Shloka 21
Ethics of Action — Chanakya Niti
ऋणकर्ता पिता शत्रुर्माता च व्यभिचारिणी ।
भार्या रूपवती शत्रुः पुत्रः शत्रुरपण्डितः ॥
ṛṇakartā pitā śatrur mātā ca vyabhicāriṇī |
bhāryā rūpavatī śatruḥ putraḥ śatrur apaṇḍitaḥ ||
A father who brings debt is an enemy; a mother who is sexually wayward is an enemy. A wife of excessive beauty is an enemy; an unlearned son is an enemy.
FAQs
In the broader nītiśāstra milieu, kinship and household stability are treated as integral to social order and political well-being. This verse reflects a genre tendency to describe domestic or moral disruption (e.g., indebtedness, perceived sexual transgression, concerns about desirability and loyalty, and lack of learning) using the idiom of “enemy,” a metaphor that aligns private life with the risk-management logic common in classical statecraft and didactic literature.
Here “śatru” functions primarily as a metaphor for a source of danger, liability, or reputational harm within the household rather than a literal external foe. Each case pairs a family role with a condition portrayed as producing vulnerability—financial (debt), moral/social (vyabhicāra), sexual-politics of the household (rūpavatī), and educational/capacity concerns (apaṇḍita).
The verse uses a compact nominal style typical of gnomic Sanskrit: role + qualifier + “śatruḥ.” Terms like “vyabhicāriṇī” carry strong normative force in premodern legal-ethical discourse, and “rūpavatī” is deployed not as praise but as a trigger for suspicion within a patriarchal social imagination. The repeated “śatruḥ” creates a rhetorical cadence that equates different kinds of domestic risk under a single conceptual label.