Shloka 10
Governance and Policy — Chanakya Niti
यस्माच्च प्रियमिच्छेत्तु तस्य ब्रूयात्सदा प्रियम् ।
व्याधो मृगवधं कर्तुं गीतं गायति सुस्वरम् ॥
yasmācca priyam icchet tu tasya brūyāt sadā priyam |
vyādho mṛgavadhaṁ kartuṁ gītaṁ gāyati susvaram ||
Whoever seeks what is pleasing from another should always speak what is pleasing to that person; like a hunter who, to kill a deer, sings in a sweet voice.
FAQs
Within the Nītiśāstra tradition, such verses are commonly situated in discussions of persuasion, courtly interaction, and pragmatic social conduct, reflecting a milieu in which speech is treated as an instrument of power in political and interpersonal settings of early and medieval South Asia.
The verse frames persuasive speech as strategically “pleasing” language directed toward a desired source of benefit, presenting it as a conventional technique that can be used to obtain outcomes, including outcomes that are ethically ambiguous when paired with the hunter-and-deer illustration.
The parallelism of priyam (desired benefit/pleasantness) and priyam (pleasant words) foregrounds a rhetorical economy: pleasing speech becomes a means to secure what is desired. The hunter (vyādha) singing sweetly (susvaram) functions as a period-typical metaphor for alluring presentation masking harmful intent, a motif found across Sanskrit didactic literature.