Natural Order and Wise Synthesis:

Sovereignty-Violence-Varṇa in the Arthaśāstra and Aurobindo

Abstract

The Dalit Panthers Manifesto made the claim that a revolutionary transformation of Indian society was necessary because of its systemic character—i.e., a form of systemic violence that “survives the ever-changing forms of power structure” from premodernity (“Hindu feudalism”) into and beyond the anticolonial struggle.  This article aims to analyze two such systems of sovereignty-violence-varna, one in a premodern and the other in an anticolonial treatise, the Kauṭīlya’s Arthaśāstra and Aurobindo Ghose’s essays “Indian Polity” in The Foundations of Indian Culture.  This article investigates how these visions of Indian polity—rightly ordered distinction; wise, stable synthesis—each necessitate two sovereign violences of varna:  what, in complementary analyses, Walter Benjamin called lawmaking and law-preserving violence, and what Geroges Dumézil identified as magical and juridical sovereignty (of raj and brahman, respectively). By analysing two iterations of the sovereignty-violence-varna system, this article suggests that Brahmanic political theology might be better understood not as primarily based on inclusion/exclusion as in an Agambenian understanding, but rather on relations of opposition and complementarity.