Chanakya

Chanakya is remembered in Indian tradition as the Brahmin teacher and minister who helped Chandragupta Maurya overthrow the Nanda kings and found the Maurya Empire in the late fourth century BCE. He is also traditionally named as Kautilya, author of the Arthashastra, a celebrated Sanskrit treatise on statecraft. Both claims are less secure than his fame suggests: no contemporary record of him survives, the stories about him come from much later legends, and most modern scholars believe the Arthashastra in its present form was written centuries after the Mauryas.

The historical setting is solid. In the 320s BCE the Nanda dynasty ruled Magadha, the most powerful kingdom of the Ganges plain, from its capital Pataliputra, near modern Patna. Around 321 BCE Chandragupta seized power there and went on to build an empire covering most of northern India, as Greek writers who knew of him as Sandrokottos confirm. The Greek ambassador Megasthenes lived at his court. None of the Greek sources, however, mentions a minister called Chanakya, and no inscription names him.

The dates sometimes given for him, about 375 to 283 BCE, are therefore estimates derived from the traditional story rather than from documents. It is plausible that Chandragupta had able Brahmin advisers, and possible that one of them was the man later remembered as Chanakya, but historians cannot confirm his existence or any detail of his career.

The story of Chanakya and Chandragupta survives in several independent traditions, all written long after the events. The oldest are the Buddhist Mahavamsa chronicle of Sri Lanka and its commentary, from about the fifth or sixth century CE; a Jain version, told most fully by the monk Hemachandra in the twelfth century but drawing on earlier sources; a Kashmiri version in the eleventh-century story collections of Somadeva and Kshemendra; and the Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa, "The Signet Ring of Rakshasa", by Vishakhadatta, probably composed in the Gupta era or later and largely fictional.

The versions differ in detail but share a core. Chanakya, a learned but ill-favoured Brahmin, often said to have been educated at Taxila, in today's Pakistan, is insulted and thrown out of the Nanda king's court. He vows revenge, finds the young Chandragupta, trains him, raises an army and, after early failures, brings down the Nandas and places his pupil on the throne. The Jain account has him later serve Chandragupta's son Bindusara as well, and tells of court intrigues that led to his death, in some tellings by self-starvation. The Mudrarakshasa centres on his cunning efforts to win over Rakshasa, the last loyal Nanda minister. Elements such as Chanakya's vow to leave his topknot untied until the Nandas were destroyed became famous, but they belong to literature, not history.

The Arthashastra, "the science of material gain" or of statecraft, is a long and practical manual on how a king should govern. It covers taxation, agriculture, mining, trade, law courts and punishment, the duties of officials, the running of a large network of spies and secret agents, diplomacy and war. Its famous mandala theory treats neighbouring kingdoms as natural enemies and the kingdoms beyond them as natural allies. It accepts deception, assassination and other harsh methods when they serve the security and prosperity of the state, while also stressing that a king's happiness lies in his subjects' welfare.

The text was lost for many centuries and was rediscovered in 1905, when the librarian Rudrapatna Shamasastry identified a palm-leaf manuscript at the Oriental Research Institute in Mysore. Its author calls himself Kautilya, and in one verse near the end describes himself as the man who rescued the land from the Nandas. Early editors therefore accepted that it was a Mauryan work by Chanakya, and the Indian scholar R. P. Kangle still defended that view in the 1960s.

Most later scholarship disagrees. Thomas Trautmann's statistical study of the text's style in 1971 suggested several authors. Patrick Olivelle, its most recent major translator, argues that it grew in stages: older source texts from roughly 150 BCE to 50 CE, a first compilation by Kautilya around 50 to 125 CE, and a final revision between about 175 and 300 CE. The name Chanakya never appears in it, and the verse linking the author to the overthrow of the Nandas looks like a later addition, perhaps made in the Gupta period, when the Gupta Empire liked to present itself as heir to the Mauryas. On this view, attaching the work to Chanakya lent it prestige. Some scholars still argue that a Mauryan core may lie beneath the later layers, so the question is not fully closed, but the Arthashastra cannot safely be used as a direct description of Chandragupta's government.

A collection of moral and practical maxims, the Chanakya Niti, is also attributed to him. It is a later compilation and its link to any historical Chanakya is weaker still.

Since its rediscovery the Arthashastra has been compared with Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince and with Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and Chanakya is often called India's Machiavelli. The comparison captures the work's unsentimental realism but undersells its range, since it is as much a handbook of economic administration as of power politics. The text has become a standard reference in the study of Indian philosophy and of ancient political thought.

In modern India Chanakya is a national hero, a symbol of strategic intelligence and of a strong, home-grown tradition of statecraft. Indian nationalists of the early twentieth century valued the Arthashastra as proof that ancient India had produced sophisticated political science, and scholars have noted that this enthusiasm encouraged an early Mauryan dating. His story has inspired plays, novels, a celebrated 1991 television series and the name of Chanakyapuri, the diplomatic district of New Delhi. Popular retellings often set his rise against the invasion of the Punjab by Alexander the Great in 326 BCE, which did unsettle the north-west just before Chandragupta's rise, but any personal role for Chanakya in those events rests on legend rather than evidence.