In Our Time - The Arthashastra

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ancient Sanskrit text the Arthashastra, regarded as one of the major works of Indian literature. Written in the style of a scientific treatise, it provides rulers with a guide on how to govern their territory and sets out what the structure, economic policy and foreign affairs of the ideal state should be. According to legend, it was written by Chanakya, a political advisor to the ruler Chandragupta Maurya (reigned 321 – 297 BC) who founded the Mauryan Empire, the first great Empire in the Indian subcontinent. As the Arthashastra asserts that a ruler should pursue his goals ruthlessly by whatever means is required, it has been compared with the 16th-century work The Prince by Machiavelli. Today, it is widely viewed as presenting a sophisticated and refined analysis of the nature, dynamics and challenges of rulership, and scholars value it partly because it undermines colonial stereotypes of what early South Asian society was like. WithJessica Frazier Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu StudiesJames Hegarty Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions at Cardiff University And Deven Patel Associate Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of PennsylvaniaProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, the ancient Indian Sanskrit text, the Ota Shastra, has been compared to the work of Machiavelli. Its origins are uncertain, but what is clear is it was designed to be part of a practical manual for statecraft.

It tells a ruler how to govern. his territory, how to achieve stability and prosperity, and how to conduct relations with other powers, in the process, it gives us an insight into the lives of people in South Asia more than 2,000 years ago. Yet the text only came into the hands of Western scholars at the start of the 20th century. With me to discuss the Athashtra and James Hegetty, Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religion at Cardiff University, Devon Patel, Associate Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Jessica Frazier, lecturer in the study of religion at the University of Oxford and fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Jessica, when was a Achisastro written?

Do we know precisely? We don't know precisely, but we know the era that it came out of. So if we kind of cast our minds back to about 400 BC, we've got an India that's in the middle of what's sometimes known as the axial age. There are states coming to coalesce with urbanized centers in them and cities and courts which encourage kind of intellectual development. And in India, this is known as particularly in North India, the Mahajana padas, these kind of great people centers. There are 16 of them. They make up a kind of a tile work of different states. And yet all that changes in 320. And this is going to basically inspire the development of the text. In 320, India's first really serious empire arises, the Maoriian empire.

And it's really important partly because on the one hand, it achieves huge territory bound to a single administrative center. So Chandra Gropta Maria, Ashoka Maria. They cover almost all of North India. And that's not just a country. It's the larger half of a subcontinent. So people realize that extended power is possible. But it also establishes a kind of an ideological strength. Chandra Gupta adopts a philosophy of Ahimsa nonviolence, which kind of gives a,

an ideological coherence to his state. And his grandson Ashoka adopts Buddhism and actually kind of spreads his philosophy across the country and these rock edicts in which he promotes it. So what this really does is create a new era in around 185 when the empire dissolves, which is going to set the stage for this text. And in this era, people have new expectations of extended empire with sustained power and an ideology and a king promoting it all to fit that model. What else do we know about Indian society at that time? At that time, it's actually a very sophisticated, very developed and rich society in many ways. It's administratively strong. So these different kingdoms have a kind of a centralized structure.

In fact, the text itself describes as being like a wheel. The spokes reach out and administrators, tax collectors, governors and judges keep the states strong. And at the same time, the spokes of that wheel can suck in resources. So we're talking about an era in which mining is important, and that means that there's money, that means that there's jewels and treasure, a kind of a capital system which makes the state much more stable. There's a huge amount of land produce, elephants as well as agriculture,

all kinds of things emerging. And there's a huge amount of kind of intellectual product in that time as well. So one of the most things that's most interesting and important about the society in this area, not only is it sophisticated culturally, wealthy in many ways, but it also has a real investment in intellectual capital. Sanskrit, the lingua franca, is a language in which you can now capture all your knowledge and wisdom of the court and of your own group and movement and write a treatise, a shastra, a text that will capture what the civilization has come to realize.

So there's a real movement towards a knowledge industry in action. I was amazed that they were getting silk from China and coral from different. and other parts of the world. Yeah, it's fascinating. You talk about coral that has to have come from Alexandria. So what we think of as the Silk Road much later is very much present here.

You've got, you know, from sea to sea in India, and that means from the Arabian Ocean all the way over to the Bay of Bengal and beyond. This is a global society, actually, in many ways, that is trying to come up with global philosophies to match. Does it feel its muscles? Does it feel we are the first great empire? We are a global society.

Is it self-consciously? a powerful empire. One of the things that's interesting about, if we go back to sort of Ashoka Maurya, perhaps he reigns over the largest territory of empire that anyone has had at that time. And this is about 250 BC. He knows that what he's done is extraordinary. He develops a philosophy that he has engraved on these rock edicts that he places at key spots around the nation for travelers moving out beyond India to pass on his philosophy

into China, Southeast Asia. Greece and beyond. And that sense that everyone's aware there's something larger in the making. Ashoka's also sending missionaries with his Buddhist ideology all over Asia. People know that they have the capacity not only to cover their territory, but to expand their ideas and their power on a much, much larger scale. Thank you. James Hakely. Do we know who was the author or authors of this text?

Let's say it begins to emerge in the 4th century BC and grows from there. You tell us. Well, in early South Asia, in early India, that's always a complicated question with a long and involved answer. But in this case, we have an author within the text. So in the first book, the author names himself. He says, I'm Caltilia. Basically, he states that this is a wonderful text.

It's incredibly well constructed. You're going to enjoy reading it. It's free of digression. I'm not sure that's wholly true, but I've also never met an academic who wholly keeps to that as a rule for themselves. So we have this Caltilia, who's the author within. the text. If we flip to the end of the Arta Shastra, we go to the final 15th book. There are 15 books in each of that, each book is divided into sections and so on.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, that's right. So we've got 15 books, and the first book mentions Kaltiliya. It's not the only place we find mention of Kaltiliya. And the last book mentions Vishnogupta, and it also mentions someone who assisted in the overthrow of the Nundas, who were the, Jessica's already told us of the Maorian Empire, but the predecessors of the Maorian Empire were the Nanda, that was the predecessor dynasty. So what we find there are three authors within the Arta Shastra. We've got Cautilia, we've got this tantalising mention of Vishnupta,

and we've got another mention of this person who assisted in the overthrow of the Nanda dynasty. Now that person associated with the overthrow of the Nanda dynasty has been known by what, wider tradition as Chanakya. And he's the kind of archetypal wily Brahmin. And a Brahmin was the kind of person entrusted with Vedic knowledge, wider knowledge systems, knowledge of Sanskrit as the kind of elite language, and was sort of the guardian of Vedically related religious and other forms of knowledge in early India at this time. So we've got this Chanakia who is someone who lives a large and interesting

life in wider Sanskrit tradition. So he pops up in mid-first-manenium dramas. Vichaka Data has a play called Mudra Rakshasa, lots of Sanskrit words. But the play tells the story of this wily brahmin assisting Chandrgupta Maurya in the foundation of this new dynasty. Now, so we've got this cultural memory of this wily brahmin. We then have this Kaltilia person within the text, who's frankly the text that the author that the Atta-Shars, most often mentions. The tradition focuses on Chanakia. The text has cartelia,

and that's something that we can ponder on more as we proceed. This is Emmanuel for kingship. It shows how a ruler should govern his kingdom and what the structure of government should be. Can you develop that? I can. It absolutely does. But it does so in ideal typical terms. It's not full of references to historical predecessors.

there are some references to mythical predecessors, but there's not much in the way of concrete historical detail. It's a kind of ideal, typical expression of how to do statehood. It's a sort of instruction manual. It's a kind of unboxing of the nature of early Indian statehood. For instance. So what it does is it sets out a pyramid. It puts the king at the top,

and then it has a four-layer pyramid beneath the king. I mean, in somewhat generalized terms. But beneath the king, we have his intimates. The text says you should only really have four advisers. which is kind of the idea being that if you've got two, they can sort of split their view, if you can be manipulated. Four is considered to be the optimum number for a range of views while also maintaining state secrecy. So you've got these four advisors.

But in this pyramid with the king at the top, what you've got is a top player, the head of your armoury, the crown prince, various other things of that type. You've got your religious specialists. Then beneath that, you've got your kind of key ministers who are in charge of the palace. They're in charge of main aspect. of urban life. Beneath that, you've got people who are entrusted with whole areas of activities such as manufacturing, the treasurer, and so on. And then below that, you've got heads of department. Now, they'll be dealing with specific things like mining or elephant husbandry.

So this is a really precise account of the nature of the early Indian state, but in ideal, typical terms. Sounds like a could be a very big bureaucracy. Yeah, it is. It's a highly bureaucratized state. Though what is worth noting, it's not just a bureaucracy because it's not just governance, it's also the economy that is being described, because the economy is both private and in state hands. It's an exaggeration to say that the economy is wholly in the king's hands. It isn't. There's private enterprise, but the king has control of salt, liquor, mining, all kinds of areas of activity.

And in that way, this is not just a description of how to govern, but it's also a description of key areas of the economy. And justice, which is very important in this document. Yeah, there's amazing stuff on spies and spying. Which has looked on with great favour and developed very... Well, absolutely, it is looked on with great favour. It's described in great detail. But I think it's worth dwelling on the kind of fault line in this text,

which is that on the one hand, it is absolutely concerned with virtue and the duties of the king, the wielding of the dunder, the rod of punishment in a responsible way. And then it's got a whole load of ruthless realpolitik and the description of some pretty, pretty sort of under the belt stuff, which is exciting and interesting. And I think there's, you know, not a wholly resolved tension within the text or within wider Indian literature.

The punishments are gory and I'm not going to repeat them. They are. They are. Let's leave them, show me. They really are. Draw a veil at those. Yeah, fine. Devin, Devin Patel, at the time of this book, at the time it came into being, Hinduism,

was promoting the idea that there are four fundamental goals. goals of human life. What's a relationship between those four goals in this book? Arta as a discrete goal of life has a broader sense, as you've suggested, beyond the more grounded understanding of it in this text, which is as something like statecraft or the pursuit of creating a successful state. But Artha functions as part of a quartet of goals for human life, which is well-established, I would say, or at least being established, well before this text comes into being. We have aspects of texts like the Mahabharata and the epics,

which also speak to these different goals of life. So what are these goals? Oftentimes the first one that's mentioned is this word, Dharmah. Now, Dharma, of course, carries with it so many meanings, as all of these words will on some level. But Dharma, perhaps we can think of it just as something like the pursuit of virtue or the pursuit of right living, good living. Arta, on the other hand, has this sense of success, prosperity,

but anything which makes life in the world better for you, I suppose, is one way of looking at it. And so from that point of view, Arta and Dharma are they discreet just as the third goal of life, which is pleasure. And oftentimes these are the three that are clumped together. There's virtue, success, and pleasure. And pleasure is a word that many of many people in the audience will know, this word karma, right? You have the Kama Sutra, Kama Shastra.

And this word Kama has that sense of both sensual and sexual pleasure, the things in life which one pursues with some level of attachment. The fourth one is sort of a late add-on, some would argue, but it is thought to be connected. And that's basically when you're ready to let go of these first three on some level and seek spiritual freedom. The word is Moksha. Would you tell us something about the concept of atha and how it links with the Atha Shastra? Arta with the Aartha Shastra, of course, is what we're discussing, right? Protecting the people and also for the king to gain for himself and achieve success. In the larger sense, though, Arta seems to be very closely aligned with Dharma.

And people have actually thought about how do these two things link in non-state craft contexts? And from that point of view, you know, whereas Dharma focuses on following a particular normative, as well as a kind of a prescriptive way of behavior that can be understood as virtuous, Arta seems to have as its goal success. And sometimes that means that there are moral breaches that are required in order for success to happen. And the two are not easily resolved. Thank you very much, Jessica. Jessica Preacher, what insight does it give into the life of a king in early Indian society?

It's interesting how much it sort of mirrors a universal imagery of kingship, which is that kings are always scared and life is always difficult. Really, Shakespeare's adage that uneasy lies the head that wears the crown is very much present in this text. So it gives an image of a king who is always being threatened by his advisors who may turn against him, by the regions who may raise an insurrection, by his enemies outside the borders, by tribal chieftains within his region. It gives details on how when he goes to see his own queen,

he has to make sure that they've checked under the bed in case his own son may leap out and kill him, or, you know, the queen will feed him honeyed sweets, which are in fact poisoned. There's a wonderful section where it says, even his own family, his own sons are a danger to him. It says princes and crabs have one thing in common. and they both eat their progenitors.

And so there's a sense that, you know, the king can never rest. I always think of J.G. Fraser's Golden Bough, where he talks about rituals, where kings are always scared of being murdered. And that's very much present here. It gives two solutions, however, to how sort of a king can overcome this danger to him. One is a kind of a yogic self-mastery. The text says one of the greatest danger to a king is his own lust, desire, and propensity towards corruption.

And it gives a list of kings who've gone wrong, basically self-destructed, because they couldn't control their desires, including Ravana, the demon king of Sri Lanka, who steals another man's wife, and then the man comes and destroys him, and that was the end of his kingdom. So it says the king has to be like a yogi,

self-mastery, mastery of the senses, almost a kind of virtuous kingship that is built up by scholarship is central to a king who will succeed. It even says that actually self-mastery of the senses is the key to all politics. The other thing you have to do, of course, is master others who could be adjudged to you. And so it gives a lot of really wonderful details about how to test the people around you to see whether they're trustworthy. It's really like the mafioso and his henchmen.

How do you make sure they're okay? And it gives tests. Have them thrown in jail. Plant another prisoner who invites them to raise an insurrection, see if they go for it. tempt them with lust, tempt them with money. And it also raises interesting debates that were had at the time about who should you choose for your minister, a member of your family, well, that's trustworthy, someone who shares your own views and will agree with you, someone from your childhood.

And in the end, it looks at all these options and says, no, choose for quality. And that throws the onus back onto the king. Good judgment, a sense of virtue, is essential for him to be able to succeed. In the end, the king is still about locova. the turning of society and a sense of integrity despite the difficulties that may entail. James, what's the intended, what was the intended readership of this vast volume? I think that's a very interesting question. It's hard to answer in some ways because Sanskrit texts and the periods in which they were originally transmitted and adapted in

early South Asia, we're not always sure who's reading these texts, but we can learn a lot from the structure of the text. So what I would say is this is a text that's meant to be the basis for teaching. It's a mostly prose work. but it has these kind of pithy summary verses at the end of chapters. It is the basis for teaching. It's called a chastra, but in some ways it's more like a sutra, which is to say a text that's used for instruction. It presupposes the presence of a teacher.

So who's being taught? Well, more than likely, the people being taught are rulers or those who are in the business of advising rulers. How the West is getting on with its civilization quite well at that time. Are there any comparisons? Well, I think it depends on where we locate. the Arta Shastra. So if we're locating it as the product of Chanakya and the Māori dynasty, then what we've got is we're looking at really the period of Alexander the Great and the successor dynasties.

And that's, so at that time, well, it's a very similar situation in some ways. We've got a fragmenting empire. We've got competing polities. We've got complex bureaucracies. A huge concern with trade and with the management and support of the economy. So I think we've got huge number of similarities there. We've also got evidence in the Greek literature of awareness of the Maorian court. So we haven't got a full text, but we've got the Magasthenes fragments. We've got fragments of a Greek ambassador, Bactrian Greek ambassador, to the Maorian court. So we've got quite a kind of rich engagement.

So, yeah, there's parallels we can draw then. If we're actually looking at the text really in probably its period of core composition, which I think is probably later than the Maori period. And we're probably looking around the beginning of the common era. And that comes back to, so you mentioned coral. Well, that coral wasn't really known to the Maurians, and there's lots of circumstantial evidence, and there's been quite a lot of scholarly work

to kind of show how the mention of gold coins and the mention of coral brings us more up to the beginning of the common era. And consequently there, well, we're looking at a very much a kind of Roman period, but again, there are commonalities, but less so there, because the art des chastra is a small state text. The idea of a perfect state is something that can only really happen below south of the Himalayas. Devin, Devon Patel, how heavily or lightly should a king, rule his kingdom. How much force

should he use? Sometimes it's very difficult to be a good king and a good person. Some of it I think is very interesting is that since Arta, on some level has to create the conditions for Dharma, one of the key functions of the king is the use of force. And this is

a whole separate section in fact that's often dedicated and sometimes scholars of this text and this tradition speak of this kind of separate pursuit of this particular discipline. And that is what they call Dandaniti, which is basically the rules of using force. Now, generally, there is a reason and reasonable, I would say, use of force that's recommended. But that punishment has to be very measured from,

you know, one aspect. In other words, if the use of force is too severe, too brash, too forward, then it's going to scare the people. On the other hand, if the king's punishments are soft on crime, as they say, that they won't have any respect for his leadership. The idea is that if the king gets it right, if the force is used correctly, then it will be conducive to everybody in the populace to be able to follow these three goals of life, virtue, success, and pleasure. And there's also a sense that if there's too much force used, there's also the very likelihood that there will be revolt in the kingdom. What does this have to say about the wider society? There's a wonderful picture of society we get here that we get in almost no other text.

So most of the texts we get are very orthodox. They want to set out a kind of an ideal picture. And this fills in all these gaps. So it's a really fun text for historians. Normally you see society and it's true that it has in the text it has a kind of a strong structure that was often true of India. That there are four key kind of social classes, the Varnas or casts. And there are definite instruments of government. There's the Treasury, the military, the advisors, and everything is very kind of locked down and clearly structured.

But the text tells us all about the unruly details, the tasty kind of hidden spots of society. And that can include all kinds of fabulous things. For instance, you realize that it's not just about the kingdoms and the rulers. It's also about tribal chieftains and indigenous peoples who are always there in the forest in certain tracks of land and who at any time can affect your rule or that of your rule, or that of your. allies or enemies. So you have to negotiate with them. As well as the kind of the grand images of heroic kings that you get in the classic text, you hear about weak rulers and how to analyze what's wrong with your ruler and maybe how to use those weaknesses for your own gain.

It also tells you about outsiders. You hear a lot about the poor. You hear a lot about those who are kind of wanderers, mendicants, lost figures. And it's interesting rules on slavery, actually. In the West, we're used to the idea of slavery where one group enslaves another, and you will never become the enslaved if you're born into the first group. There's a strong divide ethnically or religiously. Here, anyone could be a slave. In fact, anyone who falls on hard times, however, high, could in fact have to sort of indentured service,

sell himself under slavery for economic reasons. And that means there's a whole set of laws and rules that kind of govern the justice, the legitimate use of slavery, you know, what's fair and what's not fair. Some of the fun bits, the most fun bits for me, is just to do with actually what it tells us about women. We don't often hear about this in the Indian world. This tells us about what happens when a couple hate each other and they really want to get out of the marriage. What are the options legally for them to kind of do that? What about marital infidelity if a woman has strayed and she has a son who's the marital son of one man, her husband, but the biological son of another man,

whose wealth does he inherit? We need laws for these things. Other texts don't tell you, but this gives you the meaty details. Cortisans is wonderful stuff about how the government sets up courtisans, chooses beautiful and young and kind of elevated, cultured young women. And owns the brothels. Yeah, exactly, and owns the brothels. And as to choose the good ones, you know, and it makes sure that they're taken care of,

but they pay a huge amount of tax. So it's an enormous income for the government. When the women are done, it says when they lose their beauty, they become the brothel madam. So they have a retirement plan in place. You know, it's really very well organised. James, James Hedey, what does it have to say about the king's foreign policy?

Is the idea, is that a successful king will keep expanding his kingdom? Not necessarily, no. Certainly the will to expand the kingdom is anticipated, even expected. But the idea is that it will provide you with the tools of analysis and the capacity to really run scenarios in your head or with your counsellors such that you will always behave in a way that is strategically sensible. So there is a time for expansion. There's a time for nefarious collaboration with allies, half allies and various other things.

For me, only about 20% of the Atta Shastra actually takes up foreign policy. But what one has is incredibly rich. Also, I think one of the key things to bear my mind, everything that it tells you about the construction of the state is then yoked potentially to the destruction of the state. So everything you know about how to order society can be yoked to disordering the societies of other humans. Can you give us an example?

Yeah, so, I mean, the selection of good ministers is then, you know, you can send out envoys to gather intelligence. They're ostensibly on a diplomatic mission. But they are advised to gather intelligence, to speak to a broad cross-section, or as many people as they possibly can, in order to gather intelligence and then sow seeds of dissent within and beyond the court. So that's a kind of classic, sort of they've engineered the state and now they're going to,

they're going to kind of disrupt the state through just diplomatic missions. I can't help but think of it as a bit like a board game. What one finds there is that therefore there's a complex system of alliances and complex instruction on how to forge those alliances, how to undertake a treaty. And it's incredibly, I mean, it presents a kind of logic tree. If you're in a weaker position, then you should do this. if you're in an intermediate position, then you should do this. So it's incredibly procedural.

Devin, what do ordinary people get out of this? Let's say ordinary people and leave it at that. Are they catered for in this book? The earth shastra is from the king's perspective. It's about, you know, setting up the state. And part of that state, of course, involves taking care of the villages and the countryside, the sources of wealth that comprise his kingdom. And there are people living there, of course.

So there is, of course, a lot to extrapolate as to what the lives of people are like and also what these instructions or these kinds of prescriptions in the Arta Shastra have to do with them. Now, I like to see it as kind of that, you know, on account of the kind of universal tone of this text that suggests a kind of wide applicability that transcends time and place, that the instructions for the king, I think, can be seen as a metaphor also for, any sort of leader or any sort of person trying to garner success and be successful in the world. And I think that's one of the things that has made this text very interesting beyond sort of political theorist and political scientists to think about how it speaks to human nature and how to think about that from that perspective. Jessica, there's a large role for spies in this ideal state which fascinated me.

Why was this considered important And how was that network organized? Oh, it's so wonderful. I mean, as David said, you don't want to rely too much on force. Force will make the people angry. And one of the things actually you're supposed to is not be forceful but rather just just so you can discourage corruption. But corruption's a big concern at this time.

How do you find it? How do you elicit the truth about it? And if you're a king at a distance, how can you even see that it's happening? Here come the spies. element of the text. It doesn't want to rely just on the administration. It knows it doesn't always work. It knows that the military have limited use. Spies are everything. It says they're the eyes of the king. Only with them can he know even how to respond. And it gives a fabulous list

of the kind of people that you should recruit for your spies. They could be holy men. All the holy men you meet, anyone could be a spy at any given moment, male or female. Trubedals. Anyone who can move around, minstrels, troubadours, entertainers, mad men, they look mad, but wait a second, what's going on. Cow herds, if you've been to India, the cow may go anywhere and you'll have to follow the cow, oops, you're in somebody's garden, who knows what you'll hear. There's a huge range, even your street vendor is said, you know, perfect person, you get your lunch from him every day, who knows what he's really watching over. So there's a huge range of possibilities, of course, prostitutes, courtisans, etc., etc., etc., etc. One of the things it does

is it kind of categorize groups. As James said, it's very procedural. If you know who you've got and what the characteristics, here's what you do. Here are four categories of spy. The first is the secret agent. They specialize in secret arts. Reading codes, strange symbols, magic is a really important. Actually, the secret agent's almost like a sorcerer. The second kind is the assassin. It says it's a countryside man who's so desperate. He's really brave and will do anything. Doesn't fear for his life. The third category is the poisoner. Poisoners always are said to be callous. They'll poison their own mother.

Cruel. They kind of enjoy the suffering. And they're always lazy. They're not willing to do the work. But the fourth category is my favorite. I like to think this is who I would have been in ancient India. It's the female ascetic, the woman holy person who is a revered sort of, you know, maybe a poor widow who can go anywhere because she's very pious.

But actually, she's the king's ultimate secret agent who can be involved in all kinds of plots. And, you know, she lives a life in both worlds. So it's really a, you don't see these characters anywhere in really in the rest of Indian literature. This is a wonderful resource. Whether they existed is another question, but it's a great story. I'm going to keep my distance now, then. James, can you give listeners some idea of the style and structure of the text? The style and structure of the text is quite terse, quite matter of fact.

It's not a florid literary text. It doesn't really fit the genre that it's within. It is mostly in prose. It has these verses that I've already mentioned at the end of each chapter. It is a text that I don't think would be celebrated for its literary style. It's a text that you go to read for its insights, its analysis, and for its comprehensive depiction of an ideal typical early Indian state. Devin, can we bring in the Mahabharata here and give us some idea of any connection that might be?

Yes, you know, the Mahabharata is generally understood not to be an Arthashtra as such, even though there's a very big section in one of the books, the Shantiparva called the Raja Dharmaparvan, which speaks about the behavior of a king. It's generally thought to be a Dharmashastra. So it seems to be that the Mahabharata has a lot to say, of course, about kings and kingdoms. It's about a massive civil war and the destruction of the state and giving you through counter-normative examples. what not to do to maintain the stability of a state. That being said, a lot of Arta Shastra, you know, like thinking is deeply embedded in this work. But the Mahabharata is really about weak kings, about tyrants, or men who should be kings or would be kings if fate was kinder. And in that way, it really kind of sets a good background for a text like the Arthashtra.

And there's also examples, of course, in the Arthashtra, which takes stories from the Mahabharata. and some of them are quite interesting the way they take the stories up. I can tell you one of them if you'd like. Yes, please. Well, there's a, you know, there's a very interesting thing about, you know, when a king has to interrogate, say, a thief. And then there's a set of things that the magistrate should be aware of because the thief might just confess even though he didn't do something.

And there's a story in the Mahabharata of this sage who is meditating and a set of thieves have just robbed the royal. old treasury and they're absconding with the loot and they drop it off and they bury it near this meditating sage and then disappear thinking they'll come back later to get it. Well, when he wakes up, this sage from his meditation, the king's men come and they basically, you know, drag him in for interrogation. And, you know, he, of course, there's no idea, but he's afraid. There's, you know, one story is that he doesn't say anything. One story is that he's afraid, so he just confesses thinking he'll avoid torture. But they still, of course, impale him. This is death by impalement.

It's one of these horrible corporal punishments. And there's a whole story about that, but it's sort of woven in just to demonstrate not the morality of the story, which takes us into this idea of why somebody suffers a fate that they don't deserve. But it goes into, just be careful because sometimes a thief might lie. And, you know, it sort of just takes it on from that point of view and doesn't go into the other stuff. So it's very interesting the interconnection between these works. Jessica, how was the text discovered in the early 20th century? It's a wonderful tale.

The text had gone quiet. It had been very influential for a while, and then it kind of disappears from reference for centuries. And it goes into that kind of silo where we know even now that there are manuscripts all over India that nobody knows are there that haven't been seen. How do you know if it haven't been seen? That's a good question, but we keep finding them.

And actually, you know, people are, colleagues always going to India and you knock on someone's door and you look in their basement or you go to the temple and they've got a huge archive and you'll find extraordinary manuscripts that people have known existed but couldn't get hold of because they've been referred to by other texts. And this is kind of the situation with the Arthasustra. So we know we've had references to it.

It's been influential on a number of other texts, including the Kama Sutra actually. The style is very influential. But nobody's seen it. And actually, importantly, that when the British colonial institution arrives in India, they're looking for kind of governance and social ethics texts that they can use to rule.

So they're looking for something like this, but they haven't found anything like it. And then in 1905, Dr. Shamashastri in Mysore, a beautiful garden city of India, is a Sanskrit scholar, and he's got a whole bunch of manuscripts. And on one version, he finds this manuscript, and another one, someone turns up and hands it to him and disappears, so we don't really know where it comes from.

Either way, there's a kind of a mysterious provenance. He looks at it. It's in the Grunthi script, which is a sort of southern, that not everyone reads. It takes a little while to figure it out. Eventually, he thinks, wait a second, what is this? And over the course the next four years, he translates it into Sanskrit. So now everybody can read it, including Sanskrit scholars in the West. And they go, my gosh, this is incredible. And then in 1915, it gets translated into English finally. And now it goes wild. Everyone discovers this text. And one of the things that it does that changes our

understanding of India, just before that, people, major gurus like Swami Vivekanand very importantly, had portrayed India as the great spiritual, otherworldly force of human society. And that's an important and sort of beautiful idea. This gave you the other side. It reminded an India that was still at the time under empire that it had its own empires, that it could be wily and practical and forceful and secular as well when necessary. And so that other side of India, practical, hard thinking, hard fighting India, came to the fore as an image. I sometimes wonder if it had an impact on the development towards independence.

James Hegarty, what's the reputation and status of the work today? It has a varied reputation and it lives varied lives. I think building on what Devon said earlier on about the king kind of counterintuitively being in every person, Chanakia and the kind of genre of Chanakia Niti, which is kind of much more generalized life advice, has become a popular thing in South Asia. So if you go on YouTube now and you put Chanakianiti you will find instructions on management, life, all kinds of things that are rooted in the putative author of Arttershastra.

So that's one life that it leads. Another life that it leads and richly so is as a classic in the kind of global literature. So it sits up there with Aristotle's politics, Machiavelli is the Prince, you know, Lao Tzu and, you know, various other things. And it's part of a kind of global canon of works that provides. insights into the nature of good or not so good government and the prosecution of fair and not so fair wars. So it's got all of that going on. So it has that kind of high literary reputation and it has this kind of life in popular life in South Asia. I think again we should probably focus also on Chanaki as a character. I mean there are comic books. The Amalachataka Thais a popular

English medium predominantly but available in a wide variety of Indian monaculars. And that has a comic book on Chanakya, which, interestingly, in terms of what Jessica said, recast the story of Chanakya's aiding of the Marians as the defeat of Alexander the Great, a foreign invader. So it kind of plays into what Jessica was saying, that the Amachachataka comic book reworks Chanakya's advice. And the lessons of the Arta Shasta are threaded into this comic book. So the kind of use of spies, the poisoning, all kinds of things are there in the comic book. And what it says, though, is that this is that hard-nosed real political South Ocean wisdom that led us to independence or fought off a foreign invader. So that really plays into it.

And I think that's part of its life in South Asia as a kind of cultural touchstone of that kind of wisdom. Evan, we're coming towards the end now. it's been lying to the prince Machiavelli 16th century do you see connections there? Well I suspect that's probably one of the of that connection which I think was drawn very early by someone like Max Weber who was the famous sociologist

I think that connection is what often is attractive for people to learn about the Arthashtra because they know the prince very well and of course the similarities between the two works are very clear right there's they're both about maximizing power, political power, don't really necessarily prioritize moral values, but rather just what's expedient, as they say, or the famous ends justify the means and ruthlessness. But the similarities are there, of course, no doubt. And this is one of the reasons why the two texts

are often spoken of together. There's considerable differences, of course, between them. You know, as I think James was speaking about and Jessica both, that the economic is much more pronounced in the Arta Shastra, the idea of Machiavelli, that the, the state is actually involved in that. And also the contexts, right? The prince occurs in a very specific context in 16th century Italy, but where the earth shastra is timeless, right? Even though there are these connections to the Mauryas and later to the Gupta,

this is not necessarily speaking about any given state and context, which is a very interesting thing. And so from that point of view, I feel like, you know, both works essentially a struggling with this connection between the political and the moral. But beyond that, they have very different ways of approaching things. Just to come in, I think it's a really interesting question. And I agree they both have this kind of sense that the end justifies the means. And in fact, I think Weber said that the Arthur Shuster was even more callous than Machiavelli's prince

because it gives more and more of the detail, right, of how to punish, of which limbs to chop off, how to identify an assassinated corpse and which means it died by. But maybe just to see a different side of it, it is true all the way through again and again here and there, it says the king cannot flourish without his people. He only has power because he's a protector. He is there to engage in kind of locovart. He's there to ensure that the world turns and turns successfully.

And only in that sustenance will he himself be able to flourish. And that goes along with his kind of yogic scholarly character. he's supposed to spend hours each day studying, he has to be himself a kind of a virtuous character to be able to pull this extraordinary act off. And if I could come in on that, I think that's the important question there is what is the end that is being justified

and the end that is being justified in the Arta Shastra ostensibly is a virtuous state and the conditions for virtue for king and for people. Now, I'm not suggesting that actually justifies what is described in the Arta Shastra, but it's a very different end. to that which we find in Machiavelli's prints. And the economic part is really interesting

because I think it recognises that you can't have a virtue estate without a strong treasury and a happy, successful resource use. So it's a very flourishing state that makes for virtue. And officials that aren't too corrupt. Thank you very much. And thanks to Devin Patel, as well as James Hagerty and Jessica Frazier. And to our studio engineer, Tim Heffer.

Next week we'll be exploring seismology the signs of earthquakes. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to have said that you haven't said because you can put it on the podcast?

Well, you know, I mean, well, one of the things is that, you know, I'm really fascinated by this tension between these, you know, between Dharma and Arta and how it gets played out. I mean, I think that, I think Jessica made a very good point about that, stereotype that's been developed is that this is a tradition, this Indian tradition,

classical Indian tradition, which is heavily emphasized the kind of priority of the moral, the priority of the virtuous. And there's this whole other side that's there. And I think the literature, I mean, I'm, you know, I work mostly on literary works, and you can see that some of the most productive plots and the most productive statements about the complexity of human life have been brought forth with this tension. So I think of this work, the Raguamshah, a very famous poem by the famous Kalidasa about a dynasty of kings that moves from the ideal king to what we kind of have now, right, the kind of the end of that lineage, which is a complete, you know, devolution. And the whole poem, this massive poem is about, is a meditation on how a king can be virtuous. And what happens when a king

not virtuous. Do you take that up? James? Yeah, no, I think that's fascinating. And I do, and I think this builds on what Devin was saying about the relationship between the Mahapharata and the Arta Shasta. I think, Devin, you talked about tyrannies and the tyrannical king in the Mahabharata and the kind of commentarial, even satirical side of that.

And we find that in the Mahapharata in that we get some devastatingly blunt statements of might is right for kings, Doriodhana, the prince in the Mahabata being the key example. But in the side of virtue, we're probably less sensitive to exaggerated virtue or problematic virtue in the form of the king. And I've often wondered whether the Yudisdhira, the kind of heroic central protagonist of the Mahabharata, and I'm not alone in this, this has been something that's been pondered for a long time, whether Yudisdha's presentation of virtue is that as an excess, as a problematic virtue. And then behind that, so I think you've touched on something really important there and it's certainly something I would have

liked to, or we can discuss more. But one other side of that is I wonder in the arteshaastra if there's something from the other epic that are minor, where in book two there's a Brahmin called Jabali, I'm sure some of you, Jessica and Devon, you'll probably know the story, but Jabali

says not just might is right, but he says essentially there is no afterlife, when you die, you die, there is no metaphysical realm. It's an incredibly strong statement of a kind of atheistic materialism. And the artashastra seems to be something, it seems to kind of contain elements of that, or the kind of consequences of that in terms of real political

thought, but yoked now to a kind of pucker, brahminical, Brahmin-centered, Vedic, religious agenda. So sort of neutralize again. And Devin, you said early on, well, Moshe was kind of added to sort of, to the Porosha-Arta's, the goals of life, in order to sort of, in some ways, bring into the fold, a goal that wasn't so conducive to settled social life because it basically said, let's get off the wheel of life and death and get away from this mess. So the virtuous king, I think, can be the subject of caricature, stereotype. And I think the arteshaastra, in some ways, on coming back to it again for this programme, I was kind of like, well, I think this is incredibly helpful for unpacking some of what's

happening in that wider epic literature. and the story literature that I've spent so long engaging with them. I agree, yeah. I think you're absolutely right that there's something about it's solving a problem that we've seen lots of excessively virtuous kings, almost stupidly virtuous kings who get into all kinds of trouble, and it wants to remind us of what it is to be wily. One of the things I was struck by when I reread the text for this

is that it's in some ways very secular. It has very little interest in temples. It's not that excited about it. Dharma, sort of virtuous ethics. It has relatively little to say about soterological things. It's really very practical. And there's something about that, I think. You're right. It's interesting. You make that connection to Jabali, who's sometimes related to what's called the lokiata or Charvaca, the atheist school. Lochaata, the word for the atheist, literally means the worldly one. And worldliness is what this is about. It's unapologetically worldly. And actually kind of very rich in doing that. And it seems like the underlying anxiety of all of these works is the famous, you know, Matsyaya, the law of the fish, that without some kind of justified force or king that kind of is, can handle things that big fish will eat the little fish.

And it, you know, all of these things, if it means you have to torture and do ethically strained interrogation procedures, so be it, you know. it's really quite clear-eyed. So, I mean, if you have to do ethically strange procedures to lead an ethical government. Yeah. I mean, of course, there's limits, right? I mean, there's limits. The text says that you shouldn't torture petty criminals or drunks or children or the elderly or pregnant women.

But, you know, everything else is on the table. You can beat with a stick with whips, hang people upside down. I think there's waterboarding in there. I don't think it's successful in harmonising these two things, but I think it sets itself the task of attempting to. And it also reflects the time, right? So the section on slavery is so interesting because it's something we find extremely uncomfortable

and yet it was totally present and it was in Greece. It was in, you know, all the great philosophers we read about, you know, we're involved in a slave-oriented world. And it goes in and it talks about the courtesans and slaves and all these things and it gives you some kind of attempt at justice in that world. You know, the man who indentured services himself to someone and then dies in service, what happens to his son? Does this poor child inherit his servitude and lose the money? No, the son actually is still free and inherits the money as father-made.

What if a woman who's a slave is impregnated by her master? Well, actually, she automatically gets freedom and so does her child, right? If a nurse is asked to bathe her master naked, basically turned into a prostitute, she gets to, she gets, you know, fine as he has to pay or she gets to leave. So there are ways it's trying to create a practical world. In a way, we have such high expectations of the classical world and of these texts. This is what it meant, and in some ways still means now, to make things work. You know, I also just, I'm sorry, just one last thing. I also wonder if, like, the fact that the textual history of the earth as Shastra is so complex.

It's conflated with Dharmashastra, with epic, all kinds of materials that I think that there is this kind of, you know, I think the texts are is reflecting a deeper conflation of these so-called discrete sciences about how to, you know, that they're all flowing together. Can I see two little things separately? Yeah. And one is just, James mentioned the idea of corruption at the end. And that was absolutely essential when you're having traveled a lot in Asia, in Africa and all kinds of countries and thinking about what this meant in the past as in the present. Corruption is a huge problem. And the text is very concerned about that.

It's use of force, its use of spies, the ways it thinks about strong control. It's actually, it says it's about stopping your officials from taking matters into their own hands. And it really sees that as a perennial problem, I think significantly so. A totally separate issue. The text is kind of wonderful.

It's a manual, and it has this typical style of Indian manuals that, as you said, it's procedural. It lists every possible kind of governor or minister. and a protisan or spy gives you what to do with them. But it can also be very poetic. There's a lot of beautiful imagery in there. Actually, each section has a verse at the end that captures and encapsulates its wisdom

and tries to give you something pithy and delicious to take away. And some of the imagery is wonderful. It says how to recognize poisons. And if the steam from your rice is the color of a peacock's throat, then beware it is poisoned. Only a peacock's throat would turn up in this text. How wonderful. Do we learn much about the state of knowledge

and scientific investigation? I think we gain knowledge as we do with a lot of early South Asian texts of that period on the approach to the construction of sound knowledge, as it were. So it's very systematic in its approach. This is the contention. This is the these are the ramifications of that contention. says this is the case, this is the opposite of that being the case, and we need to take that into account. So I think what we learn certainly directly is the very sophisticated level

of argument, consciousness of argument structures in this and other texts. Obviously, we also indirectly see lots of things about such areas of activity as mining, currency, architecture, the layout of a city, the layout of a palace. So there's an extraordinary amount of material that tells us things about the state of the practical sciences in early South Asia. It really made me realize how much, how economy worked at that time. I think I'd never understood how much mining was absolutely essential. It's very distrustful of people who are metal workers because they can, you know, add stuff to the metal and make it cheaper.

Yeah, exactly. And it's keeping an eye on trade and shipping if you're trying to export things that, you're a bit dodgy. But amongst other things, it reminds you, it captures that moment when capital becomes a thing. Land management is big and that includes, you know, forest produce like elephants as well as agriculture. But now that we've got mining and from it treasure, whether jewels or coins or metalwork, now trade is possible in a new way, wealth is possible in a new way. The whole structure of society fundamentally changes. Taxation is possible in a new way. And I think that sense in which it's a product of those technological shifts really reminds

is something that's true across the world. People talk about the axial age as a time when society changes. I think it's one of the reasons that it changes, something as simple as mining, has taken a leap forward technologically. It's also quite interesting that, you know, it seems like most of these texts,

I mean, we think about it as a science and this kind of culling of knowledge from various quarters. You know, one can only imagine how much, just as in most of this Shastra tradition, how much went into informal contexts before it got distilled and put into some kind of form. And then, of course, that form is still pithy enough, as is described by Jessica in these final verses, but also just the very, each of these descriptions and normative prescriptions, each can be extrapolated further and taken into a whole other directions and apply to different contexts.

So it seems like there's this kind of capsule, that these texts are kind of in capsule form, that have something before it and can produce a lot after it, which is why I guess the text still can have enormous amounts of reception to come, you know, in terms of what it can speak to. I agreed, Van, just because I was thinking about the – I hadn't actually mentioned before the citation of the previous arguments of other people who've had insights on whatever it is that Cartelia is discussing, which, of course, models argument and debate beyond the text

and shows people implicitly how to conduct a sound argument, And of course he doesn't always disagree with the previous authorities. Sometimes he says, yeah, no, that's good. Yeah, it totally captures that area in Indian history when for each of the different areas that these Shastras capture, whether it's aesthetics, whether it's ethics, whether it's state craft, etc., etc. There's a whole group of specialists that it refers to. And it lets us know that there's not just one individual.

There's a kind of a knowledge world, a school of different views for each one. And typically for India, it doesn't necessarily totally reject everybody else. It cites them. It offers them. And it often tries to summarize or give its own version. But there's a kind of a sense of a buildup of knowledge here. And it's interesting that the science of sex, as it were, right? The kama shastra is very much modeled on the earth shastra. So that's kind of an interesting detail that, I don't know, how compelling that argument is, but it is interesting.

Sex and politics. Sex and politics. Well, let's leave it at that. Thank you all very much. Thank you very much indeed. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Death by Conspiracy, a new podcast from BBC Radio 4. Gary Matthews was an artist and photographer, a familiar site on the streets of his hometown in Shropshire.

But in the last few years, he was drawn to conspiracies. And when the pandemic hit, Gary, who was suspicious of experts, ignored the rules. When he died of COVID-19, his distraught family and friends were left searching for answers. I'm Mariana Spring, the BBC's specialist disinformation reporter, and I've been investigating what happened to Gary by delving into the conspiracy underbelly of the picturesque town of Shrewsbury. From BBC Radio 4, Death by Conspiracy. A new 10-part podcast series. Subscribe now on BBC Sounds.