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a magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship

AN ANCIENT TREATISE AND THE MAKING OF

MODERN INDIA
7.1.2016

BY ANANYA VAJPEYI
  

I
n the intellectual history of modern India, 1909 was a turning point. That
year Mohandas Gandhi, a middle­aged Gujarati lawyer based in South
Africa, wrote his slim but Galilean freedom charter, Hind Swaraj, or Indian
Home Rule, which made the case for ending British colonialism in India.
Vinayak Savarkar, eventually to be recognized as the father of Hindutva, or
majoritarian Hindu nationalism, published an English translation of his Marathi
history of the sepoy mutiny, The Indian War of Independence of 1857,
anonymously signed “By an Indian Nationalist.” And in the same year, down
south, Dr. R. Shamasastry, the Chief Librarian of the Mysore Government
Oriental Library, published the editio princeps of Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, a
Sanskrit work on politics and statecraft then thought to date from the reign of
the Emperor Candragupta (c. 321–c. 297 BCE). Candragupta was the founder
of the Mauryan kingdom, the earliest imperial polity covering a huge swathe of
the subcontinent, more or less the entirety of what we now think of as “India.”
The influence of Gandhi and Savarkar on the making of modern India is
undisputed. But how did the Arthaśāstra, an erudite treatise from Indic
antiquity, become one of the key books from ancient India to have an important
career in modern times? The Arthaśāstra is not just a relic of a remote past; it
continues to animate discussions about political life in contemporary India.
Defense analysts, management gurus, and op­ed page pundits at Indian think
tanks are fond of quoting the Arthaśāstra. According to the political
psychologist and public intellectual Ashis Nandy, this text manifests, at least in
the fantasy of modern­day hawks who like to flaunt their familiarity with the
classics, an ideology of power that could be described as “controlled pathology,”
though it cannot really be taken to advocate out­and­out tyranny or a state that
might be called dictatorial. 1
In an engaging account of the rediscovery of a manuscript of Lucretius’s 1st­
century BCE Latin didactic poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)
by a papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, in the library of a Benedictine
monastery in southern Germany, in 1417, Stephen Greenblatt argues that it was
the appearance of this book in early 15th­century Europe that led to the
“swerve” toward Renaissance Humanism. 2 By putting Lucretius’s ideas back
into circulation after centuries of amnesia about this text, Bracciolini, a so­called
book­hunter, inadvertently became “a midwife to modernity.” Greenblatt traces
Lucretius’s influence throughout the literature and arts of the Renaissance, a
period in Europe’s cultural history that is by very definition about the “rebirth”
of Greek and Roman antiquity a thousand or more years later.
The “swerve” toward modernity—what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre
might have called an “epistemological breakthrough” marking the transition
from the medieval to the modern world—can be seen in the work of a range of
figures, including Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Galileo, Leonardo da
Vinci, Botticelli, Hobbes, and many others, who over time brought about a
profound change “from one way of perceiving and living in the world to
another.” A case stands to be made, I would suggest, that the discovery of the
Arthaśāstra in early 20th­century southern India has a comparable role to play
in the still­evolving elaboration of the idea of an Indian modernity.
In India today, the Arthaśāstra is considered analogous to Aristotle’s
Politics and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Its topics include kingship, governance,
and law in early India. Its perspectives on these subjects have proved to be as
important to the project of Indian modernity as the theories of violence and
nonviolence, state, community, and self­rule authored by such political thinkers
and founding figures of the postcolonial Indian nation as Gandhi, Ambedkar,
Tagore, Savarkar, and their peers. British India’s foremost anticolonial leader
and free India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, brings up the
Arthaśāstra half a dozen times in his classic popular history, The Discovery of
India (1946), written in jail on the eve of Independence. Sixty years later,
Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate in Economics, still treats this work as relevant to
our times.

First things first: what does the title mean? A śāstra is an authoritative work, a
master manual or a scientific treatise, in this case about something called artha.
What is artha? It can mean “meaning,” as in the meaning of a word. It can mean
“substance,” as in the material, the stuff out of which anything is made. It can
mean “purpose” or “goal,” the end that determines the means, the driver of an
action or the reason for an undertaking. The title Arthaśāstra refers to both the
substance and the purpose of political power. If power were a kind of material,
of which kingdoms are made, and because of which the king can do things, then
this book tells you in a rigorous and rational manner about the type of substance
power is, what it might do in the world, and how best to put it to use—if you
happen to be a king—to consolidate your own power, keep rivals in check, and
take care of your people. 3
The Arthaśāstra has two sections, the first dealing with the governance of
the kingdom (tantra, “home affairs,” so to speak), and the second dealing with
foreign relations (āvāpa, “external affairs”). There’s a prefatory table of
contents, and a concluding self­reflexive statement showing that the Arthaśāstra
itself is a well­constructed text, ideal as a handbook for the ruler of a well­
governed kingdom. All aspects of what we might think of as policy, planning,
infrastructure, strategy, security, war, treaties, alliances, law and order, trade,
taxation, revenue, property, fortifications, treasury, and defense are covered in a
systematic fashion.
The Arthaśāstra is an encyclopedic, in many ways unique source of
knowledge about the material culture of ancient India; it preserves information
that has otherwise disappeared from the historical and literary record. Even
though it does not refer to any historically specific domain, ruler, or set of
kingdoms, it is replete with breathtaking empiricism, using a vast and specialized
vocabulary to describe in detail a highly urbanized, diversified, and developed
economy, polity, and society. (Translating this vocabulary is itself a stupendous
task.) The Arthaśāstra does not, however, address the moral dimensions of
sovereign power or political conduct. Those are subjects for a related but
separate body of texts concerned with dharma, law or norms, in contrast to
artha, the pragmatics of governing a kingdom.

In his new annotated translation of the Arthaśāstra, Patrick Olivelle, Professor

Emeritus of Sanskrit and Indian Religions at the University of Texas at Austin,
settles many questions about the date, authorship, architecture, and contents of
the text that have dogged scholars since the first modern edition of 1909. The
Arthaśāstra as we receive it, he argues, has its roots in textual materials dating
somewhere between the mid­1st century BCE and the mid­1st century CE.
These materials are lost and we only know of their existence because of
references to them in the later literature. We are helped in temporally locating
these materials with some precision, though, by references to coral, gold, and
gold coins, which indicate that the text was written at a time when sea trade
between India and the Mediterranean lands had already begun, and gold was
being both mined and minted into currency on the Indian subcontinent.
The right way to think of the Arthaśāstra, then, is as the apotheosis and
distillate of a tradition of political pragmatics in India between the mid­1st
century BCE and about 300 CE, of which the greatest exponent was the
historical author whose name has survived in connection with this body of
knowledge, namely, Kauṭilya. This body of knowledge is variously referred to
within the tradition using a vocabulary of compounded words, all of which
weave together one element connoting administration, governance, policy,
punishment, rule, and so on with another connoting the science or discipline
thereof. 4  Next, sometime between 50 and 125 CE, an author, a real historical
person with the name Kauṭilya (sometimes “Kauṭalya”), composed a work with
the probable title Daṇḍanīti (literally, “Policy of Punishment”), which is still the
core of the Arthaśāstra. This text has the aphoristic brevity, linguistic elegance,
and structural compactness characterizing much of classical sūtra literature in
Sanskrit. The final version, which comes down to us two millennia later, Olivelle
calls the “Śāstric Redaction” of Kauṭilya’s root text, a much longer and more
elaborate treatise, the work of many hands between 175 and 300 CE. In this
book, daṇḍa and dharma marry, as it were, to yield artha, an epistemological
provenance of the theorization of sovereignty according to which power has
both bluntly punitive and subtly normative aspects.
According to Olivelle, Kauṭilya the author of the Daṇḍanīti
that is the spine of the Arthaśāstra chronologically preceded Manu, the author
of the eponymous Manusmṛti, or Laws of Manu, the text that stands in the
dharma epistemological tradition exactly where the Arthaśāstra stands in the
artha epistemological tradition. The Manusmṛti, however, had stabilized before
the process of śāstric redaction that yielded the final Arthaśāstra. 5
Both texts—the Arthaśāstra and the Manusmṛti—have been subject to
philological and hermeneutical commentary and interpretation over the two­
thousand­odd years of their respective trajectories, from the dawn of the
Common Era down to the present. In the first millennium, in southern India,
the Arthaśāstra seems to have been known, read, commented upon, and
referred to a great deal, though it seems to recede from view somewhat in the
second millennium, until its rediscovery in the 20th century. More importantly,
both Kauṭilya’s and Manu’s texts continue to animate discussions about
political life even in contemporary India, which necessitates our taking them
seriously as the repositories of living ideologies and not just as relics of a remote
past.

Any reader of the Arthaśāstra would be struck by a couple of features of the

world conjured through the text. First, the polity being referred to is both urban
and urbane. People practice a variety of professions. The population of the city
is largely mobile and transient. Men and women both work; there is a large and
complex bureaucracy employed in the king’s service; the state must keep an eye
on the traders, courtesans, actors, informants, spies, ascetics, secret agents,
soldiers, artisans, officials, manufacturers, performers, moneylenders, and
hundreds of other types of persons inhabiting and moving around in the city and
its surrounding countryside.
A tint of the fourfold hierarchy of varṇa (social class + ritual status) normally
referred to as “the caste system” seems only lightly and belatedly brushed onto
this teeming, dynamic, and complex sociological picture. Olivelle argues, based
on the work of scholars like Thomas Trautmann and Mark McClish, that the
superimposition of the vocabulary and sociology of caste onto the basic
structure of Kauṭilya’s text was due to the original text’s later redactors.
But even after this transformation, the sensorium of Arthaśāstra retains an
ecumenical, diverse, and worldly flavor. The royal palace, the marketplace, the
brothel, the government office, and the army camp are the hubs of most of the
action in the Arthaśāstra, not the temple, the private home, the monastery, or
the university. In the latter half of the text, we get an overwhelming sense of the
importance of surveillance, stratagem, and counterinsurgency to the ruler’s
control over his kingdom. People are not who they seem to be; identities are in
flux. Enemies and rivals swarm within the kingdom and flourish abroad; the
king must be vigilant at all times and trust no one.

THE URBANE AND CANNY DENIZENS

OF THIS CITY-STATE, MORE WARY
OF THEIR POLICE
SUPERINTENDENT AND REVENUE
OFFICER THAN CONCERNED WITH
THE AFTERLIFE, LOOK NOTHING
LIKE PIOUS HINDUS.

The text’s focus is on the expansion of territory; plucking out “thorny

elements” (kaṇṭakaśodhana)—criminals, miscreants, spies, and so on—using
surveillance, interrogation, detention, and punishment; the consolidation and
management of subject populations; and the monopoly of military strength. To
that extent, it is oriented toward realpolitik and reminds the modern reader of
Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Schmitt. Nehru writes about Kauṭilya: “Long before
Clausewitz, he is reported to have said that war is only a continuance of state
policy by other means.” In this scenario, soul­searching, ascetically inclined, and
exilic monarchs like Janaka, Kṛṣṇa, Rāma, Siddhārtha Gautama or Aśoka—
kings at odds with power, who are valorized in other traditions of Indian
political philosophy—have no place.
It should also be emphasized that the Arthaśāstra does not show us a
“Hindu” society in the least: entirely preoccupied as it is with the institutions of
government, law, and the military, it is devoid of reference to gods and
goddesses, temples and shrines, worship and ceremonies, priests and other
religious leaders. It belies every vision of either Vedic antiquity, saturated with
sacrificial rituals and elemental deities, or of India’s purportedly timeless
religious essence, so beloved first of the colonial historians with their Orientalist
gaze, and today of the ruling right wing, bent on constructing a once and future
Hindu Rashtra, India as a nation of, for, and by Hindus.
The urbane and canny denizens of Kauṭilya’s city­state, more wary of their
local police superintendent, tax collector, and revenue officer than concerned
with whatever rewards and punishments await them in the afterlife, look nothing
like the pious Hindus we are today being told built India into the great
civilization it was thousands of years ago, before the advent of Buddhism, Islam,
Western modernity, and other such “recent” encumbrances.

Olivelle’s meticulous scholarship puts to rest the most widely held belief about
Kauṭilya—that he was in fact the Brahman Cāṇakya, the prime minister of
Candragupta, who founded the Mauryan Empire sometime around 320 BCE.
When the Arthaśāstra was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century,
and subsequently published in constantly improving editions right into the
1960s, many Indian political thinkers and historians were only too happy to
equate its author with the Brahman advisor to Candragupta. Both the emperor
Candragupta and his Brahman prime minister, Cāṇakya, were taken to be near
contemporaries of the Greek king Alexander (who came to India) and the Greek
philosopher Aristotle, who was Alexander’s teacher.
The Arthaśāstra could therefore be seen as analogous to and
contemporaneous with Aristotle’s Politics. Nationalists could argue that Indian
antiquity had its own tradition of political thought to rival the Greek. This,
added to India’s long history of glorious and enormous precolonial indigenous
empires, from the Mauryan to the Gupta to the Mughal, could be presented as a
strong argument against the continuation of the British Empire in India, to be
defeated and replaced by Indian self­rule once again.
The Arthaśāstra became enfolded into the nationalist narrative of Indian
thinkers and leaders struggling against colonial domination, as a sign of
historical antiquity, political power, intellectual prestige, and cultural pride.
Nehru’s retelling of prime minister Cāṇakya’s role in the founding of the
Mauryan Empire is almost breathless with admiration for this kingmaker, who is
somewhat implausibly described as “bold and scheming,” “proud and
revengeful,” “simple and austere,” “unscrupulous and rigid,” and yet “wise”
and conciliatory—all at once. Even today, almost seven decades after
Independence, it takes a genuine effort of scholarly disambiguation to undo the
mythical aura that surrounds the Arthaśāstra and its purported author. 6
Over the past century since its rediscovery, the Arthaśāstra
has been attractive for modern Indian thinkers, especially its political leaders
doubling as historians and intellectuals, for its empiricist breadth as well as its
imagination of statecraft as a function of intelligence gathering, military strategy,
and panoptical surveillance. It has appealed to nationalists—both secular and
Hindu—more broadly because it seems to embody the impressive extent of
philosophical achievement that prevailed in ancient India, proving that Indian
intellectual culture was sophisticated to the highest degree, and that systematic
knowledge pertaining to all aspects of life was cultivated, honed, and valued.

Olivelle proves definitively that there is no evidence whatsoever for equating

Kauṭilya with the Brahman prime minister Cāṇakya. The myth of these two
being one and the same came into circulation in the Gupta period (early 4th to
mid­6th century CE), when the playwright Viśākhadatta wrote his famous
Sanskrit drama the Mudrārākṣasa, a story about the origins of the Mauryan
dynasty and the founding of the Mauryan Empire. It was likely written
sometime in the late 4th or early 5th century CE, during the reign of
Candragupta II “Vikramāditya,” the greatest of the Gupta dynasts.
The Guptas explicitly modeled themselves on the Mauryas, building an
empire whose territorial extension sought to match that of the Mauryan
imperium five or six hundred years earlier. For the Guptas, the prestige of a
tradition of political thought represented by the Arthaśāstra, a text very much
under revision during their time, became further enhanced by rooting it firmly
in the Mauryan period and by positing its Brahman authorship in this
amalgamated but fictitious figure of Cāṇakya­Kauṭilya.

UNDER A REGIME OF THE HINDU

RIGHT, A HARMLESS BIT OF
MYTHMAKING STANDS TO BECOME
A DANGEROUS ARTICLE OF FAITH.

Building on earlier research by McClish and Trautmann, Olivelle makes it

explicit that it was in the Gupta period that the idea of a Brahman advisor who
was also a political theorist attached itself to the vision of ideal kingship, and was
projected onto the then already­distant Mauryan past. With impeccable
philological thoroughness, Olivelle undermines the political imagination that
firstly posits the Arthaśāstra as a singular text (rather than as the summa of a
textual tradition), secondly attributes the authorship of the Arthaśāstra to the
Brahman Mauryan prime minister Cāṇakya, and finally treats Cāṇakya and
Kauṭilya as alternative names for the same person.
Even if we were to accept that Cāṇakya actually lived and was
Candragupta’s advisor, his Brahman status, his intellectual perspicacity, and his
inauguration of a tradition of political philosophy are propositions we can no
longer simply accept as historical truths. No indication of the existence of this
type of person, of his dramatic role in the establishment of the Mauryan Empire,
or of his legitimation of any kind of absolutist monarchy is available. Moreover,
what we know about Mauryan kingship is markedly at variance with the rather
more intricate and ambitious prescriptions of Kauṭilya.
While philologists and historians would have no problem adjusting to this
henceforth­permanent separation of Cāṇakya from Kauṭilya and the former’s
severance from the authorship of Arthaśāstra, it remains to be seen how the
culture warriors of the Hindu right, who currently claim to represent
mainstream Indian opinion, will react to the paradigm­shifting implications of
Olivelle’s opus.
For, like Faust or Shylock, the figure of Cāṇakya­Kauṭilya, wily Brahman,
kingmaker, and strategist, has become stock and stereotype, equally likely to
show up in Amar Chitra Katha comic books, in television serials, in the names
of newspaper columns, or in the titles of learned books. Under a regime of the
Hindu right, what was a harmless bit of mythmaking stands to become a
dangerous article of faith, and moreover to acquire sinister overtones, providing
yet another symbol of idealized authoritarianism that Indian democracy simply
cannot afford to perpetuate.
Although citizens of democratic India continue to mull over and quarrel
about old texts like these, it could be argued that what keeps such works vital
and relevant is not so much what’s in them as the fact that they exist at all, that
they function as reminders of the deep foundations on which the edifice of
Indian modernity rests with a degree of confidence and stability. Whatever we
may make of such texts, depending on our ideological needs, our political
vantages, and our imaginative capacities, we must remain grateful to scholars
like Olivelle, whose immense labor and lucid analysis give us the building blocks
with which to make or break, arrange or rearrange our past, our present, and
perhaps, with time enough, our future as well. 

1. Ashis Nandy, interview by the author, New Delhi, India, February 26, 2016.
2. Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Norton, 2011).
3. Nehru translates the title Arthaśāstra as “Science of Polity.” Amartya Sen writes in The
Argumentative Indian (2005): “Kauṭilya’s classic treatise on political economy and governance,
Arthaśāstra (translatable as ‘Economics’), initially composed in the fourth century BCE, is
basically a secular treatise, despite the respectful gestures it makes to religious and social
customs.” Sen thinks that arthaśāstra can be translated as “the discipline of material prosperity.”

4. These are, principally: daṇḍanīti, rājanīti, nītisāstra, rājaśāstra, and arthaśāstra. Olivelle
repeatedly acknowledges that it was his student Mark McClish who definitively established the
staggered composition, chronological layering, and multiple authorship of the Arthaśāstra in his
doctoral dissertation of 2009.
5. Olivelle has also critically edited and translated the Manusmṛti, which means he has considered
the separate and relative dates, sources, origins, traditions, authors, and redactions of both texts as
exhaustively as is possible.
6. A 47­part Hindi serial titled Chanakya was broadcast on Indian television in 1991–92, and
another TV series titled Chandragupta Maurya has been airing on and off since 2011. Needless to
say, both shows enjoy a huge popularity with Indian audiences. Novels like Ashwin Sanghi’s
Chanakya’s Chant (Westland, 2012) do in the genre of pulp fiction what diplomat­politician
Pavan K. Varma’s Chanakya’s New Manifesto to Resolve the Crisis within India (Aleph, 2013)
tries to do in the realm of a type of popular political theory.

Featured image: Asit Kumar Haldar, Megasthenes in Chandraguptas Court, Bengal, early 20th
century. Image courtesy Ananya Vajpeyi

#HISTORY #INDIA #PHILOSOPHY #POLITICS

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ON THE TABLE

King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India:

Kautilya’s Arthasastra; A New Annotated
Translation
Patrick Olivelle

Oxford University Press, 2013

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