Exploring the human dimension that played a key role in the evolution of India over the centuries is a fascinating but daunting task. Sunil Khilnani, director of the India Institute at King’s College London, took on the challenge and sifted through mountains of history to zero in on 50 personalities who helped shape India as we know it today. He starts with Gautama Buddha and ends with Dhirubhai Ambani. The biographical sketches that Khilnani has penned in Incarnations—India in 50 lives tell us the history of a country which is old and yet young—one which was reborn on August 15, 1947 as the largest democracy in the world. The book is the result of the writer’s travels across the length and breadth of the country as he researched for a major series for BBC 4 Radio. The book is a charming, engaging and personal account of the writer’s discovery of India. In fact, many critics are of the view that history spanning over several centuries of so diverse and complex a country as India has been presented in a remarkably approachable manner.
In this extract Khilnani profiles Kautilya who authored Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft and the art of governance. This is a text which touches on matters not religious and flies against the popular notion that ancient Indian texts are spiritual, mystical and ethereal.
A little over a hundred years ago, in southern India’s princely state of Mysore, a humble librarian chanced upon a monumental discovery. Rudrapatnam Shamashastry worked at the Mysore Government Oriental Library, a cream-coloured jumble of classical Greek pillars and faux-Hindu architectural motifs, built in 1887 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Shamashastry’s job was to look after the library’s ancient manuscripts, many of which were fragmentary and crumbling. One day, shortly before 1905, a nameless ‘Brahmin from Tanjore’ arrived at the library and handed him a manuscript made out of dried palm leaves. Although Shamashastry had never seen anything like it, he quickly realized its significance. Here was a Sanskrit text that may have lain unread for almost a thousand years—and that would revolutionize our sense of the Indian past. Written on those palm leaves was the two-millennia-old Arthashastra, a massive, detailed treatise on statecraft and the art of government. The opening folios enumerated the contents of the work, ranging from chapters on the ‘Establishment of Clandestine Operatives’ and ‘Pacifying a Territory Gained’ to the ‘Surveillance of People with Secret Income’ and ‘Investigation through Interrogation and Torture’. Eerily contemporary, this is the only complete text on non-religious matters to reach us from the classical or early period of Indian history. Its discovery summarily exploded a Western cliché: that Indians were primarily ethereal, spiritual thinkers. Here was a strategic work focused on worldly ends, advocating ruthless means to achieve and maintain power.
Shamashastry started to publish bits of the Arthashastra in English translation in 1905. The reaction in India and beyond was electric. He released more sections of the text, rather like a Victorian serial novel, as the audience grew. Soon the mysterious treatise was not just providing historians with an unprecedented wealth of detail about early India; it proved to be a timely gift for those seeking freedom from colonial rule…
If we lay the Arthashastra alongside other accounts of power and politics from its broad historical era—the works of, say, Plato or Aristotle, with their focus on moral virtue—we can see how unique its perspective is. Many compare it to the treatise that disrupted western ethical and religious beliefs in the sixteenth century, Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. But Max Weber, the German social theorist, thought such a comparison anodyne. To him, the Arthashastra’s radicalism made The Prince look ‘harmless’.
Kautilya’s work suggests he inhabited a world unlike the clan-led oligarchic society into which the Buddha and Mahavira were born. His world was one of kings in perpetual conflict. ‘Kautilya for the most part is a political strategist,’ says Patrick Olivelle, Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, and the most recent translator of the Arthashastra. ‘He is serving a king and trying to enhance that king’s power. And for “king” he uses a very technical term in Sanskrit, vijigishu, which means a person who is yearning, desiring to conquer. So conquest, expanding one’s power, is at the heart of the Kautilyan strategy.’ Kautilya specifies no particular territory or space to be subjugated—it is potentially and rightfully the entire earth…
In the balancing act between liberty, security and prosperity, the Arthashastra places its weight behind the latter two. To fulfil his functions, a king requires wealth and the means to maintain a well-ordered state. These concerns are very much at the centre of the Arthashastra, whose title means something like the ‘Treatise on Success’. Four main sources of wealth were central to the empire that Kautilya imagined: resources acquired through imperial expansion; revenues from royal monopolies; trade with other kingdoms; and taxes collected from private enterprise, especially agriculture. Indeed, Kautilya was no early advocate of the free market. Olivelle characterizes his prescriptions as ‘a mixed economy’, not unlike the one practised by post-Independence India—or the British East India Company. At the same time, ‘a lot of private enterprise was allowed and encouraged’, Olivelle says, particularly through the relief of taxation, the creation of infrastructure and the maintenance of security.
The government Kautilya described was a vast bureaucracy designed to regulate both economic and social life. And the watchers had, above all, to be watched; Kautilya mentions forty forms of embezzlement and, in a memorable image, captures the endemic, often invisible corruption that is present even in India today: ‘Just as it is impossible to know when fish, moving about in water, are drinking water, so it is impossible to know when officers appointed to carry out tasks are embezzling money.’
The sovereign’s tools of control included not only officialdom, but propaganda, coercion, domestic espionage and violence. Among other things, Kautilya offers extensive guidance on how a ruler should win over his own people by ‘seduction’: the king should perform illusory acts to give him the aura of miraculous powers, and should make liberal use of manipulation. He should also cultivate an army of spies, and Kautilya devotes a whole section of his treatise to ‘Secret Conduct’. Quite often these agents were ‘monks’—men with ‘shaven heads or matted hair’—and even nuns. They flitted among the populace collecting information and, if necessary, seeding uncertainty, mistrust and fear, thus reinforcing the need for a powerful, paternal king.
Kautilya seems to have taken particular pleasure in the details of punishment. Wherever lèse-majesté was exposed, strict royal action was needed. Here, for instance, is his catalogue of the ‘eighteen-fold torture’ to be meted out to real reprobates:
Nine strokes with a cane, twelve whip-lashes, two thigh-encirclings, twenty strokes with a nakta mala-stick, thirty-two slaps, two scorpion bindings, and two hangings-up, needle in the hand, burning one joint of a finger of one who has drunk gruel, heating in the sun for one day for one who has drunk fat, and a bed of balbaja points on a winter night.
Beatings, exposure to extreme temperatures, suspension torture—not so different from what’s in the 2014 US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. Indeed, Kautilya’s conception of the state is disturbingly familiar today: like an iceberg, one part towers above us, a beacon of majestic power, while another part hides in the deep — a state of secrecy, duplicity, manipulation and constant surveillance.
But this sort of power proves, in the end, to be a trap. A ruler cannot trust his own officials. Kautilya warns, ‘Even if it is possible to know the path of birds as they are flying in the air, it is never possible to know the path of officials as they move with concealed designs.’ He must ever be wary of his retinue. As Patrick Olivelle puts it:
The subject of the king’s food becomes important because poisoning the king is one of the easiest ways to get rid of him. There are all these people, including his family, who are the greatest threat to him personally, who are vying to get rid of him. It becomes a real treadmill: he does not know where a threat may come from—and it can come from anywhere.
If this sounds like the kind of paranoia worthy of Saddam Hussein or Colonel Gaddafi, there’s another piece of Kautilyan practice that they both followed: reduce the risk of assassination by employing a double. The author of the Arthashastra was a man who clearly understood the risks of power and captured the paradoxical instabilities of those who rule: their minds are eternally filled with the fear of losing what they have acquired.
Kautilya’s treatise eventually proved too radical in at least one respect: it showed no deference to Brahminic conceptions of dharma, to religious ethics and moral duties. You might call it a profoundly disenchanted work. As Olivelle has argued, the text must have been modified a few centuries after it was composed in order, in part, to bring the decidedly secular Arthashastra ‘more into line with the mainstream of Brahminical social ideology’. In this century, in a subcontinent where kings no longer reign, the Arthashastra has been repurposed. It’s become a how-to guide for ambitious entrepreneurs seeking to amass wealth in an increasingly competitive and globalizing country, much in the same way that Sun Tzu’s Art of War has become a manual for the world’s aspiring business leaders. It’s also become a touchstone for foreign policy wonks in the nationalist slipstream, struggling to devise a distinctively Indian view of international relations and India’s place in the world. And in the Pakistani military, Kautilya gets assigned to young officers to give them insights into the supposed deviousness of the Indian mind. Some other suggested reading for Pakistani military schools might be a 1937 essay published in Calcutta’s Modern Review. It attacked a young politician then still on the rise in India’s freedom movement—Jawaharlal Nehru—for his authoritarian, anti-democratic tendencies and his will to dominate. It’s author was Chanakya, the variant of Kautilya—clearly a pseudonym. The real author was in fact Nehru himself, who only a decade later would become democratic India’s first elected leader, and who did much to establish India as a democracy, serving for many years in Parliament House. But his article implied that inside every democrat is a Chanakyan, totalitarian temptation—that Kautilya is the Mr Hyde lurking in every democratic Dr Jekyll.
