The Arthashastra

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Hello, the ancient Indian Sanskrit text, the Otashastra, has been compared with the work of Machiavelli. Its origins are uncertain, but what is clear is that it was designed to be part of a practical manual for statecraft. It tells a ruler how to govern his territory, how to achieve stability and prosperity, and how to conduct relations with other powers. In the process it gives us an insight into the lives of people in South Asia more than two thousand years ago.

Yet the text only came into the hands of Western scholars at the start of the twentieth century. With me to discuss the Athashastra of James Heggerty, Professor of Sanskrit and Indian religion at Cardiff University. Devin Patel, Associate Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

And Jessica Frasier, lecturer in the study of religion at the University of Oxford and fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Jessica, when was the Achasastra written? Do we know precisely?

We don't know precisely, but we know the era that it came out of. So if we kind of cast our minds back to about four hundred BC, we've got an India that's in the middle of what's sometimes known as the Axial Age. there are states coming to coalesce with urbanized centres in them and cities and courts which encourage kind of intellectual development. And in India this is known as, particularly in North India, the the Mahajana Padas, these kind of great people centres

There are sixteen of them, they make up a kind of a a tile work of different states. And yet all that changes in three hundred and twenty and it's this is gonna basically inspire the development of the text. In three hundred and twenty India's first really serious empire arises, the Maorian Empire. And it's really important partly because on the one hand it achieves

huge territory bound to a single administrative center, so Chandragupta Marya, Ashoka Marya. They have a they cover all almost all of the North India, and that's you know not just a country, it's it's the larger half of a subcontinent. So people realize that extended power is possible, but it also establishes a kind of an ideological strength. Chandragupta adopts a philosophy of Ahimsa nonviolence, which kind of gives a an ideological coherence to his state.

And his grandson Ashoka adopts Buddhism and and actually kind of spreads his philosophy across the country and these rock edicts in which he promotes it. So what this really does is create a new era in around 185 when the Empire dissolves. uh which is gonna set the stage for this text. And in this era people have new expectations of extended empire with sustained power and an ideology and a king promoting it all to fit that model.

What else do we know about the Indian society at that time? At that time it's actually uh you know a very sophisticated, very developed and rich society in many ways. It's administratively strong, so these different kingdoms have a kind of a centralized structure, in fact the Itself describes as being like a wheel. The spokes reach out, and administrators, tax collectors, governors and judges keep the state strong.

And at the same time, the spokes of that wheel can suck in resources. So we're talking about a an era in which uh mining is important and that means that there's money, that means that there's jewels and treasure, a kind of a capital system which makes the state much more stable. There's a huge amount of land produce, elephants as well as agriculture, all kinds of things emerging.

Uh and there's a huge amount of kind of intellectual product in that time as well. So one of the most things that's things that's most interesting and important about the society in this area, not only is it sophisticated culturally wealthy in many ways, But it also has a real investment in intellectual capital. Uh Sanskrit, the lingua franca, is a language in which you can now capture all your knowledge and wisdom of the court and of your own group and movement.

and write a treatise, a shastra, a text that will capture what the civilization has come to realise. So there's a there's a real movement towards a knowledge industry in action. I was amazed that they were getting silk from China and uh coral from different um parts of other parts of the world. Yeah, it's fascinating. So what we think of as the Silk Road much later is.

very much present here. You've got uh you know, from sea to sea in India, and that means from the Arabian Ocean all the way over to the Bay of Bengal and beyond. This is a global society actually in many ways, that is trying to come up with global philosophies to match. Does it feel its muscles? Does it feel we are the first great empire? We are a global society? Is it self consciously a powerful empire?

One of the things that's interesting about if we go back to sort of Ashoka Mauryo, perhaps the uh he he reigns over the largest territory of empire that anyone has had at that time, and this is about two hundred and fifty B C.

He knows that what he's done is extraordinary. He develops a philosophy that he has engraved on these these rock edicts that he places at key spots around the the nation for travelers moving out beyond India to pass on his philosophy into China, Southeast Asia, uh Greece and beyond.

And that sense that everyone's aware there's something larger in the making. Ashoka's also sending missionaries with his Buddhist ideology all over Asia. People know that they have the capacity not only to cover their territory, but to expand their ideas and their power. uh on a much, much larger scale.

Thank you, James. Do we know? Who was the author or authors of this text? Let's say it begins to emerge in the fourth century BC and grows from there. You tell us. Well in early uh South Asia, in early India that's always a complicated question with a long and involved answer. But i in this case we have an author within the text, so in the first book

the author uh names himself. He says I'm Caudilia. This is a uh basically he states that this is a wonderful text. It's incredibly well constructed, you're going to enjoy reading it. It's free of dig you know, digression. Um I'm not sure that's wholly true, but I've also never met an academic who wholly keeps to that as uh as a as a rule for themselves. Um so we have this Kaltilia, who's the author within the text. If we flip to the end of the Arthashastra, we go to the the final fifteenth book.

Fifteen books in each of that div and each book is divided into sections and so on. Yeah, yeah, absolutely that's right. So we've got fifteen books and the first book mentions Kautilia. It's not the only place we find mention of Kautilia. And the last book mentions uh Vishnu Gupta, um and it also mentions

uh someone who assisted in the overthrow of the Nundas, who were the Jessica's already told us of the Maorian Empire, but the predecessors of the Maorian Empire were the Nundas. That was the predecessor dynasty. Um so What we find there are three authors within the Arthashastra. We've got Kautilia, we've got this tantalising mention of Vishnu Gupta, and we've got another mention of this person who assisted in the overthrow of the Nanda dynasty.

person associated with the overthrow of the Nanda dynasty has uh been known by wider tradition as Janakya. And he's the kind of archetypal wily Brahmin. And the art and a Brahmin was the the kind of person entrusted with Vedic knowledge, uh wider knowledge systems, knowledge of Sanskrit as the kind of elite language and was uh sort of the the guardian of uh vedically related religious uh and and other forms of knowledge in in early India at this time.

So we've got this Chanakya who is someone who lives a large and interesting life in wider Sanskrit tradition. So he pops up in mid first millennium dramas, uh Vishaka Data has a play called the Mudra Rakshasa, lots of Sanskrit words, but they're The play tells the story of this Wily Brahmin assisting Chandragupta Maurya in the foundation of this new dynasty. Now, so we've got this cultural memory of this.

wily Brahmin. We then have this Kaltilya person within the text who's frankly the text that the Artha uh the author that the Arthashastra uh most often mentions. The tradition focuses on Chanakya, the text has kautilia and that's uh something that we can ponder on more uh as we proceed.

This is a manual for kingship. It shows how a ruler should govern his kingdom and what the structure of government should be. Can you develop that? I can. It absolutely does. Uh, but it does so in ideal typical terms. It's not full of references to historical predecessors. There are some references to mythical

predecessors, but there's not much in the way of concrete historical detail. It's a kind of ideal typical expression of how to do statehood. It's a sort of instruction manual. It's a kind of unboxing of the nature of early Indians early Indian statehood. For instance.

So what it does is it sets out a pyramid. Uh it puts the king at the top and then it has a four layer pyramid beneath the king. I mean in in you know uh somewhat uh generalized terms. But but no beneath the king we have his intimates. The text says you should only really have four advisors.

Which is kind of the idea being that if you've got two they can sort of split their view, if you you can be manipulated there four is considered to be the optimum number for a range of views while also maintaining state secrecy. So you've got these four advisors, but in this pyramid with the king at the top, what you've got is a a top player, the the head of your army, the crown prince, uh various other things of that type. You've got your religious specialist.

Then beneath that you've got your kind of key ministers who are in charge of the palace. They're in charge of main aspects of urban life. And beneath that you've got people who are entrusted with whole areas of activity such as manufacturing, the treasurer and so on. And then below that you've got heads of department. Now they'll be dealing with specific things like mining or elephant husbandry. So this is a really precise Sounds like it could be a very big bureaucracy.

Yeah, it is. It's it's a highly bureaucratised state. Uh though what it's what is worth noting it's it's not just a bureaucracy because it's not just governance, it's also the economy that is being described, because the economy is both private and in state hands. It's a an exaggeration to say that the uh the economy is uh wholly in the king's hands. It isn't. There's private enterprise. But the king uh it has control of st salt, liquor, mining, all kinds of areas of activity.

And uh in that way this is not just a description of how to govern, but it's also a description of key areas of the economy.

Yeah, there's amazing stuff on spies and spying. Which is looked on with great favour and developed very Well absolutely it is looked on with great favour, it's described in great detail, but I think it's worth dwelling on the kind of fault line in this text, which is that on the one hand it is absolutely concerned with virtue and the duties of the king, the wielding of the dunder, the rod of punishment.

in a responsible way. Um and then it's got a whole load of ruthless realpolitik and the description of some pretty, pretty, pretty sort of under the belt stuff. Uh, which is exciting and interesting. Uh and and I think there's you know, a not a wholly resolved tension within the text or within wider Indian literature. The punishments are gory and I'm not going to repeat them. Yeah, let's leave them, shall we?

Time of this book, the time it came into being, Hinduism, was promoting the idea that there are four fundamental goals of human life. What's the relationship between those four goals in this book? Artha as a uh discrete goal of life has a broader sense as you've suggested.

beyond the more grounded understanding of it in this text, which is as something like statecraft or the pursuit of uh creating a uh a successful state. But Artha functions as a as part of a a quartet of goals for human life which is Well established, I would say, or at least being established well before this text comes into being, we have aspects of texts like the Mahabharata and the epics which also speak to these different goals of life. So what are these goals?

Oftentimes the first one that's mentioned is this word Dharma. Now Dharma of course carries with it so many meanings as all of these words will on some level. But Dharma perhaps we can think of it just as something like The pursuit of virtue or the pursuit of right living, good living. Arta, on the other hand, has this sense of success.

Prosperity, but anything which makes life in the world better for you, I suppose, is a is one way of looking at it. And so from that point of view, Artha and Dharma are their discrete just as the third goal of life, which is pleasure, and oftentimes these are the three that are clumped together. There's virtue, success and pleasure. And pleasure is a word that many of uh many people in the audience will know, this word gamma.

Right. You have the Kama Sutra, Kama Shastra. And this word Kama has that sense of uh both sensual and sexual pleasure, the things in life which one pursues with some level of attachment. The fourth one is a sort of a late add on, uh some would argue, but it's uh it is thought to be connected and that's basically when you're ready to let go of these first three on some level and uh seek spiritual freedom. The word is moksha.

Would you tell us something about the concept of Artha and how it links with the Athashastra? Out of tab with the Arthashastra of course is is what we're discussing, right? Protecting the people and also for the king to gain for himself, uh and achieve success.

In the larger sense though, Artha seems to be very closely aligned with dharma. And people have actually thought about like how does how do these two things link in non state craft contexts? And from that point of view You know, whereas Dharma focuses on following a a particular normative as well as uh a kind of a prescriptive

way of behavior that can be understood as virtuous, Arta seems to have as its goal success. And sometimes that means that there are moral breaches that are required in order for success to happen. And the two are not easily resolved.

Thank you very much, Jessica. Jessica Prasia. What insight does it give into the life of a king in early Indian society? It's interesting how much it sort of mirrors a universal imagery of kingship, which is that kings are always scared and life is always difficult. Um, i really Shakespeare's adage that, you know, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown is very much present in this text. So it gives an image of a king who is always being threatened.

By his advisors who m may turn against him, by his the regions who may raise an insurrection, by his enemies outside the borders. by tribal chieftains within his region, by it gives details on how when he goes to see his own queen, he has to make sure that they've checked under the bed in case his own son may leap out and kill him, or, you know, or the queen will feed him honey deep

sweets, which are in fact poisoned. There's a wonderful section where it says, uh, even his own family, his own sons are a danger to him. It says Princes and crabs have one thing in common. They both eat their progenitors. And so there's a sense that, you know, the king can never rest. I always think of uh J. G. Fraser's Golden Bough where he talks about rituals w where kings are always scared of being murdered.

And that's very much present here. It gives two solutions, however, to how sort of a king can overcome this danger to him. One is a kind of a yogic self-mastery. The text says one of the greatest danger to a king is his own lust.

desire uh and propensity towards corruption and it gives a list of kings who've gone gone wrong, uh basically self destructed because they couldn't control their desires, including Ravana, the demon king of Sri Lanka, who steals another man's wife, and then the man comes and destroys him and That was the end of his kingdom. So it says the king has to be like a yogi, self mastery, mastery of the senses.

uh almost a kind of virtuous kingship that is built up by scholarship is central to a king who will succeed. It even says that actually self-mastery of the senses is the key to all politics. The other thing you have to do of course is master others who could be a danger to you and so it gives a lot of really wonderful details about how to test the people around you to see whether they're trustworthy.

It's really like the mafioso and his henchmen, you know, how do you make sure they're okay? And it gives tests, you know, s have them thrown in jail, plant another prisoner who uh invites them to raise an insurrection, see if they go for it, um, tempt them with luck.

tempt them with money. Um and it also raises interesting debates that were had at the time about who should you choose for your minister? A member of your family, that's trustworthy. Someone who shares your own views and will agree with you. Someone from your childhood? And in the end it looks at all these options and says, No, choose for quality. And that throws the onus back onto the king. Good judgment.

uh a sense of virtue is essential for him to be able to succeed. In the end the king is still about uh lokka varta, the turning of society and a sense of integrity, despite the difficulties that may entail.

James, James, what's the intent what was the intended readership of this vast volume? I think that's a very interesting question. Um it's hard to answer in some ways because Sanskrit texts and the periods in which they were originally transmitted and adapta adapted in early South Asia, we're not we're not always sure who's reading these texts, but we can learn a lot from the structure of the text.

So what I would say is this is a text that's meant to be the basis for teaching. It's a mostly prose work, but it has these kind of pithy summary verses at the end of chapters. It is the basis for teaching. It's called the Shastra, um, but in some ways it's more like a sutra, which is to say a text that's used for instruction. It presupposes the presence of a teacher. So who's being taught?

Well, more than likely, the people being taught are rulers or those who are in the business of advising rulers. Now the West is getting on with its civilization i uh quite well at that time. Are there any comparisons? Well I think it depends on where we're locating the Arthashastra. So if we're locating it as the product of uh Chanakya and the um Maorian dynasty, then what we've got is we're we're looking at really uh the period of Alexander the Great and the successor dynasty.

So at that time, well, it's a very similar situation in some ways. We we've got a a fragmenting empire, we've got competing polities, we've got complex bureaucracies, a huge concern with trade and with the management and support of the economy. So I think we've got huge number of similarities there. We've also got evidence in the Greek literature of

awareness of the Marian court. So we haven't got a full text, but we've got the Megasthenes fragments. We've got fragments of a Greek ambassador, Bactrian Greek ambassador to the Marian court. So we've got quite a kind of rich engagement. So yeah there's there's a l parallels we can draw then. If we're actually looking at the text

uh i really in probably its period of core composition, which I think is probably later than the Maurian period. And we're probably looking around the beginning of the Common Era. And that comes back to you mentioned coral. Well, that coral w wasn't really known to the Maorians, uh and there's lots of circumstantial evidence And there's been quite a lot of scholarly work to kind of show how the mention of gold coins and the mention of coral

Brings us more up to the beginning of the common era. And consequently there, well, we're looking at a a very much a kind of Roman period. But again there are commonalities, but less so there, because the Art De Shastra is a small state text. The idea of a perfect state is something that can only really happen below the south of the Himalayas.

Devon, Devon Patel, how heavily or likely should a king rule his kingdom? How much force does he Should he use Sometimes it's very difficult to be a good king and a good person. Some of it I think is very interesting is that since Arta on some level has to create the conditions.

For Dharma, one of the key functions of the king is the use of force. And this is there's a whole separate section in fact that's often dedicated and sometimes uh scholars of this text and this tradition speak of this as a kind of separate pursuit of this of this particular discipline and that is what they call dandaniti, which is basically the rules of using force.

Now generally there is a reasoned and reasonable I would say use of force that's recommended. But that punishment has to be very measured from you know, one aspect. In other words, if the use of force is too severe, too brash, too forward, then it's going to scare the people. On the other hand, if if the king's punishments are soft on crime, as they say

Uh, they won't have any respect for his leadership. The idea is that if the king gets it right, if the force is used correctly, then It will be conducive to everybody in the populace to be able to follow these three goals of life, uh virtue, success and pleasure. And uh there's also a sense that if there's too much force used, there's also the very likelihood that there will be revolt in the kingdom.

What does this d this have to say about the wider society? There's a wonderful picture of society we get here that we get in almost no other text. So most of the texts we get are very orthodox, they want to set out a kind of an ideal picture, and uh this fills in all these gaps, so it's a really fun text for historians.

Normally you see society and it's true that it has in in the text it has a kind of strong structure that was often true of India, that there are four key kind of social classes, the varnas or castes. uh and there are definite instruments of a government, there's the treasury, the military, the advisors, and everything is very kind of locked down and clearly structured. But the text tells us all about the unruly details. uh the tasty, kind of hidden spots of society.

And that conclude all kinds of fabulous things. Uh for instance, you realise that it's not just about the kingdoms and the rulers, it's also about tribal chieftains and indigenous peoples who are always there in the forest. in certain tracts of land and who at any time can affect your rule or that of your allies or enemies. So you have to negotiate with them. As well as the kind of the grand images of heroic kings that you get in the classic text.

You hear about weak rulers and how to analyze what's wrong with your ruler and and maybe how to use those weaknesses for your own gain. It also tells you about outsiders. Uh, you hear a lot about the poor, you hear a lot about those who are kind of um, you know, wanderers, mendicants.

lost figures. And there's interesting rules on slavery actually. In the West we're used to the idea of slavery where one group enslaves another, and you will never become the enslaved if you're born into the first group. There's a strong divide ethnically or religiously.

Here anyone could be a slave. In fact, anyone who b falls on hard times, however high, could in fact have to sort of indentured service sell himself into slavery for economic reasons, and that means there's a whole set of laws and rules which

that kind of govern the the justice, the the legitimate use of slavery, you know, what what's fair and what's not fair. Uh some of the fun bits, the most fun bits for me, is just to do with actually what it tells us about women. We don't often hear about this in the Indian world. This tells us about what happens when a couple hate each other and they really want to get out of the marriage. How what are the options legally for them to kind of do that?

What about marital infidelity? If a woman has strayed and y she has a son who's the marital son of one man, her husband, but the biological son of another man, Whose wealth does he inherit? We need laws for these things. Other texts don't tell you, but this gives you the the meaty details. Um courtesans is wonderful stuff about how the government sets up courtesans. chooses, you know, beautiful and young and kind of uh sort of elevated, cultured young women And owns the brothels.

Yeah, exactly. And owns the brothels. And has to choose the good ones, you know, and it makes sure they're taken care of, but they pay a huge amount of tax, so it's an enormous income for the government. And when the when the women are done, it says when they lose their beauty, they become the brothel madam. So they have a retirement plan in place. You know. It's really very well organized.

James, James Hagerty, what did you have to say about the king's foreign policy? Is the idea that a successful king will keep expanding his kingdom? Not necessarily, no. Certainly the will to expand the kingdom is anticipated, even expected. But the idea is that it will provide you with the tools of analysis and the capacity to really run scenarios in your head or with your counsellors such that you will always behave in a way that is.

strategically sensible. So there are there is a time for expansion, there's a time for nefarious uh collaboration with uh allies, half allies uh and various other things. For me, uh only about twenty percent of the Adashastra actually takes up foreign policy. So um but what what one has is incredibly rich.

Also I think one of the key things to bear in mind is everything that it tells you about the construction of the state is then yoked potentially to the destruction of the state. So everything you know about how to order society can be yoked to disordering the societies of other Yeah, so I mean uh it y the s the selection of good ministers uh is then you know, you can send out envoys to gather intelligence, they're uh ostensibly on a diplomatic mission.

But they are a advised to gather intelligence, to speak to a broad cross section or as many people as they possibly can in order to uh uh gather intelligence and then sow seeds of dissent within and beyond the court. So i that's a a kind of classi it's sort of they've they've engineered the state and now they're gonna they're gonna kind of disrupt the state.

through just diplomatic missions. I can't help but think of it as a bit like a board game. What one finds there is that therefore there's a complex system of alliances and complex instructions on how to forge those alliances, how to undertake a treaty. And it's incredibly I mean, it presents a kind of logic tree. If you're in a weaker position, then you should do this. If you're in a an intermediate position, then you should do this. So it's incredibly procedural.

Devon, how how what do ordinary people get out of this? Let's call let's say ordinary people and leave it at that. Are they catered for in this book? The Arthashastra is from the king's perspective. It's about, you know, setting up the state and part of that state of course involves taking care of the villages and the and the countryside, uh the sources of wealth that comprise h his kingdom.

and there are people living there of course. So there is of course a lot to extrapolate a as to what the lives of people are like and also what these instructions or these kinds of prescriptions in the Arthashastra have to do with them. Now I like to see it as kind of that you know, on account of the kind of universal tone of this text that suggests a kind of wide applicability that transcends time and place.

that the instructions for the king I think can be seen as a metaphor also for any sort of leader in or any sort of person trying to garner success and be successful in the world. And I think that's one of the things that has made this text very interesting beyond sort of political theorists and political scientists, to think about how it speaks to human nature and how to think about that from that perspective.

Jessica, it there's a large role for spies in this ideal state which fascinated me. Why was this considered important and how was that network organised? Oh it's so wonderful. Um I mean as Steven said, you don't want to rely too much on force.

Force will make the people angry. And one of the things actually you're supposed to do is not be forceful, but rather just just, so you can discourage corruption. But corruption's a big concern at this time. How do you find it? How do you elicit the truth about it?

And if you're a king at a distance, how can you even see that it's happening? Here come the spies element of the text. It doesn't want to rely just on administration, it knows it doesn't always work, it knows that the military have limited use.

Spies are everything. It says they're the eyes of the king. Uh only with them can he know even how to respond. And it gives a a fabulous list of the kind of people that you should recruit for your spies. Uh they could be holy men, would you all the holy men you meet, anyone could be a spy at any given moment, male or female.

Uh troubadours, anyone who can move around. Minstrels, troubadours, entertainers, madmen they look mad, but wait a second, what's going on? Cow herds if you've been to India, the cow may go anywhere, and you'll have to follow the cow Oops, you're in somebody's garden, who knows what you'll hear?

Um there's a huge range. Even your street vendor has said, you know, perfect person, you get your lunch from him every day, who knows what he's really watching over. So there's a huge range of possibilities, of course prostitutes, courtesans, etcetera, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things it does is it kind of categories it loves to categorize groups. As as James said, it's very procedural. If you know who you've got and what the characteristics, here's what you do.

Here are four categories of spy. The first is the secret agent. They specialise in secret arts, reading codes, strange symbols, magic is a really important s actually the secret agent's almost like a sorcerer. The second kind is the assassin. It says it's a countryside man who's so desperate he's really brave and will do anything, doesn't fear for his life.

The third category is the poisoner. Poisoners always are said to be callous, they'll poison their own mother, cruel, they kind of enjoy the the suffering, and they're always lazy, they're not willing to do the work. But the fourth category is my favourite, I like to think this is who I would have been in ancient India. It's the female ascetic, the the woman holy person who who is a revered sort of, you know, maybe a poor widow who can go anywhere'cause she's very pious.

But actually she's the king's ultimate secret agent who can be involved in all kinds of plots. and uh you know, she lives a life in both worlds. So it's really a you don't see these characters anywhere in really in the rest of Indian literature. This is a wonderful resource. Whether they've re existed is it is another question, but it's a great story.

I'm keeping my distance now then. Uh James, um can you give listeners some idea of the style and structure of the text? Um it's not a florid literary text. It doesn't really fit the genre that it's within. is mostly in prose. It has these verses that I've already mentioned uh at the end of each chapter. It is a text that I d I don't think

would be celebrated for its literary style. It's a text that you go to read for its insights, its analysis, and for its comprehensive depiction of an ideal typical early Indian state. Devin, can we bring in the Mahabharata here and uh give us some idea of any connection there might be?

Yes, uh you know the Mahabharata is generally understood not to be an Arthashastra as such, even though there's a very big section in one of the books, the Shanti Parva called the Rajadharma Parvan, which speaks about the behavior of a king. It's generally thought to be a dharmashastra. So it seems to be that the Mahabharata has a lot to say, of course, about kings and kingdoms. It's about a massive civil war and the destruction of of the state and uh giving you

through counter normative examples what not to do to maintain the stability of a state. That being said, a lot of Arthashastra, you know, like thinking is deeply embedded in this work. But the Mahabharata is really about weak kings, about tyrants or men who should be kings or would be kings if fate was kinder and it's uh and in that way it really kinda sets a good background for a text like the Arthashastra

And there's also examples of course in the Arthashastra which take stories from the Mahabharata and some of them are quite interesting, uh the way they take the stories up. Uh I can tell you one of them if you'd like. Please. Well, there's a you know, there's a very interesting thing about uh you know, when a king has to

interrogate, say a thief. And uh and then there's a set of things that that uh the magistrate should be aware of because the thief might just um confess even though he didn't do something. And there's a story in the Mahabharata of of this sage who is meditating and a set of thieves have just robbed the royal treasury and they're absconding with the with the loot and they drop it off and they bury it near this meditating sage and then disappear thinking they'll come back later to get it.

Well when he wakes up the sage from his meditation, the king's men come and they basically, you know, drag him in for interrogation. And, you know, he of course has no idea, but he's afraid. There's you know, one story is that he doesn't say anything. One story is that he's afraid, so he just confesses. thinking he'll avoid torture, but they still, of course, impale him. This is death by impalement. This is one of these horrible corporal punishments.

And uh is a whole story about that, but it's sort of woven in just to uh demonstrate not the morality of the story, which is you know, which takes us into this idea of why somebody suffers uh a fate that they don't deserve, but it goes into Just be careful because sometimes a thief might lie and you know it sort of just takes it on from that point of view and doesn't go into the other stuff. So it's very interesting the interconnection between these works.

Jessica, how was the text discovered in the early twentieth century? Um it's a wonderful tale. The text had gone quiet. It had been very influential for a while, and then it kind of disappears from reference for centuries. Um and it goes into that kind of silo where we know even now that there are manuscripts all over India that nobody knows are there, that haven't been seen, we're waiting for No, it haven't been seen.

That's a good question. But we keep finding them. And actually, you know, people Uh colleagues are always going to India and you knock on someone's door and you look in their basement or you go to the temple and they've got a huge archive, and you'll find extraordinary manuscripts that people have known existed but couldn't get hold of because they've been referred to by other texts.

And this is kind of the situation with the Arthashastra. So we know we've had references to it. It's been influential on a number of other texts, including the Kama Sutra actually, the style is very influential.

But nobody's seen it. And actually it's importantly that when the British colonial uh colonial institution arrives in India, they're looking for kind of governance and social ethics text that they can use to rule. So they're looking for something like this, but they haven't found anything like it. And then in 1905, uh Dr. Sama Shastri in Mysore, beautiful garden city of India, is a Sanskrit scholar and he's got he's got hold of a whole bunch of manuscripts.

And on one version he finds this manuscript and another one someone turns up and hands it to him and disappears, so we don't really know where it comes from. Either way there's a kind of a mysterious provenance. He looks at it, it's in the Granthi script, which is a sort of southern script that not everyone reads. Uh it takes a little while to figure it out. Eventually he thinks wait a second, what is this?

And over the course of the next four years he translates it into Sanskrit. So now everybody can read it, including Sanskrit scholars in the West. And they go, My gosh, this is incredible. And then in nineteen fifteen he it gets translated into English finally, and now it it goes wild. Everyone discovers this text.

And one of the things that it does that changes our understanding of India. Just before that, people major gurus like Swami Vivekananda, very importantly, had portrayed India as the great spiritual, otherworldly force. of human society. And that's an important and sort of beautiful idea.

This gave you the other side. It reminded an Indy that was still at the time under empire, that it had had its own empires, that it could be wily and practical, and forceful, and you know, secular as well, when necessary. And so that other side of India, practical, hard thinking, hard fighting India, came to the fore as an image. I sometimes wonder if it had an impact on the development towards independence.

James Hegerty, what's the reputation and status of the work today? It has a varied reputation and it lives varied lives. I think one of the if building on what uh Devens said earlier on about the king kind of counterintuitively being an every person. But much more generalized life advice.

has become a popular thing in South Asia. So if you go on YouTube now and you you put Chanakya Niti in, you will find instructions on management, life, all kinds of things that are rooted in the putative author of Abdishas. So that's one life that it leads.

another life that it it leads uh and richly so is as a classic in the kind of global literature. So it sits up there with Aristotle's politics, Machiavelli's the Prince, uh you know, Lao Tzu and you know various other things and it it's part of a kind of global canon of works that provide insights into the nature of good or not so good government and the prosecution of fair and not so fair war.

So i it's got all of that going on. So it it has that kind of high literary reputation, um and it has this kind of life in po popular life in South Asia. I think again we should probably focus also on Chanakya as a character. I mean there are comic books. The Amacha Chakata is a popular uh English medium predominantly, but a available in in a a a a wide variety of Indianculars. And that has a a comic book on Chanakya, which interestingly in terms of what Jessica said

recasts the story of uh Chanakya's w uh aiding of the Marians as uh the defeat of Alexander the Great, a foreign invader. So it kind of plays into what Jessica was saying. The Amachachatar comic book reworks Chanakya's advice and it uh the lessons of the Aptashastha are r threaded into this comic book. So the the kind of use of spies, the

Poisoning, all kinds of things are there in the comic book and what it says though is is that this is that hard nosed, uh realpolitical uh South Ocean wisdom that w led us to independence or fought off a foreign uh invader. So That that really plays into that and I think that's part of i its its life in South Asia as a kind of cultural touchstone of of that kind of wisdom.

Nevin, um we're coming towards the end now. Um it's been liking to uh the Prince Machiavelli, sixteenth century. Do you see connections there? Well I suspect that's probably one of the um uh that connection which I think was drawn very early by someone like Max Weber, who's a famous sociologist. I think that connection is what h often is attractive for people to learn about the Arthashastra because they know the prince very well.

Um and of course the similarities between the two works are very clear, right? There's they're both about uh maximizing power, political power, don't really necessarily prioritize moral values, but rather just what's expedient, as they say, or you know, the f the famous ends justify the means and ruthlessness. The similarities are there of course, no doubt, and this is one of the reasons why the two texts are often spoken of together.

There's considerable differences of course between them. You know, as I think James was speaking about and Jessica both, that the economic is much more pronounced in the Arthashastra, the the idea of uh in Machiavelli that this the the state is actually Uh the context, right? The prints occurs in a very specific

context in sixteenth century Italy, but where the the other Shastra is timeless, right? I I mean even though there are these connections to the Mauryas and later to the Gupta, this is not necessarily speaking about any given state.

and context, which is a very interesting thing. And so from that point of view, I feel like uh you know, that both works essentially are struggling with this connection between the political and the moral. But beyond that they have very different ways of approaching things. Just to come in I think it's a really interesting question. Um and I agree they both have this kind of sense that the end justifies the means.

And in bac in fact I think Weber said that the Arthashastra was even more callous than Machiavelli's Prince because it gives more and more of the detail, right, of how to punish, of you know, how which limbs to chop off. how to identify an assassinated corpse and which means it died by. But I maybe just to see a different side of it, it is true all the way through, again and again here and there it says, the king cannot flourish without his people.

He only has power because he's a protector. He is there to engage in kind of look of art. He's there to ensure that the world turns and turns successfully, and only in that sustenance Will he himself be able to flourish? And that goes along with his sort of yogic scholarly character. He's supposed to spend hours each day studying. He has to be himself a kind of a virtuous character to be able to pull this extraordinarily uh extraordinary act off.

And if I could comment on that, I think that's the important question there is what is the end that is being justified? And the end that is being justified in the Arthashastra ostensibly is a virtuous state. Mm. Now I'm I'm not suggesting that actually justifies what is described in the Artashastra, but it's a very different end to that which we find in Machiavelli's print.

And the the economic part is really interesting because I think it recognises that you can't have a virtuous state without a strong treasury and a happy, successful resource use. Right. So it's a very flourishing state that makes for virtue. And officials that aren't too corrupt.

Thank you very much. Thank and thanks to Devon Patel, as well as James Heggerty and Jessica Frasier, and to our studio engineer Tim Heffer. Next week we'll be exploring seismology, the science of earthquakes. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to have said that you haven't said?'Cause you put it on the podcast.

Well you know, I mean well one of the things is uh that I you know I'm really fascinated by this tension between these betwe you know, between Dharma and Arta and how it gets played out. I mean I think that that I think Jessica made a very good point about That the stereotype that's been developed is that this is a tradition, this this Indian tradition, classical Indian tradition, which has heavily emphasized the

The kind of priority of the moral, the priority of the virtuous. And th there's this whole other side that's there. And I think the literature, I mean I'm you know, I work mostly on literary works and you can see that some of the most productive plots and the most productive statements about the complexity of human life have been brought forth with this tension. So I think of the this work the Raguvamsha, a very famous poem by the famous Kalidasa about

a dynasty of kings that moves from the ideal king to what we kind of have now, right? The kind of the end end of that lineage, which is a complete you know, devolution. And the whole poem, this massive poem, is about i it's a meditation on on how a king can be virtuous. Uh and what happens when the king is not virtuous. Do I take that up? James?

Yeah no I think that's fascinating and I and I do and I think i this builds on what Devane was saying uh about the relationship between the Mahapartha and the Arthashastra. I think Devin, you talked about tyrannies, uh and and the tyrannical king in the Mahabharata and the ki the kind of commentarial, even satirical side of that and and we find that in the Mahabharata in that we get some devastatingly uh blunt statements of might is right.

four kings, Duryodhana, the prince in the Mahabharata being the key example.

But on the side of virtue, we're probably less sensitive to exaggerated virtue or problematic virtue in the form of the king. And I I've often wondered whether the Yudhishthira, the kind of heroic central protagonist of the Mahabharata, Um uh and I'm not alone in this, this has been something that's been pondered for a long time, uh whether you dished it as a presentation of virtue is that is that that that as an excess, as a as a problematic virtue.

Um and then behind that so I'm I'm I think you've touched on something really important there and it's certainly something I would I would have liked to or we can discuss more. But uh one other side of of that is I wonder in the Arthashastra if there's something from the other epic, the Ramayana, where in book two there's a a Brahmin called Jabali, I'm sure y uh some of you you y Jessica and Devani you will probably know the story, but uh Jabali says Not just

Mighty's right, but he says essentially there there is no afterlife you when you die, you die. There is no metaphysical realm. It's an incredibly strong statement of a a kind of atheistic materialism. And The Arthashastra seems to be something it seems to kind of contain elements of that or the the kind of consequences of that in terms of real political thought, but yoked now to a kind of

Puka, Brahminical, Brahmin centred, Vedic, religious agenda, so sort of neutralize again. And and Devin you said early on, Mulmoksha was kind of added to sort of uh to the Purushartas, the goals of life, in order to sort of in some ways bring into the fold.

a goal that wasn't so conducive to uh settled social life'cause it basically said, let's you know, this is a let's get off the wheel of life and death and and uh get away from this this mess. Um so The virtuous king I think is uh uh can be the subject of caricature, stereotype and I think the Arthashastra in some ways, on coming back to it again for this programme, I was kind of like well I think this is

incredibly helpful for for unpacking some of what's happening in in that wider epic literature and and the story literature uh that th that I've spent so so long engaging with. Mm, I agree. Yeah. I mean it's it's I think you're absolutely right that there's something about it solving a problem that we've seen lots of excessively virtuous kings almost

stupidly virtuous kings who get into all kinds of trouble and it wants to remind us of what it is to be wily. Um I one of the things I was struck by when I reread the text for this is that it's in some ways very secular. It has very little interest in temples. It's not that excited about Dharmo, a sort of like virtuous ethics. It has relatively little to say about

soteriological things. It's really very practical. And there's something about that, I think you're right. It's interesting you make that connection to Jabali, who's sometimes related to what's called the Lokayato Charvaka, the atheist school. Lokiata, the word for the atheist, literally means the worldly one. And worldliness is what this is about. Uh it's it's unapologetically worldly and actually kind of very rich in doing that.

And then it seems like the underlying anxiety of all these works is is the famous uh you know, Matsyanyaya, the the law of the fish. that without some kind of justified force or king that kind of is can handle things, that big fish will eat the little fish and it you know, all of these things uh If it means you have to torture and do ethically strained interrogation procedures, so be it, you know. Uh it's it's it's really quite clear eyed.

So be I mean, if you have to do ethically strange procedures to lead an ethical government. Yeah. I mean of course there's limits, right? I mean there's limits. The uh the text says that you shouldn't torture petty criminals or drunks or children or the elderly and or pregnant women. But, you know, everything else is on b uh is on the table. You can beat with a stick, with whips, uh hang people upside down. I think there's uh there's water boarding in there.

I don't think it's successful in harmonising these two things, but I think it sets itself to task of of attempting to. And it also reflects the the time, right? So you've that I the section on slavery is so interesting because it's something we find extremely uncomfortable and yet it was Totally present and it was in Greece. It was in, you know, all the great philosophers we read about, you know, were involved in a slave-oriented world.

And it goes in and it talks about the courtesans and slaves and all these things and it gives you a some kind of attempt at justice in that world. You know, the man who indentured services himself to someone and then dies in service. What happens to his son? Does this poor child inherit his servitude and lose the money? No, the son actually is still free, and inherits the money his father made. What if a woman who's a slave is impregnated by her master,

Well, actually she automatically gets freedom and so does her child, right? She you know if a nurse is asked to bathe her master naked, basically turned into a prostitute. She gets to she gets, you know, a fine is he has to pay or she gets to leave. So there are ways it's trying to create a practical world and in a way we have such high expectations of the classical world and of these texts. This is what it meant and in some ways still means now to make things work.

You know I I also just I'm sorry, just one last thing. I I also wonder if like the the fact that uh the textual history of the Arthashastra is so complex. It's conflated with Dharmashastra, with epic, all kinds of materials that I think that that there is this kind You know, I think the text are is reflecting a deeper conflation of these so called discrete sciences about how to you know that that they're all flowing together.

Can I see two little things separately? And one is just James mentioned the idea of corruption at the end and that was absolutely essential when you're having travelled a lot in Asia, in Africa and all kinds of countries and thinking about what this meant in the past as in the present

Corruption is a huge problem, and the text is very concerned about that, its use of force, its use of spies, the ways it thinks about strong control. It's actually it says it's about the stopping your officials from taking matters into their own hands and it it really sees that as a as a perennial problem, I think I pr significantly so.

A totally separate issue. The text is kinda wonderful. It's a manual and it has this typical style of Indian manuals that it as you said it's procedural. It lists every possible kind of governor or minister and pro courtesan or spy, gives you what to do with them. But it can also be very poetic. There's a lot of beautiful imagery in there. Um you know actually each

section has a verse at the end that captures and encapu encapsulates its wisdom and tries to give you something pithy and delicious to take away. And some of the inj it the some of the imagery is wonderful. Um, it says you how to how to recognise poisons and if your the steam from your rice is the colour of a peacock's throat, then beware it is poisoned, you know. Only a peacock's throat would would turn up in this text. How wonderful.

Do we do we h do we learn much about the state of knowledge in scientific investigation? I think we we gain n knowledge as we do with a lot of early uh South Asian texts, um of uh of that period

on the approach to the construction of sound knowledge, as it were. So it's very systematic in its approach. It's, you know, this is the contention, this is the these are the the ramifications of that contention, or it says this is this is the case, this is the opposite of that being the case and we need to take that into account.

So I think what we we learn certainly uh directly is the very sophisticated level of argument, uh consciousness of argument structures um in this and other texts. Um obviously we also indirectly see lots of things about material that tells us things about the state of the practical sciences in in early South Asia.

really made me realise how much how economy worked at that time. I think I'd never understood how much mining was absolutely essential. Uh it's very distrustful of people who are metal workers'cause they can they can, you know, add stuff to the metal and and make it cheaper.

Yeah, exactly. And it it's keeping an eye on trade and shipping if you try and export things that you know are a bit dodgy. But amongst other things it reminds you it it captures that moment when capital becomes a thing. Land management is big. And that includes, you know, forest produce like elephants as well as agriculture. But now that we've got mining and from it treasure, whether jewels or coins or metal work

Now trade is possible in a new way, uh wealth is possible in a new way, the whole structure of society fundamentally changes. Taxation is possible in a new way. And I think that sense in which it's a product of those technological shifts. really reminds us of something that's true across the world. People talk about the Axial Age as a time when society changes. I think this is one of the reasons that it changes. Things something as simple as mining has taken a leap forward technologically.

It's also quite interesting that um you know, it seems like most of these texts I mean we think about it as a science, I mean this kind of culling of knowledge. from various quarters. You know, one can only imagine how much just as in m most of this Shastra tradition, how much went into informal contexts before it got distilled and and put into some kind of form.

And then of course that form is still pithy enough as is described by Jessica in these final verses, but also just the very each of these descriptions and normative prescriptions each can be extrapolated further and taken into whole other directions and applied to different contexts. So it seems like there's this kind of capsule that these texts are kind of in capsule form.

that have something before it and can produce a lot after it, which is why I guess the tech still can have enormous amounts of reception to come, you know, in terms of what it can Speak to. I agree, Devane, just because I was uh thinking about the w I hadn't actually mentioned before the the citation of the previous arguments of other people who've uh had insights on whatever it is that uh Cartilier is discussing, which of course models argument and debate beyond the text.

and shows people, uh, implicitly how to conduct uh a sound argument. And of course he doesn't always disagree with the previous authorities. Sometimes he says, Yeah, no, that's that's good. Yeah, it totally captures that that area in Indian history when for each of the different areas that these shastras capture, whether it's aesthetics, whether it's ethics, whether it's statecraft, etc. etcetera, there's a whole group of specialists.

that it refers to and it lets us know that this is not just one individual there's a kind of a knowledge world, uh a school of different views for each one. And typically for India, it doesn't necessarily totally reject everybody else. It cites them, it offers them. And it often tries to summarise or give its own version, but there's a kind of a sense of a build up of knowledge here.

Yeah. And it's interesting that the that the uh science of uh of sex, as it were, right, the Kamashastra is very much modeled on the Earth Shastra. So that's kind of an interesting uh detail that I don't know of how compelling that argument is, but it is interesting. Sex and politics. Well, it's a good thing. İzlediğiniz için teşekkür ederim. Thank you all very much. Thank you very much indeed. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

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