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Kautilya |
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Also known as Chanakya and Vishnugupta, Kautilya is generally believed to have lived somewhere between approximately 300 BC and AD 300 and to have been the friend, adviser and first minister of Chandragupta Maurya, whom he helped install as King of Magadha in northern India. Kautilya is remembered today chiefly for his reputed authorship (there is controversy on this question) of a long Sanskrit text on the science of government which came to modern eyes only in 1904. Known as the Arthashastra, this is without doubt one of the earliest extant works of its kind and has long sections dealing with foreign policy and war. Kautilya\'s teaching on statecraft assumes that kings will always want to expand their territory and should thus regard any with whom they share a common border as a ‘natural enemy’. Since his interest is the small state (including the ‘weak king’), he places great emphasis on the use of the envoy, the duties of whom include ‘sending information to his king, ensuring maintenance of the terms of a treaty, upholding his king\'s honour, acquiring allies, instigating dissension among the friends of the enemy, conveying secret agents and troops, suborning the kinsmen of the enemy to his own king\'s side, acquiring clandestinely gems and other valuable material for his own king, ascertaining secret information and showing valour in liberating hostages’. Envoys were also of great value in playing for time. Kautilya taught that an envoy should never be killed even if an outcast, though he condoned the imprisonment of one who had brought an unwelcome message. Though the list of duties prescribed for the envoy by Kautilya do not suggest that the average mission would be brief, it is also clear that he was not speaking of an envoy who was properly permanently resident at a foreign court. Any lengthy stay was because he had been refused permission to leave, in which case he should use every resource at his disposal to subvert the local king. Though Kautilya felt that the giving of hostages was the least satisfactory way of guaranteeing a treaty, the fact that he devoted a whole chapter to the subject suggests, as has been pointed out, that this was a common practice in his time. (The first person to offer as a hostage is a treacherous minister, the last oneself; in between, daughters rather than sons, brave sons rather than wise ones, and so on.) As for the ethics of his statecraft, these are so repellent that it must be said that the common description of Kautilya as the ‘Indian Machiavelli’ is a serious libel on the Florentine Secretary. The Arthashastra is a work of great pedantry and replete with banalities and circular statements. Though of little if any enduring theoretical significance, it is nevertheless of great historical interest. A modern translation with the text helpfully rearranged and interpreted was produced by the former Indian ambassador L. N. Rangarajan in 1992. |
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