Arthaśāstra

The Arthashastra is an ancient Indian Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, political science, economic policy and military strategy. Kautilya, also identified as Vishnugupta and Chanakya, is traditionally credited as the author of the text. He was a scholar at Takshashila, teacher and guardian of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya. Some scholars believe that it is the same person, while others dispute this identification. The text is probably the work of several authors over the centuries. Composed, expanded, and redacted between the 2nd century BCE and the 3rd century CE, the Arthashastra was influential until the 12th century, when it disappeared. It was rediscovered in 1905 by R. Shamasastry, who published it in 1909. The first English translation, also by Shamasastry, was published in 1915.

The Sanskrit title, Arthashastra, can be translated as “political science” or “economic science” or simply “statecraft”, as the word artha (अर्थ) is polysemous in Sanskrit; the work has a wide scope. It contains books on the nature of government, law, civil and criminal justice systems, ethics, economics, markets and commerce, methods of vetting ministers, diplomacy, theories of war, the nature of peace, and the duties and obligations of a king. The text covers Hindu philosophy, includes ancient economic and cultural details of agriculture, mineralogy, mining and metals, animal husbandry, medicine, forests and wildlife.

History

Colonial-era scholars considered the text lost until the manuscript was discovered in 1905. A copy of the Arthashastra in Sanskrit, written on palm leaves, was presented by a Tamil Brahmin from Tanjore to the newly opened Mysore Oriental Library headed by Benjamin Lewis. Rice. The text was identified by the librarian Rudrapatna Shamasastra as the Arthashastra. During 1905-1909, Shamasastry published English translations of the text in parts, in the journals Indian Antiquary and Mysore Review.

In 1923–1924, Julius Jolly and Richard Schmidt published a new edition of the text, which was based on a Malayalam script manuscript in the Bavarian State Library. In the 1950s, fragmented parts of a North Indian version of the Arthashastra in Devanagari manuscript form were discovered in a Jain library in Patan, Gujarat. A new edition based on this manuscript was published by Muni Jina Vijay in 1959. In 1960 R.P. Kangle published a critical edition of the text, based on all available manuscripts. Many translations and interpretations of the text have been published since then.

A text written in 1st millennium BCE Sanskrit that is coded, dense, and capable of multiple interpretations, especially since English and Sanskrit are very different languages, both grammatically and syntactically. Patrick Olivelle, whose translation was published by Oxford University Press in 2013, said it was “the most difficult translation project I have ever undertaken”. Parts of the text are still opaque even after a century of modern science.

Authorship, date of writing, and structure

The authorship and date of writing are unknown, and there is evidence that the surviving manuscripts are not original and have been modified throughout their history, but were most likely completed in their accessible form between the 2nd century BCE and the 3rd century CE. Olivelle states that the surviving manuscripts of the Arthashastra they are the product of a transmission that involved at least three major overlapping divisions or layers, totaling 15 books, 150 chapters, and 180 topics. The first chapter of the first book is the ancient content, while the last chapter of the last book is a short 73-verse epilogue, which asserts that all thirty-two Yuktis—elements of right methods of reasoning—were used to create the text.

A notable structure of the treatise is that while all the chapters are primarily prose, each transitions towards its end into poetic verse as a marker, a style found in many ancient Hindu Sanskrit texts where the poetic meter or style of writing changes. used as a syntactic code to silently signal that a chapter or section is ending. All 150 chapters of the text also end with a blurb indicating the title of the book to which it belongs, the topics covered in the book (as an index), the total number of titles in the book, and the number of books in the text. Finally, the Arthashastra text numbers 180 topics consecutively and does not start over from one when a new chapter or a new book begins.

The division into 15, 150, and 180 books, chapters, and themes was probably not accidental, Olivelle notes, because ancient authors of major Hindu texts favored certain numbers, such as the 18 Parvas in the epic Mahabharata. The largest book is the second with 1285 sentences, while the smallest is the eleventh with 56 sentences. The entire book contains about 5,300 sentences on politics, governance, social security, economics, protecting key officials and the king, gathering information about enemy states, forming strategic alliances, and waging war, in addition to the table of contents and an epilogue-style final book. .

Authorship

Stylistic differences in some parts of the surviving manuscripts suggest that it probably includes the work of several authors over the centuries. There is no doubt, says Olivelle, that there have been “revisions, errors, additions, and perhaps subtractions” in the Arthashastra since its final redaction in 300 AD or earlier.

Three names for the text’s author are used in various historical sources:

Kauṭilya or Kauṭalya

The text identifies its author by the name “Kauṭilya” or its variant “Kauṭalya”: both spellings appear in manuscripts, commentaries and references in other ancient texts; it is not certain which one is the original spelling of the author’s name. This person was probably the author of the original recension of the Arthashastra: this recension must have been based on the works of earlier authors, as indicated by the opening verse of the Arthashastra, which states that its author consulted the so-called “Arthashastras” to compose a new treatise.
Vishakhadatt’s Mudrarakshasa refers to Kauṭilya as kutila-mati (“cunning-minded”), which has led to speculation that the word “Kauṭilya” is derived from kutila, the Sanskrit word for “cunning”. However, such a derivation is grammatically impossible and the Vishkhadatta usage is simply a pun. The word “Kauṭilya” or “Kauṭalya” appears to be the name of a gotra (lineage) and is used in that sense in later literature and inscriptions.

Vishnugupta

A verse at the end of the text identifies its author as “Viṣṇugupta” (Viṣṇugupta), stating that both the text and its commentary were composed by Višnugupta himself after noticing “many errors committed by the treatise’s commentators”. R.P. Kangle believed that Višnugupta was the personal name of the author, while Chanakya (Cāṇakya) was the name of his gotra. Others, such as Thomas Burrow and Patrick Olivelle, point out that none of the early sources that refer to Chanakya mention the name “Vishnugupta”. According to these scholars, “Vishnugupta” may have been the personal name of the author whose gotra name was “Kautilya”: but this person was different from Chanakya. Historian K C Ojha theorizes that Vishnugupta was the editor of the final revision of the text.

Chanakya

The penultimate paragraph of the Arthashastra states that the author of the treatise is the person who saved the country from the Nanda kings, although it does not specifically name that person. Prime Minister Maurya Chanakya played a key role in overthrowing the Nanda dynasty. Several later texts identify Chanakya with Kautilya or Vishnugupta: Among the earliest sources, the Mudrarakshasa is the only one that uses all three names – Kauṭilya, Vishnugupta and Chanakya – to refer to the same person. Other early sources use the name Chanakya (eg Panchatantra), Vishnugupta (eg Kamanda’s Nitisara), both Chanakya and Vishnugupta (Dandin’s Dashakumaracharita) or Kautilya (eg Ban’s Kadambari). The Puranas (Vishnu, Vayu and Matsya) are the only ancient texts that use the name “Kautilya” (instead of the more common “Chanakya”) to describe the Maurya prime minister.
Scholars such as R.P. Kangle believe that the author of the text was the Maurya prime minister Chanakya. Others, such as Olivelle and Thomas Trautmann, argue that this verse is a later addition and that the identification of Chanakya and Kautilya is a relatively later development that occurred during the Gupta period. Trautmann points out that none of the earlier sources that refer to Chanakya mention his authorship of the Arthashastra.[39] Olivelle suggests that in an attempt to present the Guptas as the legitimate successors of the Mauryas, the author of the political treatise that the Guptas followed was identified with the Maurya prime minister.

Wildlife and forests

Arthashastra states that forests be protected and recommends that the state treasury be used to feed animals such as horses and elephants that are too old for work, sick or injured. However, Kautilya also recommends that wildlife that is damaging crops should be restrained with state resources. In Topic 19, chapter 2, the text suggests:

The king should grant exemption [from taxes]to a region devastated by an enemy king or tribe, to a region beleaguered by sickness or famine. He should safeguard agriculture when it is stressed by the hardships of fines, forced labor, taxes, and animal herds when they are harassed by thieves, vicious animals, poison, crocodiles or sickness. He should keep trade routes [roads] clear when they are oppressed by anyone, including his officers, robbers or frontier commanders when they are worn out by farm animals. The king should protect produce, forests, elephants forests, reservoirs and mines established in the past and also set up new ones.

In topic 35, the text recommends that the “Superintendent of Forest Produce” appointed by the state for each forest zone be responsible for maintaining the health of the forest, protecting forests to assist wildlife such as elephants (hastivana), but also producing forest products to satisfy economic needs, products such as Teak, Palmyra, Mimosa, Sissu, Kauki, Sirisha, Catechu, Latifolia, Arjuna, Tilaka, Tinisa, Sal, Robesta, Pinus, Somavalka, Dhava, Birch, bamboo, hemp, Balbaja (used for ropes), Munja, fodder, firewood, bulbous roots and fruits for medicine, flowers. The Arthashastra also reveals that the Mauryas designated specific forests to protect supplies of timber, as well as lions and tigers, for skins.