KAUTILYA’S CAREFULLY DRAWN-UP WORLD

Let us revisit the Arthashastra before we engage with Mauryan politics because this tome provides a great introduction—or background, as it were—to ruling and living at the time. However, we will merely contend ourselves with some of the more interesting and thought-provoking themes that run through it. Hopefully, this will enthuse many more readers to tackle the text in its entirety without their hearts quailing at the thought. Kautilya may be stern but he can also be delightfully acerbic and candid—and this is where the text comes alive. What follows, therefore, is a sort of dipping into his magnum opus and, by no means, a comprehensive analysis of its content.

The Arthashastra essentially deals with the state as a concept and is concerned with the security and foreign policy imperatives of such an entity, small though it may be, in a context where it jostles with numerous other small states. The focus, therefore, is to strengthen it internally and externally, so that it can occupy a pre-eminent position. The state that Kautilya envisages, by extension, is extremely well-organised and structured and, consequently, awe-inspiring. At the centre of this magnificent polity was the king (the vijigishu; in his words, the king who wants to win or the would-be conqueror). Kingship was a fiercely contested and sought-after possession at the time but if you were to consider Kautilya’s view of the king’s world and his duties within it, your heart would go out to the poor soul who must live in a highly-dangerous scenario of perpetual murder attempts while barely getting any time to breathe.

Consider Kautilya’s structuring of a typical day in a king’s life. The Arthashastra recommends that the royal day be divided into eight parts each, thereby constituting a block of sixteen units of time. Each unit, in turn, consisted of one and a half hours devoted to particular work/activities. So here we go with the eight parts of the king’s day beginning right after sunrise: receive reports on defence and accounts; examine urban and rural affairs; bathe, eat and study; receive revenue and assign tasks to the heads of department; consult the council of ministers and receive secret information from spies; relax or hold further consultations; review troops, elephants, horses and chariots; and discuss military policy with the commander-in-chief of the army.

And here is how the king should spend the eight parts of the night: interview secret agents; bathe, eat and study; retire to bed with a background music of instruments; club two units together and continue to sleep; wake to the sound of musical instruments and mull over the day’s work, as well as the science of statecraft; consult counsellors and despatch secret agents; receive the priests’ blessings, and see the physician, chief cook and astrologer. At dawn, the king was to circumambulate a cow and its calf, as also a bull, and then move to the assembly hall to execute the first eight parts of the day. And so on and on.

Yes, you would definitely feel for a mortal who had to follow such a cheerless routine, however exalted his status. With a paltry four and a half hours of sleep and without the liberty to ponder over, say, the day’s meal at dawn, requiring, instead, to consider the dark realities of statecraft, one can imagine any king’s reaction to this ghastly regimen. The stern Kautilya must also have anticipated some amount of reluctance, or even mutiny, on the part of the king, and so he hastily adds a disclaimer: if the latter does not want to follow this routine, he is free to divide the day and night into different parts according to his abilities, and figure out what he wants to do.

The prescription is, of course, for an ideal king—for whether he liked it or not, Kautilya had to factor in human frailty, however immune to it he himself was! The subjects mirror the king, he cautions, though. If he is energetic, so will they be. If he is lazy, well, then, his subjects will emulate him and eventually eat up all his wealth. And there is a far worse consequence of royal indolence: the awful spectre of the enemy who has his eye on the throne and will oust the careless incumbent at the slightest opportunity.

This brings us to Kautilya’s somewhat over-the-top precautions to ensure the king’s safety in a world that is otherwise filled with political malevolence and backstabbing. He is never safe, and neither he nor those around him can relax their vigil for a moment lest some potential assassin creeps up and does his treacherous work. What further complicates matters is that the greatest threat is posed by those closest to the king—vipers lurking in his bosom again. To drive home his point, Kautilya painstakingly cites examples of some unfortunate royal personages who were killed by their sons, wives or brothers.

However, while a prince can, at any point, seize the country’s resources for himself and his friends, he can be kept in check through ministers and the like. So any threat that he poses can be countered but the same is not true of women close to the king: the ‘king’s favourite cannot be controlled because she is (stubbornly) childish and (usually) associates with harmful persons’. Queens and princes could either act in collusion against the king, according to the Arthashastra, or separately, queens having apparently killed their royal husbands ‘by putting poison in their food, with a poisoned ornament or jewel, or by a concealed weapon’. Much fodder for writers of historical crime fiction here!

Kautilya’s ideal king, though, should immediately adopt pre-emptive measures to thwart any such dastardly scheme in the making. And so, to begin with (and as confirmed by Megasthenes via Strabo), he shouldn’t sleep during the day—and even at night, he must change his bed and sleeping quarters at frequent intervals. Thus would a lurking assassin be completely confounded. This also immediately conjures up visions of a sleep-deprived king, staggering around the palace and trying hard to keep abreast of important matters while constantly peering into the shadows.

There is more. Kautilya gives elaborate instructions on how the palace (which had its own inner fortifications of ramparts, a moat and gates, and segregated sleeping quarters) should be provided with manifold secret emergency exits. His architectural design bristles with mazes, subterranean passages, hidden staircases, hollow pillars and collapsible floors. (One wonders how the palace inmates navigated these veritable death-traps. Anyone who wasn’t an expert map-reader was clearly doomed!) Everything entering or leaving the palace complex was to be closely examined. Spies in varied guises were to infiltrate all parts of the kingdom to smoke out traitors and plots in the making. Whatever the king consumed by way of food and drink was to be tested before it made its way to his mouth, the food itself being prepared in a kitchen that was constructed in a secret place. No raiding the shelves for food at night by hungry royal children. They, presumably, didn’t know the kitchen’s location, in the first place!

Apart from his personal guard of women archers, the king was to surround himself at all times with people he could trust, although all ministers, even the closest and most important ones, were to be given regular loyalty tests. Intricate arrangements to guard the king against poison, fire and snakes were also to be put in place. Kautilya does go a little over-the-top when it comes to the recruitment of secret agents. The requirements are very precise and exacting, and it definitely was not a job that anyone could just saunter up and sign up for. After emerging from what seems to have been a highly-specialised training course, the agents were assigned manifold tasks, as detailed in a section on covert operations—to protect the king, ferret out plots and sniff out traitors, create chaos in enemy camps and/or infiltrate their forces, identify those amenable to bribes and test the loyalty of ministers and others close to the king.

Among their more interesting tasks was helping the king to demonstrate his divine connections, so to speak, for specific purposes—and, therefore, demanding a certain histrionic ability on their part. Governance is always smooth when a ruler sports a divine aura but more so if he can be shown to have the private ear of the gods. Kautilya’s helpful recommendations, in this regard, point to a highly-refined sense of the dramatic, among other things: for instance, agents were to conceal themselves in tunnels or inside images in temples so that the king, while worshipping, could carry on a conversation with the deity; they could even rise out of water, pretending to be nagas (snakes) or the god of water (Varuna), so that the king could have a casual chat with them. This was to be accompanied by various chemical experiments to create illusions (fire on water and the like) before the presumably gobsmacked public, so that the king rose sky-high in their estimation.

Being an agent wasn’t just a male prerogative, though. Kautilya recommends that ‘poor but intrepid widows’ could, equally, be recruited in the service of the state, after which they could disguise themselves as wandering nuns, for instance, and move around freely with their antennae out for insidious plots. He further notes that women agents who were comfortable with water could be used to demonstrate the king’s ability to talk to mermaids and snake-maidens (naga-kanyas). So picture, if you will, the king stepping into a sacred space and conversing with the idol/s enshrined therein, while beautiful apparitions floating on the water awaited their turn for a discussion—and, in the meantime, fire and smoke issued from sundry mouths in the background. The public would have watched, wide-eyed, and then retreated to discuss—in hushed, awestruck tones—the divine being that was their ruler. A highly-effective ploy in discouraging dissension—rebelling against a semi-god (or a demigod!) was just asking for trouble, after all!

The bottomline, to Kautilya, is that the king is always vulnerable and cannot really trust anyone around him in an atmosphere where everyone is eyeing the throne and will resort to all sorts of devious, savage ways to nab it. ‘No enemy shall know his secrets,’ he vows. On the other hand, the king should be privy to ‘all his enemy’s weaknesses. Like a tortoise, he shall draw in any limb of his that is exposed’—an endeavour, which, if constantly practised, must have been utterly exhausting! Chandragupta’s eventual abdication of the Mauryan throne begins to make more sense, in this context. If he had had to adopt some, if not all, of Kautilya’s measures while on the throne, a religious life would have seemed like a wonderful, relaxing alternative to him!

So does this ideal polity that Kautilya envisages correlate to an actual geographical space in the Arthashastra? He declares, rather grandly, that ‘of the whole world, the northern part of the country’ from the Himalayas to the seas ‘is marked out as the natural sphere of imperialism’ (chakravarti-kshetram). R.K. Mookerji speculates that he had in mind the empire already established by Chandragupta in northern India by extinguishing the remnants of Greek rule in the Punjab, quelling the Nandas of Magadha and drawing Saurashtra in western India into his imperial ambit. It is a rich land, avers Kautilya, with immense potential in economic and human resources, and bristling, therefore, with possibilities for an able person at the helm to capitalise upon. But the central point of whether he was looking backwards (to an existing political realm) or forwards (to an ideal political realm) remains unclear.

Did the Mauryan king do anything apart from batting off death threats, then? Well, for a start, he was the pivot of the political system that Kautilya visualised, the power at the centre of the monarchy. And although the Arthashastra discusses in depth the acquisition, maintenance and strengthening of political power, it also stresses the moral duties and responsibilities of the king. These include protecting his subjects in every which way (including from a diverse range of wrongdoers like deceitful artisans, thieves, murderers and their ilk), and ensuring their welfare and prosperity. Thus, his happiness is inextricably wound up with that of his people, and it is incumbent on him to protect the social order and do things that are beneficial to himself and everyone else.

If this is strongly reminiscent of a benevolent father hovering around his children and anxious about their welfare but knowing, all the same, what is best for them, you are completely justified in thinking so. In fact, the idea of a paternalistic rule that is raised by Kautilya in his text is brought to triumphant fruition by Ashoka in subsequent times with his own unique twist to it—but more on that later. Suffice it to say that a blend of the Arthashastra and Ashoka’s inscriptions gives us plentiful information on the Mauryan political system and its machinations. We will come to this in due course. These strictures aren’t exactly binding but, as Kautilya warns, a king ‘who flouts the teachings of the Dharmashastras and the Arthashastra, ruins the kingdom by his own injustice’. Ignore them at your peril, then, Mauryan king!

Kautilya’s brisk, commonsensical directives for society show him at his best. Consider this singularly pithy saying: ‘Wealth will slip away from that childish man who constantly consults the stars. The only (guiding) star of wealth is itself: what can the stars of the sky do?’ One imagines the realm’s astrologers howling in dismay. This, too—his cynical appraisal of corruption in the ranks: ‘Just as it is impossible to know when a fish moving in water is drinking it, so it is impossible to find out when government servants in charge of undertakings misappropriate money.’ (This, incidentally, was also a concern for Rudradaman of the Junagadh inscription of c. CE 150 in Saurashtra—who mentions Chandragupta and whom we will come to soon—who scouts around very carefully before entrusting the repair of the Sudarshana lake reservoir to an incorruptible official.)

And yet, it wasn’t as if Kautilya was above resorting to underhand ways if his purpose was served—the ends justifying the means, as it were. Consider his singular methods of collecting revenue to make it appear as if the king wasn’t involved in the least: for one, a secret agent could pose as a trader, coin examiner or goldsmith, and collect, in the process, money on deposit and as loans. This could, in turn, be ‘stolen’ by other agents for the treasury’s benefit. For another, the property of anyone accused of a crime could be confiscated by using one of several drastic methods, ranging from the milder woman-as-blackmailer ploy, to the brutal usage of someone on death row to falsely convict him, to the impossibly convoluted use of an agent to pose as an ascetic and trap him into performing occult rituals and then accuse him of sorcery.

As noted earlier, the punishments for errors and aberrations are stringent and unsparing: physical maiming and/or hefty fines are all par for the course. Everything is aimed towards the rolling of the state’s wheels without a single piece of grit coming in the way. Therefore, if a state functioned with the Arthashastra as a guide, it would be a sort of utopia with no crime, no dissent, and no interference in governance and conquest and eventual glory. Was this, in fact, the case with the Mauryans? Its greatest rulers—who also happen to be the first three in sequence—might or might not have followed these strictures but all were highly individualistic in their approach to ruling and managed to cover themselves in glory in varied ways, nevertheless. To use a modern analogy, if you will, it matters little if you swotted away at a guide book or just used your brains to ace a test!

Before we wrap up this quick survey of Kautilya’s excellent work, here is another noteworthy aspect: the text’s recognition of prostitutes as an autonomous body of women dealing with the state on their own without any male intermediary as regards the payment of taxes. The income from their establishments needed to be scrupulously accounted for with details on payments and expenses, and the profits made. One can imagine the less mathematically-inclined among them wrestling with accounts and figures and intricate calculations! The revenue, already stipulated by the text and likely to rise in times of financial stringency, was to be handed over to the Chief Controller of Entertainers—a post that must have been much sought after in that it sounds marginally less taxing (and no pun is intended here!) than, say, that of the Chief Superintendent of Warehouses. It would have also meant a certain measure of cultural and artistic hobnobbing that would have relieved the otherwise deathly grim picture of work that emerges from the text, involving, as it did, the supervision of other entertainers, too, such as actors, dancers, singers and musicians.

Although brothels and similar places of entertainment were strictly state-controlled, space was accorded to individual prostitutes as well provided they dutifully paid their taxes. Incidentally, the Chief Controller of Entertainers (although Kautilya refers to him by the more prosaic Head of the Department of Courtesans/Prostitutes) was apparently responsible for the training of courtesans and protecting the interests of prostitutes but no special qualifications are stipulated for this job. Clearly, this ability came naturally to men, which is a wonderful thing, indeed, if you consider it! But Kautilya hedges his strictures with welcome safeguards: raping a prostitute was a crime, inviting censure and punishment. In fact, he has a whole chapter on sexual offences where he shows little patience with rapists and their ilk—or with anyone flouting varna and other rules to indulge their passions, for that matter. And, of course, anyone caught having sexual relations with the queen was to be boiled alive on the spot.

Incidentally, the Mauryan king, in Kautilya’s world, had three grades of women dancing attendance on him: the lowest was to hold the royal umbrella and pitcher, the next one carried the fan and the highest grade served him while seated on the throne. Moreover, Kautilya envisaged a constant influx and outflux of these women keeping in mind the vagaries of age. Thus, the elderly women staff were continually transferred to the royal kitchens or storehouse and the recruitment process went on, and so, everyone was constantly and gainfully employed. Of course, if some woman wanted to opt out of this cycle, she could pay ‘a ransom’ of twenty-four thousand panas—an interesting choice of word, that!

And now that we have sketched the world that the Mauryan king would (or did) inhabit, let us finally turn to Chandragupta, the one who started it all.