Arthashastra
Kautilya's Arthashastra is an Ancient Indian Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, politics, economic policy and military strategy. The text is likely the work of several authors over centuries, starting as a compilation of Arthashastras, texts which according to Olivelle date from the 2nd c. BCE to the 1st c. CE. These earlier treatises were compiled and amended in a new treatise, according to McClish and Olivelle in the 1st century CE by either an anonymous author or Kautilya, though earlier and later dates have also been proposed. While often regarded as created by a single author, McClish and Olivelle argue that this compilation, possibly titled Daņdanīti, served as the basis for a major expansion and redaction in the 2nd or 3rd century CE by either Kautilya or an anonymous author, when several books, dialogical comments, and the disharmonious chapter-division were added, and a stronger Brahmanical ideology was brought in. The text thus became a proper arthashastra, and was retitled to Kautilya's Arthashastra.
Two names for the text's compilor or redactor are used in the text, Kauṭalya and Vishnugupta. Chanakya, the counsellor of Chandragupta Maurya, is implied in a later interpolation, reinforced by Gupta-era and medieval traditions, which explicitly identified Kautilya with Chanakya. This identification started during the Gupta reign, strengthening the Gupta's ideological presentation as heirs of the Mauryas. However, the identification has been questioned by scholarship, and rejected by the main studies on the topic since 1965, because of stylistic differences within the text which point to multiple authorship, as well as historical elements which are anachronistic for the Mauryan period, but fit in the first centuries of the Common Era. 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 'treatise on "political science"' or "economic science" or simply "statecraft", as the word artha is polysemous in Sanskrit; the word has a broad scope. It includes books on the nature of government, law, civil and criminal court systems, ethics, economics, markets and trade, the methods for screening ministers, diplomacy, theories on war, nature of peace, and the duties and obligations of a king. The text incorporates Hindu philosophy, includes ancient economic and cultural details on agriculture, mineralogy, mining and metals, animal husbandry, medicine, forests and wildlife.
The Arthashastra explores issues of social welfare, the collective ethics that hold a society together, advising the king that in times and in areas devastated by famine, epidemic and such acts of nature, or by war, he should initiate public projects such as creating irrigation waterways and building forts around major strategic holdings and towns and exempt taxes on those affected. The text was influenced by Hindu texts such as the sections on kings, governance and legal procedures included in Manusmriti.
Structure, dating, and authorship
The authorship and date of writing are unknown, and there is evidence that the surviving manuscripts are not original, and are based on texts which were modified and edited in their history, but were most likely completed in the available form between the 1st and 3rd century CE. Olivelle states that the surviving manuscripts of the Arthashastra are the product of a transmission that has involved at least three major overlapping divisions or layers, which together consist of 15 books, 150 chapters and 180 topics.History of the manuscripts
The Arthasastra is mentioned and dozens of its verses have been found on fragments of manuscript treatises buried in ancient Buddhist monasteries of northwest China, Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan. This includes the Spitzer Manuscript discovered near Kizil in China and the birch bark scrolls now a part of the Bajaur Collection discovered in the ruins of a Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Buddhist site in 1999, state Harry Falk and Ingo Strauch.The text was considered lost by colonial era scholars, until a manuscript was discovered in 1905. A copy of the Arthashastra in Sanskrit, written on palm leaves, was presented by a Tamil Brahmin from Thanjavur to the newly opened Mysore Oriental Library headed by Benjamin Lewis Rice. The text was identified by the librarian Rudrapatna Shamasastry as the Arthashastra. During 1905–1909, Shamasastry published English translations of the text in installments, in journals Indian Antiquary and Mysore Review.
During 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 sections of a north Indian version of Arthashastra were discovered in form of a Devanagari manuscript 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 the available manuscripts. Numerous translations and interpretations of the text have been published since then.
The text written in 1st millennium BCE Sanskrit, which is coded, dense and capable of many interpretations, especially as English and Sanskrit are very different languages, both grammatically and syntactically. Patrick Olivelle, whose translation was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press, said it was the "most difficult translation project I have ever undertaken." Parts of the text are still opaque after a century of modern scholarship.
Translation of the title
Different scholars have translated the word "arthashastra" in different ways.- R.P. Kangle: "Artha is the sustenance or livelihood of men, and is the science of the means to Artha" "science of politics";
- A.L. Basham: a "treatise on polity"
- D.D. Kosambi: "science of material gain"
- G.P. Singh: "science of polity"
- Roger Boesche: "science of political economy"
- Patrick Olivelle: "science of politics"
Structure
The first chapter of the first book is a table of contents, while the last chapter of the last book is a short 73 verse epilogue asserting that all thirty-two Yukti–elements of correct reasoning methods were deployed to create the text; both were probably later added to the original text.A notable structure of the treatise is that while all chapters are primarily prose, each transitions into a poetic verse towards its end, as a marker, a style that is found in many ancient Hindu Sanskrit texts where the changing poetic meter or style of writing is used as a syntax code to silently signal that the chapter or section is ending. All 150 chapters of the text also end with a colophon stating the title of the book it belongs in, the topics contained in that book, the total number of titles in the book and the books in the text. Finally, the Arthashastra text numbers it 180 topics consecutively, and does not restart from one when a new chapter or a new book starts. The topics are unevenly divided over the chapters, with some chapters containing multiple topics, and some topics spread over multiple chapters; a peculiarity which betrays extensive redaction, with the division into chapters as a later addition, as argued by Winternitz, Keith, Trautmann, McClish, and Olivelle.
The division into 15, 150, and 180 of books, chapters and topics respectively was probably not accidental, states Olivelle, because ancient authors of major Hindu texts favor certain numbers, such as 18 Parvas in the epic Mahabharata. The largest book is the second, with 1,285 sentences, while the smallest is eleventh, with 56 sentences. The entire book has about 5,300 sentences on politics, governance, welfare, economics, protecting key officials and king, gathering intelligence about hostile states, forming strategic alliances, and conduct of war, exclusive of its table of contents and the last epilogue-style book.
Translations and scholarship
The text has been translated and interpreted by Shamashastry, R.P. Kangle, Dieter Schlingloff, Scharfe, Trautmann, Rangarajan, Patrick Olivelle, and McClish, and a selection of Arthashastra-texts by Olivelle and McClish.According to McClish, writing in 2009, three "major recent studies" have been done on the composition of the Arthashastra, namely Kangle, Scharfe, and Trautmann, whereafter "little, if any, major work has been done on the composition of the Arthaśāstra in nearly forty years." Olivelle published King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra in 2013, "taking into account the latest advances in Kautilya studies"; a translation which, according to Richard Davis, "clearly supplants all other translations of this work into English, including those of Kangle and L. N. Rangarajan." Olivelle adds Dieter Schlingloff's studies and McClish' 2009 PhD-thesis as "groundbreaking studies" since Kangle's study from 1965; McClish' also published in 2019 The History of the Arthasastra.
Dating, chronology and layers of the text
Single or multiple authorship
Olivelle notes that there are two issues with regard to its composition: if it was an entirely original work, and if the present text "is the result of emendations and redactions of the author's original work." The first is uncontroversial, as the Arthashastra itself states at its start that it has been composed by drawing together Arthashastras from former teachers. Regarding the second issue, Olivelle notes that even those who argue for a single authorship, agree that the text contains interpolations and glosses; the real issue is if there were one or more major redactions of the original text.While Kangle stated that "t is not possible to point out any substantial parts of the present work as belonging to a later age or as the work of a later hand," early on philologists and text critics have proposed that the Arthashastra consisted of multiple layers of redaction. Stylistic differences within some sections of the surviving manuscripts suggest that it likely includes the work of several authors over the centuries. There is also no doubt, states Olivelle, that "revisions, errors, additions and perhaps even subtractions have occurred" in Arthashastra since its final redaction in 300 CE or earlier. McClish:
To this, Trautmann and Olivelle add the diverse vocabularies used within the Arthashastra.