The Corruption Perception Index 2025, published earlier this week, granted India a score of 39/100, on par with Albania, the Maldives, and Morocco.
Corruption in India frequently provokes public outrage: Only last month, for example, the Lokpal was compelled to cancel a shocking Rs 5 crore tender for luxury cars. Over a thousand years ago, eerily similar sentiments were first articulated by classical Sanskrit poets, well worth a reminder today: A vocal skepticism of over-affluent bureaucrats, unscrupulous godmen, and irresponsible rulers.
The limitations of the king
From the inception of Indian statecraft, political theorists were aware of the ever-present dangers of corruption. The Arthashastra (c. 300 BCE–200 CE) recommends that all senior officials be tested by secret agents (Book 1, Chapter 10), and that they be made to regularly inspect their underlings—with fines and punishments recommended for any embezzlement. Even royals were not above suspicion: Secret agents were to report on the activities of princes and queens. (Book 1, Chapter 17) The court was to be kept in line by an austere, disciplined king. In fact, Kautilya goes so far as to say that a ruler who is either too lenient or harsh would incite everyone from householders to wandering hermits to rise in revolt. (Book 1, Chapter 4, verse 12).
In Sanskritic political thought, the merits and capabilities of the ruler were central to ensuring that the people lived in peace and prosperity. However, a parallel and recurring idea is that some kings were simply incapable of rulership. Kalidasa, the great poet-dramatist of the 4th–5th centuries CE, depicts both types in his epic Raghuvamsam. The titular dynasty of Raghu is established by vigorous conquerors. However, it ends in ignominy thanks to Agnivarma, a distant descendant of the god-king Ram, who behaves like the classic political ‘nepo baby’: “Plunged in sensual pleasure, reckoning not of royal duty…”
What applied to the king applied, more generally, to the courtly circle. In the Padataditaka of Syamilaka, roughly contemporaneous with the Raghuvamsam, we see a view from the bottom up—gossip from the courtesan’s district of ancient Ujjain, related by a wandering dilettante. We hear of a pair of Brahmin brothers, one of whom is kicked on the head by a courtesan, who then rushes to the council of town Brahmins to demand justice. The other is dragged out of a brothel for “a dispute with barbarian stablemen” until he is rescued by a general who works for his brother-in-law (verse 240). Whether these were true stories or not, clearly Sanskrit dramatists knew that the rich and powerful of ancient India could escape sticky situations through family connections.
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The minister and the bureaucrat
Medieval Indian kingdoms, much like the Indian state today, suffered from severe limitations in capacity. Local officials of various ranks could easily collude. A particularly egregious example is narrated in the Yashastilaka, a 10th century Sanskrit epic by the Deccan Jain teacher Somadeva Suri. In Book III, a spy dressed as a mendicant “with a crown of peacock feathers surmounted by a crescent… a necklace made out of magic roots… a garland made of old rags… upper arms decorated with bracelets of tin balls, and forearms enveloped with buffalo-horn” gives the king a report of a minister who is completely out of control, “a monster of financial corruption”. He forces cultivators into unpaid work; he demands taxes before the harvest; he allows troops to move during the harvest. (Verse 172). On top of it, he had stolen land-grants to temples and Brahmins, melted down sacred bronzes, and replaced them with cheap imitations.
All this, however, pales in comparison to the picture of apathy, corruption and violence painted by the Kashmiri pandit Kshemendra, active in the 11th century at a time of great cultural change. Brilliant poets and aestheticians hobnobbed with pugilistic provincial warlords and ruthless kings—some of whom did indeed melt down idols in order to fund armies. His Narma Mala is, without competition, the most excoriating indictment of Indian bureaucracy ever written. In contrast to most Sanskrit works, which begin with a prayer to a god, Kshemendra instead begins the Narma Mala with “Victory to that lord supreme, that illustrious bureaucrat, infallible, who can at will delude the whole world with deceptions.”
Kshemendra then proceeds to narrate a legendary origin for the bureaucrat (the term he uses is Kayastha, but this was before Kayasths had been organised as an endogamous caste.) After the god Vishnu destroyed the demons, we are told, the chief demon accountant prayed to Kali, the chaotic deity of the End Times. Kali blessed this accountant with a great weapon (a pen), whose “black ink will engulf everything and accomplish all your objectives.” Then, as the descendants of this accountant spread out over the Earth, Kali dances, “dressed in birch-bark documents with scissors to trim them in hand, writing on the sky with an ink-filled pen, a briefcase under his arm”.
The Narma Mala was apparently written after some experience with a bureaucratic clique, who then serve as a narrative device for Kshemendra to pour scorn on the amorality of society more broadly. Visible throughout the narrative is how the delicate checks and balances and tests and informers of the Arthashastra could easily be subverted through collusion, greed and apathy.
For, in the Narma Mala, far from reporting on corruption, bureaucrats use spies to oppress the people and identify easy targets. The poet describes an entire chain of avarice: The king’s Head of Domestic Affairs is tipped off about a wealthy temple, to which he appoints a corrupt caretaker. This man lets soldiers loose on the temple’s tenants, including homemakers and children. Next an official scribe joins the clique to issue even more taxation orders, with the collusion of a treasury officer who inflates the revenue estimates and appoints puppets to the temple board. Next, a village officer, described as “the progeny of an ordure-filled hell”, arrives on the scene and purloins fineries from the entire village in the name of “gifts”, all while hypocritically “bowing to the Brahmins, circumambulating the cows…” The villagers flee, only to be further punished with eerily contemporary measures: “Confiscate! Arrest! Imprison! Destroy the house!” (Translation by AND Haksar).
The story continues, mutating further and further as more vulture-like characters are introduced. The village officer’s young wife is seduced by local libertines. The officer seeks advice from a corrupt godman, ridiculously obese, with disreputable followers. Surgeons, courtesans, astrologers, secretaries and clerks beg the guru for financial opportunities. The situation is only resolved when the first link in the chain—the king’s Head of Domestic Affairs—decamps with his ill-gotten fortune. The king turns his wrath on the rest of the clique, persecuting everyone else until the village officer finally dies as a beggar in a sewer of excrement.
Reading this text from over a thousand years ago, one is forced to wonder what the great satirists of the Sanskrit tradition might make of corruption, unjust punishment, the nexus of crime and charlatans, and bureaucratic unaccountability today.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of ‘Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire’ and the award-winning ‘Lords of the Deccan’. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha.