Shloka 4
Right Conduct — Chanakya Niti
कलौ दशसहस्राणि हरिस्त्यजति मेदिनीम् ।
तदर्धं जाह्नवीतोयं तदर्धं ग्रामदेवताः ॥
kalau daśasahasrāṇi haristyajati medinīm |
tadardhaṃ jāhnavītoyaṃ tadardhaṃ grāmadevatāḥ ||
In the Kali age, Hari (Viṣṇu) is said to depart the earth for ten thousand (measures of time); half of that sacred presence abides in the waters of the Jāhnavī (the Gaṅgā), and half among the village deities.
FAQs
The verse reflects a late-classical/medieval Sanskrit cultural milieu in which Kali Yuga served as a framework for explaining perceived religious and social decline, while simultaneously reaffirming enduring loci of sacrality—especially the Gaṅgā and local village cults (grāmadevatāḥ). In archival terms, it illustrates how nīti collections sometimes incorporate broadly shared Purāṇic-religious ideas alongside pragmatic aphorisms.
The verse frames sacred presence as something that can be described as withdrawing from the world in the Kali age, yet remaining accessible through specific repositories: the waters of the Gaṅgā (Jāhnavī) and village deities. This functions as a descriptive mapping of where sacral power is thought to persist within a periodized cosmology.
Key terms are culturally loaded: 'kalau' invokes the yuga system; 'Hari' operates as a metonym for divine order; 'tyajati medinīm' uses the concrete verb 'to abandon' to depict cosmic withdrawal; 'Jāhnavī' is a poetic epithet for the Gaṅgā, anchoring the claim in sacred geography; and 'grāmadevatāḥ' points to decentralized, local religiosity. The repeated 'tadardham' creates a balanced partition, rhetorically distributing sacrality between pan-Indic pilgrimage tradition and village-level cult practice.