INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADVANCE RESEARCH
IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY

Political legitimacy - the question of why people accept and obey authority - has been a persistent theme in political thought. Western traditions typically frame the problem through consent, contract, or procedural rationality: Hobbes and Locke describe political order as arising from an exchange of natural liberty for peace and security, while Weber distinguishes traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational bases of obedience. These frameworks, though influential, do not exhaust the ways political authority has been justified. Classical Indian political thought grounds legitimacy instead in the ruler's moral responsibility to sustain order, a condition captured by the metaphor of matsyanyaya, the "law of the fishes," in which the strong devour the weak in the absence of authority. This paper traces the evolution of that metaphor across two texts separated by genre and historical context - the Santi Parva of the Mahabharata and Kamandaka's Nitisara - to recover an indigenous theory of legitimacy. Where the Santi Parva grounds kingship in dharma (moral duty), the Nitisara reframes the same concern through niti (prudence and statecraft). Read together, the two texts yield what this paper calls "ethical realism": a model in which legitimacy is neither purely moral idealism nor pure pragmatism, but a continuously earned balance between virtue and competence. The paper situates this synthesis against Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Weber to clarify what is distinctive about the Indian model, while also noting the limits of treating dharma-based kingship as an uncomplicated ideal.