Shloka 1
Virtuous Company — Chanakya Niti
अनृतं साहसं माया मूर्खत्वमतिलोभिता ।
अशौचत्वं निर्दयत्वं स्त्रीणां दोषाः स्वभावजाः ॥
anṛtaṃ sāhasaṃ māyā mūrkhatvam atilobhitā |
aśaucatvaṃ nirdayatvaṃ strīṇāṃ doṣāḥ svabhāvajāḥ ||
The verse describes a traditional catalogue of perceived faults—untruthfulness, rashness, deceit, foolishness, excessive greed, impurity, and lack of compassion—as being innate in women, presenting this as a generalized claim within the text’s historical moral discourse.
FAQs
In the broader Nītiśāstra tradition, verses often present compact moral typologies intended to summarize social assumptions relevant to household management and political prudence. This line reflects a premodern discourse that frequently framed certain groups through generalized character claims, which can be studied as part of the history of social and political ideas rather than as empirical description.
Here doṣa functions as a list-category for negatively valued traits (e.g., anṛta, sāhasa, māyā) and is explicitly linked to svabhāva-jāḥ, indicating that the verse presents these traits as arising from inherent disposition rather than circumstance.
The verse uses a nominal list (a series of abstract nouns) culminating in a summarizing predicate—doṣāḥ svabhāvajāḥ—forming an aphoristic style typical of didactic Sanskrit. The term svabhāva (“own-nature”) is philosophically loaded across Sanskrit literature, and in this context it serves to naturalize the enumerated qualities as essentialized attributes within the text’s rhetorical framework.