Despite the important role Kautilya's Arthashastra played during the Mauryan Empire, the treatise seems to have vanished from mainstream history in India for almost two millennia. This commonplace conclusion could be derived from the observation that the general Indian public was unaware about the Mauryan Empire before the discovery of various artifacts by European Orientalists.
Contrary to popular belief, however, there are sufficient evidence to indicate that Kautilyan thought was never lost at all. There are examples of the niti and katha literature, numerous writers, and even Puranas showing Kautilyan influences. Furthermore, King Harshavardhana had successfully used Kautilya’s concept of rajamandala to consolidate his power in the 7th century C.E., while two ministers of the Pala dynasty had also used ideas from the Arthashastra. Meanwhile, a work titled Shivatattvaratnakara in the 18th century recognised Kautilya's role in defining Hindu polity. Another apparent influence of the Arthashastra could be found in Nitisara, a text on statecraft which was written 800 years after Kautilya’s time. Kautilyan influence continued during Muslim rule in India, when the rulers Alauddin Khalji and Akbar, and the author Barani, used administrative concepts from the Arthashastra.
How did Kautilyan thought manage to stay within the Indian political sphere despite the physical text of Arthashastra itself being unavailable for millennia? This could be partly attributed to students of the Kautilyan school of thought who have been dutifully transmitting the text orally from one generation to another. The most interesting theory on this phenomenon is ‘habitus’, which believes that Kautilyan thought has continued to live on in the collective memory of the Indian population (albeit subconsciously) as a politico-strategic culture which influenced Indian thought patterns.
If the intra-cultural migration of Kautilyan ideas within the Indian subcontinent is exciting, the possibilities of trans-cultural migration of these ideas outside India is even more intriguing. Gautam (2017) and Liebig (2017) have convincingly theorised how “Kautilya’s thought-figures” in the Arthashastra could have undergone a similar path of trans-cultural migration as another ancient Indian text, the Pancatantra. The theory suggests that Kautilyan thoughts in the Arthashastra have been translated into Old Persian as Kalila wa Dimna, which was later translated into Arabic as Siraju‘l-muluk. This Arabic version later became the Latin text Secretum Secretorum, with inputs from other cultures as well. Secretum Secretorum remained in vogue in Europe until the emergence of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Chances are that Machiavelli could have had some indirect influences from this text even if he had not read it in person.
Above everything else, there seems to be significant homologies between The Prince and Secretum Secretorum, and between Secretum Secretorum and the Arthashastra, thus making Secretum Secretorum as “an important missing link in the trans-cultural migration of Kautilya’s ideas into Europe”. Furthermore, studies have found some homologies with Kautilyan thought in the book Politics Among Nations by the political realist Morgenthau (20th century), indicating that the modern theory of political realism “could have been built upon the political realism of Kautilya”. It is worth noting that Morgenthau himself had explicitly provided references to Kautilya in his work, showing that he recognises Kautilyan influence in his political realism.
The possibility of a trans-cultural migration of Kautilyan thought beyond the Indian subcontinent - thus being a precursor to the whole concept of realpolitik - is an exciting premise which deserves to be explored further...
References:
(The author highly recommends the book The Arthashastra in a Transcultural Perspective: Comparing Kautilya with Sun-Zi, Nizam al-Mulk, Barani and Machiavelli, edited by M. Liebig & S. Mishra).
1. Gautam, P. K. (2017). Understanding Kautilya’s Arthashastra: Origination, Migration and Diffusion. In M. Liebig & S. Mishra (Ed.). The Arthashastra in a Transcultural Perspective: Comparing Kautilya with Sun-Zi, Nizam al-Mulk, Barani and Machiavelli. New Delhi: Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.
2. Liebig, M. (2017). Kautilya and Machiavelli in a Comparative Perspective. In M. Liebig & S. Mishra (Ed.). The Arthashastra in a Transcultural Perspective: Comparing Kautilya with Sun-Zi, Nizam al-Mulk, Barani and Machiavelli. New Delhi: Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.
3. Liebig, M., & Mishra, S. (2017). Introduction. In M. Liebig & S. Mishra (Ed.). The Arthashastra in a Transcultural Perspective: Comparing Kautilya with Sun-Zi, Nizam al-Mulk, Barani and Machiavelli. New Delhi: Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.
4. Mitra, S. K. (2017). Kautilya Redux? Re-use, Hybridity, Trans-cultural Flow and Resilience of the State in India. In M. Liebig & S. Mishra (Ed.). The Arthashastra in a Transcultural Perspective: Comparing Kautilya with Sun-Zi, Nizam al-Mulk, Barani and Machiavelli. New Delhi: Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.
5. Sil, N. P. (2017). The Analect and the Arthashastra: Kongzi of Zhou China and Kauṭilya of Maurya India Compared. SAGE Open. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244017747324
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