Kautilya’s Arthashastra Lessons: Background of an Ancient Ethos

Ancient ethos has withstood the passage of time. Ancient texts composed thousands of years ago are still relevant in today’s world. They guide and influence modern-day leaders and management systems. We discussed a few management lessons from Bhagavad Gita in one of our previous blogs  guiding us not only in our personal but also in our professional lives. Similarly, another ancient text in the Indian canon that has a profound impact is the Arthashastra. Some lessons from this marvel of work are still relevant to us personally and professionally.

Let’s initiate today’s blog with a little background, understanding who Kautilya was. 

Kautilya, is credited as the creator of Arthashastra. Kautilya’s Arthashastra has been a matter of nationalist pride for a long time, but it may come as a surprise that it was only in the early 20th century that R. Shamasastry, the then chief librarian of Mysore state, rediscovered and published its first printed version in Sanskrit in 1909, and since then it has taken on a life of its own.

Kautilya, Chanakya, or Vishnu Gupta? 

When someone says Chanakya these days, the first thing you may think of is this person must be a tactical genius, somebody who understands human nature. Intuitively, the idea of Chanakya emerges from this real historical character, somebody who was an advisor to the Mauryan emperor, Chandragupta Maurya. Apparently, he was single-handedly responsible for the overthrow of the Nanda king. His strategy helped send Alexander back, and he had several ideas about how to run a state, how to run one’s finances, as well as state finances. Vishnu Gupta is allegedly to have been his name, or Kautilya, and Chanakya is the title bestowed upon him 

The Historical Inconsistency 

Was Kautilya the first person to have ever written anything about economics? Was he the only person? Maybe not at all.

How was this written all in one go? No, it has undergone several revisions, and like such claims, there have been many inconsistencies in the historicity of the text itself. Let's put that all to bed first, and then go into what this text tells us.

Due to its approach to the exercise of power, Kautilya’s Arthashastra has often been compared to ‘The Prince’ by Machiavelli or the ‘Art of War’ by Sansu and several other seminal texts, but there have been a lot of questions about the historicity.

Romila Thapar, one of the most preeminent historians of the country, has argued that there are, in fact, so many similarities between Arthashastra and the edicts that already existed in Ashoka's time, that it could be part of the culture itself. Several historians, in fact, have agreed that the text was not composed in one go and, in fact, was edited, added, and subtracted over the course of several centuries during the Gupta Empire. Kautilya 's original text was probably a tiny little volume and only dealt with the art of punishment, as some historians go on to say. 

There are no historical records, but whatever we know about Chanakya comes from texts and traditions. One of the earliest texts in which we find mention of Chanakya is Mudrarakshas, a Sanskrit play written about 700 to 1000 years after Chandragupta, Mahavamsa which was written in the 5th century; Kathasaritsagar, a text of the 11th century from which we have a lot of stories that are still eagerly consumed. There is also Parishishtaparvan, which is written in the 12th century. All of these refer to Chanakya, but several hundreds of years after this person existed.

Going forward in the blog, let’s focus on and understand the relevant lessons from this historical text for our times. No matter the provenance of the text or the historicity of it, there certainly are some lessons, some success mantras, that one can adopt to make a part of one’s personality. The guiding principles of the Arthashastra can influence every facet of your working style.