Chanakya (375 BCE - 283 BCE), also known as Kautilya and Vishnugupta, was an ancient Indian teacher, political strategist and royal adviser. [1] He is traditionally regarded as the architect of Chandragupta Maurya's rise to power and the founding of the Mauryan Empire, and as the author of the Arthashastra, the most comprehensive surviving Indian treatise on government and statecraft. [2]
Life and sources
Little about Chanakya can be established with certainty. He is placed in the fourth and third centuries BCE and is associated with Taxila, the great centre of learning in the north-west of the subcontinent, where he is said to have studied and later taught, and with Pataliputra, the Magadhan capital on the Ganges. [1] Almost everything told of his career comes from sources composed centuries after the events: Buddhist and Jain narrative traditions, the Puranas, and the Sanskrit drama Mudrarakshasa by Vishakhadatta, which makes him its central intriguer. These accounts differ from one another in detail and are generally treated by historians as legendary elaboration rather than record.
Adviser to Chandragupta
The common thread in the traditions is that Chanakya, humiliated at the court of the Nanda king, vowed to destroy the dynasty and found in the young Chandragupta Maurya an instrument for doing so. [3] He is described as educating and guiding him, assembling allies and resources, and directing the campaign that overthrew Nanda rule in Magadha in the late fourth century BCE. He is further credited with helping organise the administration of the new empire and with advising Chandragupta's successor Bindusara, and with a role in the settlement reached with Seleucus Nicator, the Macedonian ruler of the eastern territories left by Alexander.
The Arthashastra
The Arthashastra, a work in Sanskrit prose and verse divided into fifteen books, sets out the duties of a ruler and the machinery of the state in exhaustive detail. It covers the training of the king, the appointment and surveillance of officials, taxation, agriculture, mining, coinage and trade, land and water law, civil and criminal justice, espionage and diplomacy, and the conduct of war. [2] Its outlook is frankly pragmatic: the acquisition and retention of power and material well-being are treated as legitimate ends, to be pursued by calculated means including intelligence networks and covert operations.
The text was long known only by reputation in the modern period. A manuscript was brought to the Mysore Government Oriental Library and published in 1909 by the librarian R. Shamasastry, with an English translation following soon after; its recovery transformed the study of ancient Indian political thought. [1] Scholars now generally regard the surviving work as the product of a long process of compilation and redaction, whatever kernel may descend from a historical Kautilya. A separate body of aphorisms on conduct and policy, the Chanakya Niti, also circulates under his name.
Legacy
Chanakya occupies a permanent place in Indian cultural memory as the model of the learned counsellor whose intelligence outweighs armies, and his name is regularly invoked in Indian public discourse for shrewd political calculation. [3] The diplomatic enclave housing the foreign missions in New Delhi is named Chanakyapuri after him, and he is the subject of numerous novels, television serials and management books. The Arthashastra is studied internationally as a major work of political realism, frequently compared with the writings of Machiavelli and with classical Chinese strategic texts. [2]
