Shloka 11
Power and Prudence — Chanakya Niti
सकृज्जल्पन्ति राजानः सकृज्जल्पन्ति पण्डिताः ।
सकृत्कन्याः प्रदीयन्ते त्रीण्येतानि सकृत्सकृत् ॥
sakṛj jalpanti rājānaḥ sakṛj jalpanti paṇḍitāḥ |
sakṛt kanyāḥ pradīyante trīṇy etāni sakṛt-sakṛt ||
A king speaks once, a scholar speaks once, and a daughter is given in marriage once—these three are matters of once only.
FAQs
In the broader nītiśāstra tradition, such aphorisms reflect elite norms of speech and decision-making in monarchical and scholastic milieus, and they also register marriage as a social institution tied to kinship, inheritance, and alliance-making. The verse can be read as indexing a cultural ideal of finality and restraint in high-stakes utterances and transactions within premodern South Asian courtly and learned settings.
The verse frames finality through the adverb sakṛt (“once”), repeating it to emphasize irreversibility. It associates “once-ness” with (1) royal speech, (2) scholarly speech, and (3) the giving of a daughter in marriage, presenting these as actions conventionally treated as decisive and not to be casually repeated within the textual worldview.
Linguistically, the parallel clauses (sakṛj…sakṛj…sakṛt…) create a triadic structure typical of Sanskrit gnomic verse, reinforcing mnemonic force. The repetition of sakṛt and the compound-like reduplication sakṛt-sakṛt function rhetorically to mark social acts as performative and binding; “speaking once” operates less as a literal claim and more as a metaphor for authoritative, carefully weighed speech.