blies?’
‘Lord, so I have heard,’ replied he.
‘So long, Ananda’, rejoined the Blessed One, ‘as the Vajjians hold these full and
frequent public assemblies; so long may they be expected not to decline, but to
prosper.’ (Rhys Davids 1881: 3)

In a series of rhetorical questions to Ananda, the Buddha outlines other require-

ments for the Vajjian prosperity:

So long, Ananda, as the Vajjians meet together in concord, and rise in concord,
and carry out their undertakings in concord . . . so long as they enact nothing not
already established, abrogate nothing that has been already enacted, and act in
accordance with the ancient institutions of the Vajjians as established in former
days . . . so long as they honour and esteem and revere and support the Vajjian
elders, and hold it a point of duty to hearken to their words . . . so long as no
women or girls belonging to their clans are detained among them by force or
abduction . . . so long as they honour and esteem and revere and support the
Vajjian shrines in town or country, and allow not the proper offerings and rites, as
formerly given and performed, to fall into desuetude . . . so long as the rightful
protection, defence and support shall be fully provided for the Arahats among
them, so that Arahats from a distance may enter the realm, and the Arahats therein
may live at ease – so long may the Vajjians be expected not to decline, but to
prosper. (Rhys Davids 1881: 3–4)

We may reasonably take this as a list of ideal republican virtues. There are two
important things about this list. First, the scripture writers not only have the Buddha
endorse these virtues, but claim them for his own, as his own teachings:

Then the Blessed One addressed Vassakara the Brahman, and said, ‘When I was
once staying, O Brahman, at Vesali at the Sarandada Temple, I taught the Vajjians
these conditions of welfare; and so long as those conditions shall continue to exist
among the Vajjians, so long as the Vajjians shall be well instructed in those
54 pre-classical democracy

conditions, so long may we expect them not to decline, but to prosper.’ (Rhys
Davids 1881: 4)

Secondly, the same story tells us that these republican virtues were very close to the
ideal organisational virtues applicable to the monastic life. Once the king’s envoy had
departed, the Buddha and Ananda went to meet the assembly of monks. The Buddha
told the monks that they too must observe seven conditions if they were to prosper.
Three of those conditions were specific to the monastic life, but the first four were
identical to those Buddha had imposed on Vajji: full and frequent assemblies; concord;
preserving and not abrogating established institutions; and honouring elders (Rhys
Davids 1881: 5–7). The preservation of these precepts and other adjurations to
monastic virtue that follow in further sets of seven, were the main point for the
monks who composed and transmitted the Maha-parinibbana-suttanta to us. For
students of Indian political thought of the time, it is striking that righteous and
prosperous communities, whether secular or monastic, rested upon the holding of ‘full
and frequent assemblies’. That first virtue in particular, was not an innovation of the
Buddhist tradition; rather it resembles and grew out of a pre-existing tradition of
‘government by discussion’, rather than by command and submission.
But who discussed? It has been argued elsewhere that it is logical and justifiable to
consider any form of government by discussion a potential subject for historians of
democracy (Muhlberger and Paine 1993). All historical democracies have grown from
less inclusive roots. Students of the Indian republics, however, put off by the
enthusiastic and extravagant claims to ancient democracy made by earlier nationalists
still feel obliged today to deny that the ancient republics, some of which were highly
oligarchic in structure and perhaps even in theory, have anything to do with democracy
(Jayaswal [1911–13] 1943; Singh 2009: 267).

Democracies or Oligarchies?
The ancient republics were far from being lost utopian democracies; indeed, the most
prominent in the sources can be classified as oligarchies dominated by the Kshatriyas,
the warrior class or varna. Indeed, political participation was sometimes further
restricted to a subset of all the Kshatriyas, to the members of a specific royal clan, the
rajanya (Agrawala 1963: 430–2). Enfranchised members of such republics identified
themselves with the slippery term raja, which suggests noble or even regal status, as
well as (a share of) executive power. The Lalitavistara, in a satirical jab, depicts Vesali,
the chief city of the Licchavi gana and of the Vajji confederacy of which it was part,
as being full of Licchavi rajans, each one thinking, ‘I am king, I am king’ (A. K.
Majumdar 1958: 140). In some places, it seems likely that political power was
restricted to the heads of a restricted number of ‘royal families’ (rajakulas) among
the ruling clans. The heads of these families were consecrated as rajas, and thereafter
took part in deliberations of state.
The sources, however, permit another perspective. Both sympathetic and unsym-
pathetic sources showed the republics as being characterised by inclusive, perhaps too
inclusive, politics. The Lalitavistara in the passage just cited presented Vesali as a
 ancient india 55

place where piety, age and rank were ignored; there were too many rajas, and the
worthy few had been pushed aside by a mob of upstarts. Furthermore, power in some
republics was vested in a large number of individuals. In a well-known Jataka tale we
are told that in Vesali there were 7,707 kings (rajas), 7,707 viceroys, 7,707 generals and
7,707 treasurers (Cowell [1895] 1957: I:316. III:1). These figures, since they come
from about half a millennium after the period they describe, have no precise
evidentiary value, but confirm what we find elsewhere: the rulers were many, in
some cases supposedly numbering in the tens of thousands (Agrawala 1963: 432;
Cowell [1895] 1957: IV:94, VI:266; J. P. Sharma 1968: 99). One wonders that if these
numbers were true, would the rajas be citizen/warriors? Certainly the memory of large
ganas can be found in other sources critical of republicanism. The Santi Parva section
of the Mahabharata, for instance, shows the participation of too many people in the
affairs of state as being a great flaw in the republican polity (R. C. Majumdar [1918]
1969: 247–52).
Other evidence also suggests that in some states the enfranchised group was quite
wide. Such a development is hinted at by Kautilya, who wrote a pioneering treatise in
political science. According to him, there were two kinds of janapadas (traditional
regions): ayudhiya-praya, those made up mostly of soldiers; and sreni-praya, those
comprising guilds of craftsmen, traders and agriculturalists (Agrawala 1963: 436–9).
The first were political entities where military tradition alone defined those worthy of
power, while the second would seem to be communities where wealth derived from
peaceful economic activity gave some access to the political process. Sometimes
corporate organisation encouraged secession, so that a political community more
responsive to the membership would be created. Panini’s most thorough modern
student believed that there was in the post-Vedic period ‘a craze for constituting new
republics’, which ‘had reached its climax in the Vahika country and northwest India
where clans constituting of as many as one hundred families only organised themselves
as Ganas’ (Agrawala 1963: 432). There was, indeed, an interesting and various political
tradition of self-government at work in post-Vedic north India, even if our sources give
us a shadowy picture in most cases.
Judging whether the ancient Indian republics were democracies or, better, whether
their history is relevant to the study of democracy depends on the definition of the
crucial term. Scholars rejecting the label democracy as irrelevant to the Indian
republics are engaging with Jayaswal’s rhetoric of a century ago, not with the
historiography of ancient democracy. What makes Indian republics look undemocratic
to us is primarily the fact that the franchise – the right to participate – was so restricted
by modern standards. No doubt the ruling group of most republics thought of their
gana as a closed club – but so did the citizens of Athens, who also defined themselves as
a hereditarily privileged group. We can interrogate the Greeks themselves as to the
relationship between Greek and north Indian ideas of government. Alexander the
Great invaded India in 326 bce, and afterwards Greek monarchs ruled parts of the
subcontinent and interacted with larger areas of it for centuries. As a result, quite a bit
of the history and geography of India survives in Greek, mostly in accounts of
Alexander’s conquests. Alexander’s historians mention a large number of republics of
various sizes, but only a handful of kings (Altekar 1958: 111). Although Greek
56 pre-classical democracy

descriptions of India sometimes featured exotic races, animals and plants, Greek
accounts of Indian politics lack exotic elements. Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander, which
is derived from the eyewitness accounts of Alexander’s companions, portrays him as
meeting many ‘free and independent’ Indian communities. What ‘free and indepen-
dent’ meant is illustrated from the case of Nysa, a city on the border of modern
Afghanistan and Pakistan that was ruled by a president named Aculphis and a council
of 300. After surrendering to Alexander, Aculphis used the city’s supposed connection
with the god Dionysus to seek lenient terms from the king:

The Nysaeans beseech thee, O king out of respect for Dionysus, to allow them to
remain free and independent; for when Dionysus had subjugated the nation of the
Indians . . . he founded this city from the soldiers who had become unfit for military
service . . . From that time we inhabit Nysa, a free city, and we ourselves are
independent, conducting our government with constitutional order. (R. C. Ma-
jumdar 1960: 20)

Nysa was an oligarchy, as further discussion between Alexander and Aculphis

reveals, and a single city-state; the set-up was familiar and the Nysaeans were distant
cousins with comprehensible, Greek-like values. There were other Indian states that
were both larger in area – confederations similar to those in fourth-century Greece –
and wider in franchise (R. C. Majumdar 1960: 47, 64–75). Q. Curtius Rufus and
Diodorus Siculus mention a people called the Sabarcae or Sambastai among whom ‘the
form of government was democratic and not regal’ (R. C. Majumdar 1960: 151). The
prevalence of republicanism and its democratic form is explicitly stated by Diodorus
Siculus. After describing the mythical monarchs who succeeded the god Dionysus as
rulers of India, he says: ‘At last, however, after many years had gone, most of the cities
adopted the democratic form of government, though some retained the kingly until the
invasion of the country by Alexander’ (R. C. Majumdar 1960: 180).
This statement seems to derive from a first-hand description of India by a Greek
traveller named Megasthenes. Around 300 bce, Megasthenes served as ambassador of
the Greek king Seleucus Nicator to the Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya, and in
the course of his duties crossed northern India to the eastern city of Patna, where he
lived for a while (Stein 1893: XV:1:232–3). His evaluation of the state of northern
India, and the existence of democracy there, is the statement of an experienced and
educated Greek politician. It is worth remembering that in the previous century the
grammarian Panini attested to a special term for the gana where ‘there was no
distinction between high and low’ (Agrawala 1963: 428).

The End of Ancient Republicanism

Scholars looking at the record as a whole have understandably been interested in the
ultimate failure of the ancient republics. This is more complicated than a simple story
of monarchical success. Comparison with recent scholarship on the Greek poleis is
instructive. Traditionally the end of the poleis style of government has been identified
with the defeat of Athens and its allies by the king of Macedon, Philip II, at Chaeronea
 ancient india 57

(338 bce); after that, the vast majority of Greek city-states were subject to one or
another Macedonian or Hellenistic king. Yet, as M. H. Hansen points out, the loss of
sovereignty was not the crucial factor for ancient Greek citizens that it has been for
modern historians. For the Greeks, as long as a polis enjoyed internal self-government,
it could consider itself ‘free and independent’. Hansen puts it this way:

In the Hellenistic kingdoms all poleis were actually subordinate to the ruling
monarch, but in different degrees. Many poleis were tribute-paying and so formally
subordinate to the king, but many were formally free, independent states. The
typical ‘independent’ polis was now a democracy (dēmokratia) that had its freedom
(eleutheria) and self-government (autonomia) guaranteed by royal rescript published
by the Hellenistic king in whose kingdom the city-state lay. (Hansen 2006: 50)

In contrast to our modern understanding of their situation, many Greeks of the

Hellenistic and even the Roman period believed they lived under a regime of
democracy. That local democracy was eroded over centuries as the imperial govern-
ment became more bureaucratic and interventionist, until the reign of Justinian saw
the last traces of what Hansen calls ‘the Greek city-state culture’ (Hansen 2006: 50).
There are some similarities in the evolution of the Indian republics. The Pali Canon
shows that already in the time of the Buddha and Mahavira, even major republics like
the Vajji were having a difficult time competing with monarchical warlords. The Vajji
confederation, based on the populous city of Vesali and dominated by the Licchavis,
seems to have attained for a short time hegemonic or imperial status like Sparta or
Athens briefly did; similarly, after the Vajjis were defeated and their federation broken
up, we hear of no more such hegemonic cities in northeastern India. There were large
republican federations in northwestern India with tens of thousands of rajas at the time
of Alexander, but, again, after his intervention we have no records of such. The larger
polities of post-Alexandrian times seem to have been monarchies.
Ganas survived nevertheless, as coins and inscriptions attest. Ancient Indian
empires were rather precarious, and the communities that they conquered revived
after the empires fell apart. The process of competition with imperial monarchies,
however, seems to have strengthened the always existing tendency towards oligarchy.
We have seen that many republics were content even in the earliest post-Vedic era with
a very exclusive definition of the political community. Intermarriage of leading
members of ganas with the royal clans of monarchies, recounted in the stories of
the Buddha’s lifetime, can only have encouraged such exclusivity. Later, states known
to be republics in earlier times were subject to hereditary executives. Like Medici
Florence, eventually such republics became monarchies (Altekar 1958: 137–8; A. K.
Majumdar 1980: 144). There should be no surprise that such a development was
possible, or that leading families of powerful republics should adopt aristocratic habits
and its scions pursue kingly or at the very least oligarchic ambitions. Not all citizens of
democracies are democrats.
An evolution away from egalitarianism can also be seen in the literature of politics
and religion. Later Brahmanical classics (300 bce–ce 200) such as the Mahabharata,
the writings of Kautilya and the Manu-Smrti opposed the gana–sangha type of
58 pre-classical democracy

government. Kautilya, who is traditionally identified with the chief minister of the
Mauryan conqueror Chandragupta Maurya (300 bce), is famous for advising monarchs
on how to tame or destroy ganas through subterfuge; more importantly, he formulated
a political science in which royalty was normal, even though his own text shows that
ganas were very important factors in the politics of his time (Kautilya [300 bce] 1951:
410). Similarly, the religious law book Manu-Smrti formulated a systematic view of
society where human equality was non-existent and unthinkable (Manu [200 bce–ce
200] 1886).
Members of ganas were encouraged to fit themselves into a hierarchical, mon-
archical framework by practical considerations, too. Warlord rajas with unique
religious claims could not only inspire fear, but also offer a sometimes welcome court
of last resort to competing ganas, whose claims to autonomy and self-determination
must often have come into conflict (as we see in the Italian communes of the High
Middle Ages). How were these claims to be sorted out other than by force? The king
had an answer to this question: if he were acknowledged as ‘the only monarch [i.e.,
raja, chief executive] of all the corporations’ he would commit himself to preserving
the legitimate privileges of each of them, and even protect the lesser members of each
gana from abuse of power by their leaders (Kautilya [300 bce] 1951: 410). It was a
tempting offer, and it was slowly accepted, sometimes freely, sometimes under
compulsion. The end result was the acceptance of a social order in which many
ganas and sanghas existed, but none were sovereign and none were committed to any
general egalitarian view of society. They were committed instead to a hierarchy in
which they were promised a secure place (R. C. Majumdar [1918] 1969: 42–59). Such a
notional hierarchy seems to have been constructed in north India by the fifth century
ce. Even the Buddhist sangha, perhaps the greatest ‘republican confederacy’ of all,
was chased out of the subcontinent.
Government by discussion must have continued within many ganas and sanghas, but
the ideas of hierarchy and inequality of caste were increasingly dominant. The degree
of corporate autonomy in later Indian society was considerable, but a corporation that
accepts itself as a subcaste in a great divine hierarchy is different from the more
pugnacious ganas and sanghas of the Pali Canon, Kautilya or even the Jataka stories.

Conclusion
The significance of the Indian republics and other forms of ‘government by discussion’
can be summed up in three points. First, there is enough information to show that even
in the supposed home of oriental despotism, there were in ancient times institutions
and practices that were created, named and commonly used to implement a degree of
equality among the members of self-governing communities. The ancient subconti-
nent, with its documented councils and assemblies, voting procedures and constitu-
tional awareness, shared in the worldwide human tendency to create quasi-democratic
organisations at the local level. Secondly, there is also evidence for a degree of
egalitarian doctrine associated with these practical developments. How many ancient
Indians were sincerely moved by democratic principles is difficult to say; in the ancient
subcontinent, as in ancient Greece, opponents of and sceptics about democracy
 ancient india 59

dominate our sources. Thirdly, the republican and the quasi-democratic history of
India, interesting in its own right, has had, like the history of classical Greece, a
significant effect on modern history, in that it has challenged people to look into their
historical experience and find in it inspiration for democratic change.

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