Republic Day 2025: Panchayats, with their system of consultative discussions, hark back to the lasting legacy of the ancient republics of the Mahajanapadas, says Aloka Parasher Sen

January 26, 2025, marks 75 years since the day India adopted its constitution. While modern India’s republican history begins on this day, the country and the region’s tryst with republicanism is very old.

It dates back to the age of the Mahajanapadas, the 16 monarchies and aristocratic oligarchic republics in ancient India that existed between the Later and the Post Vedic Periods, from the sixth to fourth centuries before common era.

What exactly were these polities? What were the circumstances that led to their formation? And what relevance do these hold for India (as well as the world) today?

To get answers to these questions, Down To Earth caught up with Aloka Parasher Sen, Professor of History (Retd.), Department of History, University of Hyderabad.

Parasher Sen has written extensively on Ancient India. Among her works are Mlecchas in Early India (1991), a Reader on Subordinate and Marginal Groups in Early India up to 1500 AD (2004), Social and Economic History of Early Deccan -- Some Interpretations (1993; 2019); Settlement and Local Histories of the Early Deccan (2021) and Gender, Religion and Local History of the Early Deccan (2022).

Excerpts:

Rajat Ghai (RG): Were the Mahajanapadas monarchical or republican?

Aloka Parasher Sen (APS): The Mahajanapadas is an era in Indian history when ethnic geographical communities became territorial.

A large majority of them were monarchical states, mostly in the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Some of them though were what are called ganasanghas and were in the foothills of the Himalayas. These were mostly ‘republics’ or ‘oligarchies’.

It is interesting to note as to why the oligarchic or republican form of janapadas continued to survive on the foothills of the Himalayas. Non-monarchical communities like the Mallas, the Vajji or the Vrijji territory north of the Ganga till the Nepal hills and the Licchavis remained oligarchic and continued to have a system of governance where the local rajas or chieftains of those areas would take decisions and run the state.

In the monarchical states (like Magadha, Kosala, Kasi), governance was in the hands of individual kings. Interestingly, both the Buddha and Mahavira came from non-monarchical states. The Mallas are thought to have been ruled by 500 chiefs and like the Videhas, they are supposed to have first developed a rule-based understanding of how a republican polity should be run.

RG: How different were the Mahajanapadas from the Greek city states, the Roman Republic and other polities in Antiquity?

APS: The city was ‘the state’ among the city states of the Greeks and the Romans.

Groups like the Kosalas and the Magadhas were not originally bound by territory. But they eventually began to settle down and founded the first territorial entities or states. These became crystallised by the time of the Buddha into 16 Mahajanapadas — Anga, Asmaka, Avanti, Chedi, Gandhara, Kasi, Kamboja, Kosala, Kuru, Magadha, Malla, Matsya, Panchala, Surasena, Vajji and Vatsa. Buddhist texts also mention 24 cities among these 16 states.

The jana in janapada refers to kin-based communities. Scholars have speculated that perhaps an earlier form of collective system — like the sabha and samiti mentioned in the Rig Veda — where decisions were taken by more than one person in a jana-based community survived in these non-monarchical oligarchic republics.

The Greeks and the Romans had a city as their state. But these Mahajanapadas had a much larger territory. Each had a fort or a capital city or durga, as it is called in the Arthashastra.

The Arthashastra finally put together the idea of what would make a powerful king rule these states. So if you start from the northwestern Mahajanapadas of Kamboja and Gandhara there were cities like Charsadda and Taxila. In the Ganga-Yamuna Doab, home to Kuru and Panchala, there were cities like Hastinapur. Magadha had its capital at Rajgir, only changing to Pataliputra with the Mauryas. Anga had its capital at Champa. Vaishali was a very important city. But these were cities within these states.

RG: Were villages in the Mahajanapadas themselves small republics in a way?

APS: No. Villages were not republics in their own right. The meaning of the formation of a state is when the hereditary rulers (rajanyas) — or senior lineages as Romila Thapar has argued — begin to tax communities.

The Age of the Mahajanapadas is a transitory one from the Later Vedic to the Post Vedic Period (the time of the Buddha and Mahavira).

So, when these senior lineages begin to settle down, they begin to extract revenue. Under them comes not only an army but a system of governance like a Mantri Parishad (ministerial council), a Senani (Commander-in-chief), a capital and so on.

The villages thus are not republics but the smallest units for the generation of agrarian surplus which then goes into the hands of the consuming classes.

The junior lineages — from the younger sons — are called gahapatis or householders in Buddhist literature. These gahapatis would be rich householders owning land and also dabbling in trade.

There is thus a transition from a simple pastoral society into a more full-fledged agrarian economy with rice cultivation, especially in eastern India. And that generates a lot of surplus in the form of taxes. This, in turn, is very important for the formation of a state.

The villages are thus not republics. That term can only be applied to the ganasanghas.

RG: What is the legacy of the Mahajanapadas for India and the world?

APS: Their legacy is that primary state formation in northern India (and India as a whole) is based on their experiences and foundations of how a state should be governed, leading ultimately to the creation of a text like the Arthashastra.

The modes through which proper governance and a powerful state can come into being — it is the experiences of these Mahajanapada cultures which culminated in the way that Kautilya began to write and think about why it was important to have a solid and powerful state.

However, from my personal experience the collective monarchies or ganasangha system was also very significant. It did not totally disappear. This consultative way in which rural or smaller communities still continue to use those methods of collective governance at a local or smaller level through the panchayats is where we see the lasting legacy of the Mahajanapadas.

Interestingly, Mahavira and the Buddha talked about an ideology of renunciation at a time when the state had become powerful and people were acquiring more resources. Their ideologies were probably questioning this system of acquisition. Therefore, the Buddha used the model of the ganasangha to develop the Buddhist sangha.

There are thus so many things that we can draw upon because primary state formation in any country or region has to go through the breakup of the tribal form of polity or lineage-based society.

Ultimately, the infighting between the Mahajanapadas laid the groundwork for one of them, Magadha to emerge supreme. The Mahajanapadas provided a template for the Mauryan Empire that succeeded them as the paramount polity in ancient India.