Who wrote Arthashastra?
Answers
Answer:
The Arthashastra is so much a part of modern Indian vocabulary on politics, economics and society that it is hard to imagine that this was a book unknown to the English-speaking world until an old manuscript was discovered in 1904. It was translated and presented to the world by R. Shamasastry of the Mysore Oriental Research Institute in Sanskrit, in 1909, and in English in 1915.
It created a storm for all the wrong orientalist reasons— similar to the upheaval caused by the discovery of remains in Harappa and Mohenjodaro. In that case, history was known to have begun with Alexander’s arrival in India. So what was to be made of the spectacular ruins on the banks of the Indus and lost Saraswati, dating to millennia before 323 BCE? Similarly, to find an ancient Indian treatise on statecraft and economics upset the ideas of the rulers about the uncivilised and unsophisticated nature of the colonised Hindus.
Since then, the Arthashastra has enjoyed a revival of sorts with its precepts being used and quoted in books on history, economics, politics, management, religion, spirituality and any other subject on which books are written in English. A cursory search of the internet will throw up pages of purported quotes from Chanakya, many of them being untrustworthy.
What Exactly Is The Arthashastra?
It is a treatise on artha written about 2,300 years ago and attributed to a person named Kautilya. It consists of 15 adhikaranas or books, mainly in prose, with 380 shlokas occurring at the end of the various chapters. The first sutra contains the statement that the Arthashastra was composed by bringing together all treatises on this subject written by earlier authors. It is, therefore, a compilation.
It can be thought of as an encyclopaedia of information on the ancient Indian world, the subjects ranging from kings to spies and ministers, from cotton to spices and pearls, from inheritance to divorce and municipal law, foreign relations to forts and cities, magic incantations to justice and political administration.
It has most immediately been associated with the Mauryas. Lengend has it that Kautilya or Chanakya, a pundit, was humiliated by the Nandas and took an oath to extirpate them. He sees the qualities of kingship in a young goatherd, adopts and brings him up to be a warrior and a statesman and then, when the young boy reaches adulthood, the two of them together establish Mauryan rule over Jambudwipa. The young boy was, of course, Chandragupta Maurya.
Chandragupt Maurya in Birla Mandir, New Delhi (Wikimedia Commons)
Chandragupt Maurya in Birla Mandir, New Delhi (Wikimedia Commons)
Legend also has it that he explored the science of the Arthashastra to make it a weapon against the Nandas and wrote it during the long years before he finally overthrew the Nandas with Chandragupta, and the nucleus of an army collected from Swat. Interestingly, the Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa by Vishakhadatta (fourth century CE), which tells the story of Chandragupta’s accession to the throne, describes events which could be straight out of the Arthashastra playbook of defeating enemies— if we indeed accept it as a historical play based on Mauryan times.
Along with the Indika and the inscriptions of Ashoka, the Arthashastra has often been cited as an important source for understanding Mauryan times. As is often the case with ancient Indian history, which is a battleground for different ideologies and persuasions, the date and authorship of the Arthashastra is also the subject of many controversies. Who was it written by and when? Does it describe Mauryan times or not? What kind of society is it set in?
Answers for these questions range across a spectrum with the date of the Arthashastra being posited from as early as 600 BCE to as late as the fourth century CE, and the book being attributed to a person named Kautilya, or someone else, or to multiple others. A useful way to look at this is in the words of the 17th century German Indologist, H. Jacobi:
Without weighty grounds, one must not push aside the unanimous Indian tradition; else one practises scepticism not criticism.
Notwithstanding this advice about accepting Indian historical tradition, most Indologists have followed it only in the breach, as will be the case when an imported historiography is followed without any criticism. There have been repeated attempts to provide “evidence” to “prove” that the Arthashastra was not written by Kautilya but by many others, that it has nothing to do with the Mauryan period and so on.
Answer:
Arthashastra is written by kautilya (Chanakya)