Chanakya Niti — Ethics of Action, Shloka 21
ऋणकर्ता पिता शत्रुर्माता च व्यभिचारिणी ।
भार्या रूपवती शत्रुः पुत्रः शत्रुरपण्डितः ॥
ṛṇakartā pitā śatrur mātā ca vyabhicāriṇī |
bhāryā rūpavatī śatruḥ putraḥ śatrur apaṇḍitaḥ ||
ঋণ কৰা পিতা শত্রু, আৰু ব্যভিচাৰিণী মাতাও শত্রু। অতিশয় ৰূপৱতী পত্নী শত্রু, আৰু অপণ্ডিত পুত্ৰও শত্রু।
FAQs
In the broader nītiśāstra milieu, kinship and household stability are treated as integral to social order and political well-being. This verse reflects a genre tendency to describe domestic or moral disruption (e.g., indebtedness, perceived sexual transgression, concerns about desirability and loyalty, and lack of learning) using the idiom of “enemy,” a metaphor that aligns private life with the risk-management logic common in classical statecraft and didactic literature.
Here “śatru” functions primarily as a metaphor for a source of danger, liability, or reputational harm within the household rather than a literal external foe. Each case pairs a family role with a condition portrayed as producing vulnerability—financial (debt), moral/social (vyabhicāra), sexual-politics of the household (rūpavatī), and educational/capacity concerns (apaṇḍita).
The verse uses a compact nominal style typical of gnomic Sanskrit: role + qualifier + “śatruḥ.” Terms like “vyabhicāriṇī” carry strong normative force in premodern legal-ethical discourse, and “rūpavatī” is deployed not as praise but as a trigger for suspicion within a patriarchal social imagination. The repeated “śatruḥ” creates a rhetorical cadence that equates different kinds of domestic risk under a single conceptual label.