Shloka 16
Right Conduct — Chanakya Niti
वापीकूपतडागानामारामसुरवेश्मनाम् ।
उच्छेदने निराशङ्कः स विप्रो म्लेच्छ उच्यते ॥
vāpī-kūpa-taḍāgānām ārāma-sura-veśmanām |
ucchedane nirāśaṅkaḥ sa vipro mleccha ucyate ||
A Brahmin who, without hesitation, destroys stepwells, wells, ponds, gardens, and temples is called a “mleccha” in this moral idiom.
FAQs
In premodern South Asian polities, water infrastructure (wells, tanks, stepwells) and cultivated public spaces (gardens) were widely treated as meritorious public goods, often maintained through royal patronage, local communities, and religious endowments. This verse reflects a normative moral taxonomy in which harming such shared resources—and temples as institutional sites—was framed as a serious transgression, even when committed by someone of high ritual status.
Here, 'mleccha' functions as a label of moral and cultural deviance rather than a precise ethnonym. The verse applies the term to a 'vipra' who destroys civic and religious infrastructure, indicating that the category is being used rhetorically to mark behavior as outside accepted norms, regardless of the actor’s formal social identity.
The compound list (vāpī–kūpa–taḍāga; ārāma; sura-veśman) enumerates institutions associated with collective welfare and religious life, creating a catalog of protected social goods. The contrast between 'vipra' and 'mleccha' is a deliberate rhetorical inversion: a person expected to embody learned or dharmic conduct is described with a term typically used for the culturally ‘other,’ reinforcing the text’s moral condemnation through social-category reversal.