Chanakya Niti — Power and Prudence, Shloka 11
सकृज्जल्पन्ति राजानः सकृज्जल्पन्ति पण्डिताः ।
सकृत्कन्याः प्रदीयन्ते त्रीण्येतानि सकृत्सकृत् ॥
sakṛj jalpanti rājānaḥ sakṛj jalpanti paṇḍitāḥ |
sakṛt kanyāḥ pradīyante trīṇy etāni sakṛt-sakṛt ||
الملوك لا يتكلمون إلا مرة، والحكماء لا يتكلمون إلا مرة، والبنت لا تُزوَّج إلا مرة—هذه الثلاثة لا تكون إلا مرةً واحدة.
FAQs
In the broader nītiśāstra tradition, such aphorisms reflect elite norms of speech and decision-making in monarchical and scholastic milieus, and they also register marriage as a social institution tied to kinship, inheritance, and alliance-making. The verse can be read as indexing a cultural ideal of finality and restraint in high-stakes utterances and transactions within premodern South Asian courtly and learned settings.
The verse frames finality through the adverb sakṛt (“once”), repeating it to emphasize irreversibility. It associates “once-ness” with (1) royal speech, (2) scholarly speech, and (3) the giving of a daughter in marriage, presenting these as actions conventionally treated as decisive and not to be casually repeated within the textual worldview.
Linguistically, the parallel clauses (sakṛj…sakṛj…sakṛt…) create a triadic structure typical of Sanskrit gnomic verse, reinforcing mnemonic force. The repetition of sakṛt and the compound-like reduplication sakṛt-sakṛt function rhetorically to mark social acts as performative and binding; “speaking once” operates less as a literal claim and more as a metaphor for authoritative, carefully weighed speech.