One hundred years ago, an obscure librarian created what in scholarly terms was a sensation. 1909 was the year in which the first near complete text of Kautilya’s Arthashastra was published. Four years earlier, Rudrapatnam Shamashastry had discovered the palm leaf manuscript that would define his legacy. But while he recognised the significance of the text, even he could not have anticipated the revolution in Indian self-image his discovery would bring about. The text became a focal point with which to contest every cliché that had been used to define India. A society that allegedly never had a rational state suddenly acquired one; a society

defined by a dreamy moralism suddenly acquired a narrative of steely realism; a society without a history of political thought acquired a master text in political theory; a society without sophisticated economic thinking acquired insight into the foundations of wealth; a society without a strategic culture acquired a veritable theory of international relations; a nation with ostensibly no political identity acquired a prehistory of political unity.

Like all iconic texts the Arthashastra, or more accurately its putative author Kautilya, had a long mythology woven around him, particularly in literary productions. At one level he became the personification of the etymology of his name: kutila. But he also became a kind of Great Legislator, the saviour of India from internal dissension and external attack. While his teaching came to signify ruthlessness in a political cause, the opposite cautionary message could also be drawn. If politics requires you to be ruthless you better be sure that it is for the welfare of the subjects, and it is done with supreme detachment from personal ambition. The text itself is not an easy read. It is like the planning commission, national security council, administrative reforms commission all thrown into one, peppered with insights from moral psychology and encased by a layer of precise theoretical vocabulary that we can barely reconstruct. Its strength is the lapidary insight, not the extended argument. Its Machiavellianism is directed more against holders of power. It gives an unnerving sense of what it is like to snatch snippets of order from a deeply chaotic world always threatening to go out of kilter; the legitimacy and possibility of dharma, paradoxically, rests on a contingent foundation of power. And power is a mercurial thing indeed.

... contd.