KAUTILYA AND THE KNOTTY PROBLEM OF THE ARTHASHASTRA

The Mauryan saga begins with Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the dynasty and the one who inaugurated its greatness. His story, though, is such a curious mélange of tales, legends, claims and counter-claims that it is often impossible to separate the grain from the chaff, as it were. One can begin by examining the available sources for the Mauryan period in general and tackle the ones that pertain specifically to him later. It is near-common consensus to ascribe the first place, in this regard, to the Arthashastra of Kautilya, a detailed treatise on statecraft and politics, although the term artha itself refers to material well-being. The text, therefore, in its own words, is the branch of learning that deals with the acquisition and protection of the earth, which is the source of people’s livelihood.

Most historians believe that the Arthashastra was written in the fourth century BCE by Kautilya, a person of multiple addresses given that he was also known as Chanakya or Vishnugupta—his gotra name, a patronym and personal name, respectively—who became Chandragupta Maurya’s chief or prime minister after helping him overthrow the Nandas. The text itself states that ‘this work, easy to learn and understand, precise in doctrine, sense and word, and free from wordiness, has been composed by Kautilya’. A subsequent verse notes that ‘this shastra has been composed by him, who in resentment quickly regenerated the shastra and the earth that was under the control of the Nanda kings’.

One form of speculation is that Kautilya wrote this text after having been insulted by Dhana Nanda, the last Nanda king and before joining forces with his protégé, Chandragupta. Conversely, he could, equally, have written it when he had placed the latter firmly on the Magadhan throne and turned his musings on statecraft into concrete notes. With the discovery of interpolations and other historical calculations in the Arthashastra, it (or rather, its core) is now seen as having been partly composed in the Mauryan period with some additions and revisions spilling over into the early centuries CE. All of its statements cannot, therefore, be read as direct reflections of Chandragupta’s time for this is fraught with reconstructive dangers. It can be used as a source for certain aspects of the period, though. And similarities between terms used in the Arthashastra and the Ashokan edicts certainly suggests that the Mauryan rulers were acquainted with it.

We also have the Indica of Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador of Seleucus Nikator, one of Alexander’s inheritors, to Chandragupta’s court, which is a memoir of his travels and experiences in India, and has survived largely through quotations in later works. It merits a chapter all to itself owing to its delightful inconsistencies and exaggerations, so we will get to those later. We also have a few other texts that are immensely useful in reconstructing the early part of Mauryan history: the verse-drama, Mudrarakshasa, written by Vishakhadatta, a fifth century CE playwright, which tells the story of Chandragupta Mauryas’s ouster of the Nanda king with the help of Kautilya in which Chandragupta is the prime mover of the plot; and the twelfth century Jaina text, Parisishtaparvan by Hemachandra (containing the histories of the earliest Jaina teachers), which tells pretty much the same story but with a different take on Kautilya’s origins and his part in the whole affair. And then you have the Puranas of the Brahmanical corpus with their (often garbled and confused) king lists. For every phase of Mauryan history, the Buddhist, Jaina and Brahmanical literary traditions have to be taken in conjunction.

And then, of course, we have the weightiest category of all—the epigraphs left behind by the third Mauryan emperor, Ashoka, who spoke directly to the people all over his vast realm through these permanent missives on rocks and pillars. The whys and wherefores of Ashoka’s endeavour will be examined in detail, subsequently, so this tantalising curtain-raiser should suffice for the moment. There are certain literary sources that pertain specifically to Ashoka, and others that provide information on the Mauryan period as a whole. Among them are the Ashokavadana, a text devoted to Ashoka and his life (which is a part of a larger text, the Divyavadana, a Sanskrit anthology of tales of Buddhist saints; it may have originally existed as an independent text and was written after his time in the second century BCE by the monks of the Mathura region), and the Sri Lankan chronicles, the Dipavamsa and the Mahavamsa, the oldest historical records of Sri Lanka, dated to around the fourth and fifth centuries CE, respectively. More details of these will be revealed as we go along (as will the names of other texts that are on other subjects but prove surprisingly helpful with Mauryan details).

Archaeological remains also exist for the Mauryan period: the NBPW, associated with what is termed the second urbanisation (or the so-called Ganges civilisation), is its counterpart but, in fact—and as noted earlier, it was in use even before. It is generally a bit difficult to pinpoint archaeological data that can provide concrete dates for the Mauryans. We can, of course, produce Ashoka’s epistolary work in stone as providing additional evidence, as also some sculptural and architectural elements thereof. Remains from Kumrahar and Bulandibagh are connected to Pataliputra, the Mauryan capital, and others pertain to important sites, such as Taxila, Mathura and Bhita.

Numismatic evidence exists, too: the Mauryan period is synonymous with punch-marked coins, usually of silver, with interesting symbols on them that have, unfortunately, been assigned the deeply prosaic names of ‘crescent-on-arches, tree-in-railing and peacock-on/-in-arches’, conveying little or nothing about their meaning and symbolism. Scholars with imagination have suggested that the tree-in-railing carving represents the Buddha’s enlightenment and the arches on the others represent stupas. However, in the realm of academia, such conjectures are seen as little more than wild surmises, so all we can safely say without being frowned upon is that these definitely had some political significance as they were issued by the state.

The Arthashastra also refers to varied alloyed silver coins (panas) and copper coins (mashakas). These seem to have circulated all through the Mauryan period and until the Bactrian Greeks, particularly in northwest India, the Ganga basin and the upper Deccan. For coin and number enthusiasts, here are a few more details (which you could skip if you do not belong to this ilk!): half, quarter and one-eighth panas were in circulation; there were sixteen mashakas to a pana and four kakanis to a mashaka; there were one mashaka, half a mashaka, one kakani and half-kakani copper coins; the smallest coin was, therefore, one hundred and twenty-eighth the value of the highest; and the highest cash salary was forty-eight thousand panas a year (incidentally, the chief queen was among those in this exalted bracket), the lowest being sixty.

Before we get to the one who inaugurated the Mauryan tale, Chandragupta, we have to explore the story of his purported mentor, Kautilya, the author of the Arthashastra and a fascinating character in himself, renowned for his unbelievably shrewd and devious mind that bordered on brilliance—and for his general paranoia. Let us begin at the beginning. Kautilya is popularly seen as the person who engineered Chandragupta’s ascension of the Magadhan throne by successfully scheming against and overthrowing the Nandas whom he had sworn to supplant on account of their mistreatment of him. All sources of Indian tradition—the Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jaina—are in broad agreement on this.

Like most pivotal characters of the Indian past, Kautilya has engendered all sorts of speculation on his origins. To obfuscate matters further, legends place him all over the map. One holds that he was an impoverished brahmana from Kerala who somehow found himself in Dhana Nanda’s court in Pataliputra. Another tale claims that he was a north Indian brahmana, born and educated in Taxila/Takshashila, who came to Pataliputra to show his philosophical prowess through debate. Apparently Pataliputra, at the time, was the place to be as regards learning and in whose rarefied intellectual atmosphere you could meet the proponents of varied systems of thought and all manner of creative stalwarts.

A somewhat strange image of Kautilya emerges from the Buddhist sources that balance his intellectual highs against his physical lows. Thus, he was, apparently, a highly learned man who could spout the three Vedas, devise strategies on demand, and knew everything there was to know about intrigue and policy but, on the other hand, was ugly, with an unflattering complexion and deformed limbs. Jaina tradition chips in at this point and agrees with the Buddhist texts that he was fairly hideous to behold—and this on account of an added disadvantage. If we are to believe them, then, Kautilya’s parents noticed that he was born with a full set of teeth and were awfully dismayed as this was the mark of a future king.

Therefore, they had his teeth removed, which had the net result of making him uglier. This was because one or both of them did not want him to become a king—an inexplicable parenting compulsion, this, and one wonders whether it was attributable to their extreme modesty or extreme reserve. Perhaps they habitually shrank from the limelight and wanted their son to emulate them in this. According to some Buddhist versions, Kautilya’s mother feared he would neglect her if he became a king, hence the dental dictate. Time was to turn their desire on its head, though, for their very average looking, presumably toothless, son proved to have an excellent set of fangs that could bite hard when needed, as it were, and went on to become one of the greatest kingmakers in Indian history. Looks, clearly, aren’t everything!

So what was Kautilya’s problem with the Nanda king, Dhana Nanda, which impelled him to rebel and, further, replace the latter on the throne with his own protégé? Dhana Nanda’s name epitomised the state of the Nanda empire at the time of his clash with Kautilya: it was rich, prosperous and likely to continue in this vein for as long as it was considered impregnable, which it virtually was. The only problem was that Dhana Nanda’s fondness for his wealth had turned him into a money-extractor and an inveterate miser (the fact of his riches, incidentally, being known all over the realm, even meriting a description in the Tamil work Ahananuru). This is not a combination that would endear any ruler to his subjects and there were already rumblings among the disgruntled populace. There are several, clearly exaggerated tales of Dhana Nanda’s wealth. Its worth was purportedly around eighty crores and was buried in a secret spot in the Ganga riverbed—a decidedly odd choice for a hidden stash!

Dhana Nanda’s purported origins did nothing to mitigate matters. His father, reportedly a barber (as noted earlier), had the dubious distinction of coming to power after murdering the previous king at, apparently, the reigning queen’s behest. This murky state of affairs would have been ideal fodder for gossip and so, the tale remained fresh and in circulation through the years, and thereby firmly in the public memory. This is, incidentally, another reason behind newly-established dynasties all through history scrambling to invent impeccable genealogical origins for themselves, particularly if they came from obscure ones. A pure-blood family tree was the best safeguard against rebellion. And this was exactly what Dhana Nanda did not possess! The ground was already being prepared for an alternative but he just did not know it.

The revenge motif is a fairly ubiquitous one in stories of the ancient world—and Kautilya’s tale was no different. There are differing versions of the exact skirmish between him and Dhana Nanda but a general agreement on the broad details. Most concur that Kautilya, having entered Pataliputra, decided to sit down and partake of a feast that had been laid out at court, although whether this was after his participation in a debate or at another place altogether is a point of conjecture. Dhana Nanda seems to have made a grand entry, at this juncture, and the first thing his eye fell on was Kautilya eating away. Unfortunately, Kautilya, unschooled in the intricacies of status and hierarchy at court, had chosen to sit at a seat reserved for royalty and this infuriated the arrogant king. Rushing forward, he confronted Kautilya, demanding that he stop his meal forthwith and remove his offending presence from the chamber. Inwardly boiling with rage but outwardly stoic, Kautilya continued to eat, prompting Dhana Nanda to hurl further invectives at him.

Most ascetic male figures in the ancient literary tradition seem to have had hair-trigger tempers, causing all sorts of problems and complications thereby—and Kautilya was no exception. Two inflated egos and two strong wills locked horns, causing complete chaos in the dining chamber. It ended with Kautilya’s furious declaration that he would not tie his topknot until he had destroyed the Nanda dynasty by its roots. (This, incidentally, is a much-favoured scene in screen versions of this story; the scope for drama is immense!) He stormed out of court, consumed by rage, and wandered up and down the land in search of a way to achieve his goal. Dhana Nanda, meanwhile, dismissed the whole laughable matter from his mind, little knowing that he had cut his nose to spite his face, so to speak.

Another (Buddhist) version has Kautilya actually working for Dhana Nanda to administer his hoarded wealth. However, it seems the king’s obvious distaste for the ascetic’s purported ugliness prompted him to dismiss Kautilya (one wonders why he appointed him, in the first place, if he couldn’t bear to look at him!), which, thereupon, had the latter vowing revenge and, moreover, escaping from the royal clutches as a naked Ajivika ascetic (we will come to the Ajivikas later). His meanderings, thereafter, brought him to Chandragupta. Incidentally, the Mudrarakshasa concurs that Kautilya was dramatically expelled from the place of honour assigned to him at the Nanda court, which had him invoking revenge on the entire Nanda clan.

Kautilya’s dilemma was solved, in due course, when he met Chandragupta but we will reserve that story for later and come to the Arthashastra. The text itself came to light in a very interesting way. In 1905, R. Shamashastry, a librarian at the Mysore Government Oriental Library, received a Sanskrit manuscript from a pundit, which, though written in a crisp style that was not easily comprehensible, noted that this Arthashastra, composed by Kautilya, represented the collation of treatises aimed at the acquisition and protection of the earth. Shamashastry’s cognisance of the text being an ancient but authoritative work on statecraft led to his translating it in installments for a scholarly journal, The Indian Antiquary. The complete text was published in 1909, followed by an English translation in 1915, leading to great excitement in scholarly circles and the subsequent unearthing of several manuscripts and commentaries of the original text. Thereafter, Kautilya’s Arthashastra was translated into various Indian and foreign languages and a critical edition, using the many manuscripts and commentaries, was published by R.P. Kangle in 1960–65. The text was now firmly part of the public domain, sparking off heated debates on its date, authorship, content and contemporary relevance.

If one were to condense the arguments into a single essence, it would be this: did the Arthashastra belong to the Mauryan period at all? As noted earlier, some historians view it as an integral part of this timespan, written by Kautilya/Chanakya who masterminded Chandragupta’s bid for power, while others believe the text to be a compilation of observations by different authors at different points of time, and of a much later vintage. This seemingly intractable issue has been approached by historians with methodical and detective-like zeal ever since the text’s discovery and perusal. In order to arrive at the truth, let us break the problem into smaller, palatable portions.

What, to begin with, is this text all about? It is, in fact, the first Indian text to define a state. The word artha, usually seen in its most basic sense as money or wealth, occurs in Sanskrit literature, normative and otherwise, as one of the worthy goals of human existence. The Arthashastra, on the other hand, explains artha, or material well-being, as the sustenance or livelihood of men, stemming from the earth inhabited by people. Or in another less-convoluted way, it is the branch of learning that deals with the means of the acquisition and protection of the earth, which is the source of people’s livelihoods; thus, the science of statecraft. This work of—it must be stated—pioneering brilliance consists of fifteen books or adhikaranas of which the first five deal with internal administration, the next eight with inter-state relations and the last two with miscellaneous issues.

The text definitely works as a ready reckoner for anyone wanting to assume and maintain supreme power, demanding a higher-than-average level of comprehension and intelligence to understand the intricate ins and outs of the devious strategising recommended. To quote a simple example, your neighbour’s enemy is actually your friend whom you can use to outwit the former. By extension, that neighbour-turned-friend’s friend is actually your enemy because he might join hands with the former to oust you. Thus, the sequence facing a king—or rather, aspiring conqueror—is the enemy, the (conqueror’s) ally, the enemy’s ally, the ally’s ally, the enemy’s ally’s ally and so on, depending on the proximity of territories.

Likewise, behind the conqueror lie the enemy in the rear, the ally in the rear, the rear enemy’s ally, the rear ally’s ally and so on. All this might very well make your head swim but as the Arthashastra clearly implies, acquiring power and holding on to it is no joke, and definitely not a course of action to be undertaken by the feeble-minded or faint-hearted. It requires brains, courage, shrewdness and farsightedness, along with a general dislike and suspicion of people and an ability to be impossibly devious—all of these exemplary virtues being exhibited by the esteemed author himself, if popular stories pertaining to the Mauryan times are to be believed.

The traditional view of Kautilya having written the Arthashastra that directly pertained to the Mauryas has often been questioned, as noted above. The verses that mention Kautilya as its author (cited above) have been seen as later insertions into the original text and it is argued that his name in the colophons could, equally, be interpreted as ‘as taught or held by Kautilya’. Additional evidence has also been cited: Patanjali’s Mahabhashya, a book on grammar which mentions the Mauryas and Chandragupta’s assembly, makes no reference to Kautilya. Nor does, Megasthenes in his Indica. However, as the Mahabhashya is, essentially, an illustration of grammatical rules and mentions historical personalities only incidentally, and the Indica survives only in bits and pieces paraphrased by later writers, their omission of Kautilya’s name as clinching proof is a dubious argument, at best. This is, very clearly, the work of someone who has bloodied his hands in political wrangling.

A word about the Indica here—as Megasthenes was at Chandragupta Maurya’s court, it is presumed that whatever he wrote is an accurate, eyewitness account of the time. Unfortunately, Megasthenes seemed to have a propensity for jumping to wild conclusions. Perhaps he was in a tearing hurry to note his views or, equally, might have harboured preconceived notions about the people he had been sent to live with. Accordingly, he declares, among other things, that they did not know writing—an observation that, quite conceivably, would have outraged the Mauryan writer par excellence, Ashoka, for one! Therefore, the assertions of this worthy Greek should be taken with a pinch of salt. By extension, his not mentioning Kautilya means very little in the scheme of things.

To demonstrate the extent to which scholars will go to prove their contentions, let us consider the illustrative case of Thomas Trautmann who actually made a statistical analysis of the Arthashastra, wherein he focused on the differences in the words that occurred often in the various books that comprised the text. His conclusion was that three or four authors had contributed to its composition, which finally happened by c. 250 CE and so, while Kautilya could very well have written a part of the Arthashastra, he can’t be seen as the author of the entire work. Therefore, Trautmann asserts, the Arthashastra should not be seen as a historical source for the Mauryans. As with every other historical hypothesis, though, this claim was roundly criticised and the text reinstated as sound evidence of this period.

Let us also remember that the Mauryan realm was a huge entity and, while the Arthashastra might appear to refer to a smallish state in its discussion of inter-state relations, it completely stresses imperial ideals and ambitions, and of the perspective of a vijigishu—the aspiring conqueror—who wants to subdue the entire subcontinent, which, incidentally, is exactly what the Mauryans did, barring a few regional entities that remained outside their grasp. The framework provided of an elaborate administrative structure also indicates that the author had a large, well-established political structure in mind, one that he might very well have seen or, even, helped to evolve.

Yet, the text maintains an infuriating silence on the Mauryas and their empire, as also key words like Chandragupta or Pataliputra, the capital. One way of resolving this mystery is to look at the motive behind the text: this is a work on the theory of statecraft, which envisages an ideal and not an actual state. Kautilya could very well have been a powerful seer but for him to display such an intricate knowledge of politics, state mechanisms and the socio-economic realm presupposes his existence in this very system—a mighty state marked by sophisticated methods of governance. And he simply used it as a model for his theoretical state.

More statements have been used to reinforce this argument. Stylistic considerations place the Arthashastra as older than Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra and the Manusmriti, both texts pertaining to the early centuries CE, so that slots it neatly into the Mauryan period or very nearly thereabouts. Certain other references, such as to the Ajivika sect, the sangha politics and the widespread establishment of agricultural settlements, are, once again, seen as quintessentially Mauryan features and connections, as does the intricate administrative structure gleaned from the text that quite clearly does not pertain to any other known dynasty. Therefore, some part of this work was definitely composed in the Mauryan period by a person named Kautilya. It could have been a living work, so to speak, that he expanded based on the evolving situation he was part of.

Of such contentious arguments are historical debates woven, then pulled into inextricable knots and finally unravelled to reveal a single shining truth—or truths. Spare a thought here for the beleaguered historian, sifting through texts and other evidence, and proposing a tentative theory only to be howled at by his ilk on grounds of dating and content and logic. And so, the poor soul, eyes fixed on the holy grail of historical fact, repeats the cycle ad nauseum until proven right. Even so, there are always some naysayers lurking in the shadows.

Now picture, if you will, a brooding genius, his mind crammed with conspiracy theories and solutions thereof, raking you with his suspicious eye as you walk by, ready to despatch his spies on your tail and quite certain you are up to no good. You cringe as you soldier on but nothing and no one is safe from his hawk-eyed gaze. And woe betide you if the evidence is damning. This is what it must have felt like for anyone at the court of Chandragupta, Kautilya’s precious ward and sovereign, whom he was determined to protect at all costs and in extraordinary ways. We will examine some of Kautilya’s weirder security stipulations as we go on.

The text, though, is, undoubtedly, a work of sheer brilliance. It is as if Kautilya sat down and thought about each and every aspect of governance, administration and daily life that exists in a modern state (and the detailing is modern, in every sense of the word, even though the context is the ancient world), and then formulated rules and prescriptions covering every single miniscule detail with (fairly draconian) punishments recommended for dereliction of duty and every conceivable lapse thereof, so that if you pick it up today and read it, you will find it difficult to identify any aspect of living in a socio-political context that he has not already considered and included. The scope and breadth of vision is staggering—and the text also displays a very shrewd understanding of human propensities and frailties. It is a magnificent treatise, stemming from a magnificent mind—and despite the quibbles over authorship, should be regarded as such. In the process of penning his thoughts, though, Kautilya might very well have rendered earlier works on politics and statecraft redundant.