Shloka 8
Power and Prudence — Chanakya Niti
कुग्रामवासः कुलहीनसेवा कुभोजनं क्रोधमुखी च भार्या ।
पुत्रश्च मूर्खो विधवा च कन्या विनाग्निना षट्प्रदहन्ति कायम् ॥
kugrāmavāsaḥ kulahīnasevā kubhojanaṃ krodhamukhī ca bhāryā |
putraś ca mūrkho vidhavā ca kanyā vināgninā ṣaṭ-pradahanti kāyam ||
Living in a bad village, serving the low-born, poor food, an anger-faced wife; a foolish son and a widowed daughter—these six burn the body even without fire.
FAQs
In the Chanakya-nīti/nīti-śāstra tradition, short verses often catalogue social and domestic factors believed to affect stability, reputation, and well-being. This shloka reflects premodern concerns with locality (the quality of a settlement), dependence (whom one serves), household harmony, and lineage-based status—ideas that circulated in didactic anthologies used for moral-political instruction rather than as descriptive sociology.
Suffering is framed as “burning” (pradah-) of the body/person (kāya) caused by six adverse circumstances. The verse presents these as socially and domestically situated stressors—environment (kugrāma), economic/social dependence (sevā), material conditions (kubhojana), and family relations (spouse/child/daughter)—rather than as metaphysical causes.
The key metaphor is vināgninā … pradahanti (“they burn even without fire”), a common Sanskrit trope for intense mental or social distress expressed as physical heat or combustion. Compounds such as kugrāmavāsaḥ and kulahīnasevā condense evaluative judgments into compact nominal phrases typical of nīti verse, while krodhamukhī (“anger-faced/anger-forward”) uses a bodily image to characterize temperament.