Essentials of Indian Statecraft: Kautilya’s Arthasastra for Contemporary Readers

The present work attempts to place before modern readers, a streamlined version of the greatest book on statecraft written in India, before the Christian Era, by Kautilya, the most noted and feared minister to Chandragupta Maurya, the grandfather of Asoka and acknowledged as a consummate statesman of Hindu India. The book, Arthasastra, discovered by Dr. Shama Sastry in 1904 in Mysore, can be said to represent the pinnacle of Indian intellectual achievement in the fields of politics and public administration. Several academic theses have been woven around this magnum opus. The present author has selected portions of this great work in the present work which could be said to hold the interest of the modern reader. He has covered fields like Administration, Economic Organisation and the Services, Inter State Relations and Diplomacy and the States in Crisis, as the topics for the present version of Kautilya's Arthasastra. Those who read will observe how modern some of Kautilya's thought streams appear, considering that the original author was a contemporary of Aristotle and a practical statesman who engineered, single¬handed, a coup d'etat which overthrew the Magadha Empire and set up the Mauryan Dynasty which held sway over Northern India for more than three centuries. The interpretative introduction highlights some of the thoughts of Kautilya which deserve special attention at the hands of contemporary readers.