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The Arthasastra: Selections from the Classic Indian Work on Statecraft
The only extant treatise on statecraft from classical India, the Arthsastra is an invaluable resource for understanding ancient South Asian political thought; it also provides a comprehensive and unparalleled panoramic view of Indian society during the period between the Maurya (320-185 BCE) and Gupta (320-497 CE) empires. This volume offers modern English translations of key selections, organized thematically, from the Arthasastra . A general Introduction briefly traces the arc of ancient South Asian history, explains the classical Indian tradition of statecraft, and discusses the origins and importance of the Arthasastra . Thorough explanatory essays and notes set each excerpt in its intellectual, political, and cultural contexts.
256 pages, Paperback
Published September 15, 2012
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July 30, 2021
Book: The Arthasastra: Selections from the Classic Indian Work on Statecraft
Author: Mark McClish (Editor/Translator), Patrick Olivelle (Editor/Translator)
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Co, Inc; UK ed. edition (15 September 2012)
Language: English
Paperback: 256 pages
Item Weight: 312 g
Dimensions: 13.97 x 1.27 x 20.96 cm
Price: 1713/-
Any study of the persuation of ancient Indian thought and practice on modern India must initiate with Kautilya. Also known as Chanakya, Kautilya (c. 370–283 BC), was a logician who served as counselor to Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Mauryan Empire, the first of India’s dynasties to hold sway over large parts of the subcontinent.
The content presented to the readers through this breathtaking book is the most memorable and significant treatise (sastra) from the classical specialist tradition on statecraft (artha), composed by an extraordinary Brahmin, and passed down by his followers, who called themselves and their school the “Kautiliyas” or “the followers of Kautilya.” Hence, this dissertation on statecraft is called the Kautiliya Arthasastra, “The Manual of Statecraft of Kautilya” or “of the Followers of Kautilya.”
Part of the magnitude of the Kautiliya Arthasastra derives from the fact that it is the only exposition devoted exclusively to statecraft to have survived from the classical period. As such, it is a priceless resource for comprehending how intellectuals and rulers of that time understood and put in plain words, the project of running a kingdom.
Given the vastness of such an undertaking, the authors of this book seek to provide a comprehensive look at classical society unparalleled by other sources from the period.
In keeping with the enormous complexity of administering a kingdom, the Arthasastra deals with an implausible variety of topics, from the education of the king to the capturing of wild elephants, from the seasons for sowing crops to pulling down the walls of an enemy’s citadel, from metallurgy to divorce.
Amidst such dialogues, the Arthasastra grants us panoramic views of issues such as the relationship between the monarchy and religious institutions as well as ordinary glimpses of everyday life. Furnished with a pragmatic attitude about society and culture that is unclouded by the strong religious and ideological biases that pervade contemporary texts, the Arthasastra is the foremost textual source from the classical period for the study of South Asian politics and society.
The Arthashastra is spread over 15 books, totalling 150 chapters and covers all subjects from political philosophy and theory to public administration, diplomacy, foreign policy and intelligence gathering.
The 15 books of the extant Arthasastra informally divide the text into two halves and an appendix. The first half of the text (Books One through Five) discusses domestic administration, while the second half (Books Six through Fourteen) discusses interactions with outside kingdoms and military strategy.
The final book (Book Fifteen) is a formal list of the kinds of organizational elements from which the text is constructed, such as declarative statements and citations of earlier authorities. A full table of contents of the extant Arthasastra is given at the end of this Introduction.
Generally speaking, the subjects of the Arthasastra are arranged in an explicable manner. Kautilya organizes his advice as though he were instructing a king and his ministers in the creation of an entirely new kingdom.
Thus, the Arthasastra begins by discussing the training of a young prince and moves on to advise a new king on how to assemble his high council, vet and appoint new officials, settle his kingdom, construct his capital city, staff his bureaucracy, preserve public safety, resolve public disputes, pursue criminals, engage in foreign policy, and, finally, defeat his enemies on the battlefield and conquer their cities.
Speaking as though the kingdom was being created ex novo, however, is only a pedagogical convention. For the most part the text implies that the king it is instructing has, in fact, inherited an existing kingdom of which he is a native.
Most likely, Kautilya chooses to use this creatio ex nihilo for purely scholastic reasons: it allows him to discuss each aspect of statecraft comprehensively, beginning with the king and moving outward from there.
The Arthasastra is written mostly in a very uncomplicated prose style. It lacks any particular decorative quality that might qualify as literary merit. The 150 chapters of the text are written almost entirely in prose and conclude with one or more short verses written in the most common Sanskrit meter, the sloka.
Because traditional wisdom was usually passed down in the form of such verses, these concluding slokas provide the echo of an authoritative voice from South Asia’s collective cultural wisdom, but do little to ornament the Arthasastra as a work of literature. Because of these characteristics, the Arthasastra reads very much like a textbook or instruction manual.
A lot has been written on the influence of Kautilya on India’s strategic thinking. His magnum opus, the Arthashastra espouses his famous ‘mandala’ theory – the idea that the king or state (vijigishu) seeking extended influence by becoming universal monarch (chakravartin) must view himself as being at the heart of a series of concentric circles (mandalas).
Like Machiavelli’s Prince, Kautilya’s treatise addresses a king who is desirous of effectively managing an empire. The book lays out the world as Kautilya sees it, pointing out challenges and opportunities for the king. Like classical realists – Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes – Kautilya too saw the world as anarchic and as one where every state had to depend solely on itself. In order to survive in this anarchic world, the king needed to distinguish between friends and enemies as well as potential allies and potential foes.
In Kautilya’s concentric circles, your immediate neighbour is your natural enemy as he covets your territory and resources and is positioned to take them if he is more powerful than you.
The neighbour’s neighbour, however, is your natural friend because he can covet your neighbour’s territory but cannot invade you until he becomes your neighbour. This identification of friends and potential rivals proceeds outward in mandalas or circles. Every state in the mandala system faces the same predicament: they all face a series of concentric circles of enemies and friends.
What is it that we learn from this book? We learn the following points:
1) The Arthasastra has in mind a small, regional polity. Nevertheless, the text conceives of the king as “one desiring conquest” (vijigisu) (§6.1).
2) The second half of the Arthasastra, covering foreign policy, gains its shape by following a king through the process of contemplating foreign policy, negotiating pacts, preparing his army, marching, engaging in battle, and besieging an enemy’s fortress. This is the focus of ambitious kings. The ultimate goal is the conquest of the world “to its four directions.”
3) Despite this outlook, however, the Arthasastra is not an explicitly imperial text, for it contains no instructions on how to deal with the political and administrative challenges of ruling a large, transregional polity.
4) All of the administrative detail in the text occurs at the level of the capital city or the local region. We read nothing of how a network of such polities might be fitted into larger political frameworks, although it is possible that the model presented in the Arthasastra is meant to be scalable to larger political formations by establishing a generic template for regional administration across a large empire.
5) If conquest provides one logic for kingship in the Arthasastra, another is provided by the general purpose of statecraft: acquiring greater wealth, protecting that wealth, growing that wealth, and spending it on worthy people and projects. This model emphasizes the enrichment of one’s inherited kingdom and bequeathing it to one’s heirs in a better condition than received. If kings find their calling in glory and conquest, they find it also in stability and survival.
6) We might be best served to think of the first half of the Arthasastra as emphasizing the king’s role as wise administrator and the second half emphasizing his role as conquering hero. Somewhere within this polarity, kings established their identities and found either success or failure in the pursuit of statecraft.
Every reader of ancient Indian polity is aware of the fact that the name Kautilya has sometimes been understood to mean “the crooked one,” and may well have been a kind of nickname given to the author because his advice so frequently promotes unethical schemes.
For some, the Arthasastra had the reputation of being a “false” teaching in that it endorsed breaking any rule—even up to killing members of one’s own family—if politically expedient. Even though Kautilya does not go out of his way to endorse immoral courses of action, he does not hesitate to advise underhanded and malevolent tactics if they promote the king’s interests. In a society steeped in the ethical visions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, the amoral pragmatism of the Arthasastra could seem shocking and degenerate.
The name Kautilya, thus, might seem to give us some insight into the man himself. There is, however, the strong possibility his name has nothing to do with crookedness, but was simply a patronymic derived from the name of an eponymous family patriarch (Kutila or Kutala).
We learn from this book that Kautilya’s original composition, which closely resembled the version of the Arthasastra that has survived to modern times, underwent revision at the hands of at least one editor or redactor. This redactor did not extensively alter the structure or content of the text, although he did add certain sections and passages found in the extant treatise.
The motive for redacting the Arthasastra arose from its use within some kind of academic curriculum: the various “topics” of the original text were redivided into “chapters” of a minimum length and each chapter was given a memorable verse at the end to make them more teachable sections.
Most likely, we owe the preservation of the Arthasastra to its inclusion in educational curricula. It survived the centuries by being transmitted from teacher to student as part of an elite education.
Thus, while Kautilya’s original work is still strongly present in the surviving version of the Arthasastra; the text as we have it was also shaped by its consequent social life.
This particular reader presents us with four major advantages:
1) It consists of English translations of extracts from the Arthasastra selected and arranged by topic so as to present the instructions of the text in a manner affable to the interests of modern readers and students.
2) Each excerpt is introduced by an explanatory passage intended to provide the interpretive background necessary to understand it. Technical terms and concepts benefitting from further explication are discussed in footnotes.
3) Special care is taken all the way through, to distinguish between what is normative in the text (how things ought to be) from what is descriptive (how things are).
4) The inaccessibility of the Arthasastra from the postulations and priorities of today’s world requires that readers render themselves sentient with the classical South Asian intellectual, cultural, and political milieu. To that end, the authors have provided a coherent Introduction which lends provides critical background on the composition of the Arthasastra, its historical context, and its perspective on statecraft and governance.
Thoroughly recommended!
Author: Mark McClish (Editor/Translator), Patrick Olivelle (Editor/Translator)
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Co, Inc; UK ed. edition (15 September 2012)
Language: English
Paperback: 256 pages
Item Weight: 312 g
Dimensions: 13.97 x 1.27 x 20.96 cm
Price: 1713/-
Any study of the persuation of ancient Indian thought and practice on modern India must initiate with Kautilya. Also known as Chanakya, Kautilya (c. 370–283 BC), was a logician who served as counselor to Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Mauryan Empire, the first of India’s dynasties to hold sway over large parts of the subcontinent.
The content presented to the readers through this breathtaking book is the most memorable and significant treatise (sastra) from the classical specialist tradition on statecraft (artha), composed by an extraordinary Brahmin, and passed down by his followers, who called themselves and their school the “Kautiliyas” or “the followers of Kautilya.” Hence, this dissertation on statecraft is called the Kautiliya Arthasastra, “The Manual of Statecraft of Kautilya” or “of the Followers of Kautilya.”
Part of the magnitude of the Kautiliya Arthasastra derives from the fact that it is the only exposition devoted exclusively to statecraft to have survived from the classical period. As such, it is a priceless resource for comprehending how intellectuals and rulers of that time understood and put in plain words, the project of running a kingdom.
Given the vastness of such an undertaking, the authors of this book seek to provide a comprehensive look at classical society unparalleled by other sources from the period.
In keeping with the enormous complexity of administering a kingdom, the Arthasastra deals with an implausible variety of topics, from the education of the king to the capturing of wild elephants, from the seasons for sowing crops to pulling down the walls of an enemy’s citadel, from metallurgy to divorce.
Amidst such dialogues, the Arthasastra grants us panoramic views of issues such as the relationship between the monarchy and religious institutions as well as ordinary glimpses of everyday life. Furnished with a pragmatic attitude about society and culture that is unclouded by the strong religious and ideological biases that pervade contemporary texts, the Arthasastra is the foremost textual source from the classical period for the study of South Asian politics and society.
The Arthashastra is spread over 15 books, totalling 150 chapters and covers all subjects from political philosophy and theory to public administration, diplomacy, foreign policy and intelligence gathering.
The 15 books of the extant Arthasastra informally divide the text into two halves and an appendix. The first half of the text (Books One through Five) discusses domestic administration, while the second half (Books Six through Fourteen) discusses interactions with outside kingdoms and military strategy.
The final book (Book Fifteen) is a formal list of the kinds of organizational elements from which the text is constructed, such as declarative statements and citations of earlier authorities. A full table of contents of the extant Arthasastra is given at the end of this Introduction.
Generally speaking, the subjects of the Arthasastra are arranged in an explicable manner. Kautilya organizes his advice as though he were instructing a king and his ministers in the creation of an entirely new kingdom.
Thus, the Arthasastra begins by discussing the training of a young prince and moves on to advise a new king on how to assemble his high council, vet and appoint new officials, settle his kingdom, construct his capital city, staff his bureaucracy, preserve public safety, resolve public disputes, pursue criminals, engage in foreign policy, and, finally, defeat his enemies on the battlefield and conquer their cities.
Speaking as though the kingdom was being created ex novo, however, is only a pedagogical convention. For the most part the text implies that the king it is instructing has, in fact, inherited an existing kingdom of which he is a native.
Most likely, Kautilya chooses to use this creatio ex nihilo for purely scholastic reasons: it allows him to discuss each aspect of statecraft comprehensively, beginning with the king and moving outward from there.
The Arthasastra is written mostly in a very uncomplicated prose style. It lacks any particular decorative quality that might qualify as literary merit. The 150 chapters of the text are written almost entirely in prose and conclude with one or more short verses written in the most common Sanskrit meter, the sloka.
Because traditional wisdom was usually passed down in the form of such verses, these concluding slokas provide the echo of an authoritative voice from South Asia’s collective cultural wisdom, but do little to ornament the Arthasastra as a work of literature. Because of these characteristics, the Arthasastra reads very much like a textbook or instruction manual.
A lot has been written on the influence of Kautilya on India’s strategic thinking. His magnum opus, the Arthashastra espouses his famous ‘mandala’ theory – the idea that the king or state (vijigishu) seeking extended influence by becoming universal monarch (chakravartin) must view himself as being at the heart of a series of concentric circles (mandalas).
Like Machiavelli’s Prince, Kautilya’s treatise addresses a king who is desirous of effectively managing an empire. The book lays out the world as Kautilya sees it, pointing out challenges and opportunities for the king. Like classical realists – Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes – Kautilya too saw the world as anarchic and as one where every state had to depend solely on itself. In order to survive in this anarchic world, the king needed to distinguish between friends and enemies as well as potential allies and potential foes.
In Kautilya’s concentric circles, your immediate neighbour is your natural enemy as he covets your territory and resources and is positioned to take them if he is more powerful than you.
The neighbour’s neighbour, however, is your natural friend because he can covet your neighbour’s territory but cannot invade you until he becomes your neighbour. This identification of friends and potential rivals proceeds outward in mandalas or circles. Every state in the mandala system faces the same predicament: they all face a series of concentric circles of enemies and friends.
What is it that we learn from this book? We learn the following points:
1) The Arthasastra has in mind a small, regional polity. Nevertheless, the text conceives of the king as “one desiring conquest” (vijigisu) (§6.1).
2) The second half of the Arthasastra, covering foreign policy, gains its shape by following a king through the process of contemplating foreign policy, negotiating pacts, preparing his army, marching, engaging in battle, and besieging an enemy’s fortress. This is the focus of ambitious kings. The ultimate goal is the conquest of the world “to its four directions.”
3) Despite this outlook, however, the Arthasastra is not an explicitly imperial text, for it contains no instructions on how to deal with the political and administrative challenges of ruling a large, transregional polity.
4) All of the administrative detail in the text occurs at the level of the capital city or the local region. We read nothing of how a network of such polities might be fitted into larger political frameworks, although it is possible that the model presented in the Arthasastra is meant to be scalable to larger political formations by establishing a generic template for regional administration across a large empire.
5) If conquest provides one logic for kingship in the Arthasastra, another is provided by the general purpose of statecraft: acquiring greater wealth, protecting that wealth, growing that wealth, and spending it on worthy people and projects. This model emphasizes the enrichment of one’s inherited kingdom and bequeathing it to one’s heirs in a better condition than received. If kings find their calling in glory and conquest, they find it also in stability and survival.
6) We might be best served to think of the first half of the Arthasastra as emphasizing the king’s role as wise administrator and the second half emphasizing his role as conquering hero. Somewhere within this polarity, kings established their identities and found either success or failure in the pursuit of statecraft.
Every reader of ancient Indian polity is aware of the fact that the name Kautilya has sometimes been understood to mean “the crooked one,” and may well have been a kind of nickname given to the author because his advice so frequently promotes unethical schemes.
For some, the Arthasastra had the reputation of being a “false” teaching in that it endorsed breaking any rule—even up to killing members of one’s own family—if politically expedient. Even though Kautilya does not go out of his way to endorse immoral courses of action, he does not hesitate to advise underhanded and malevolent tactics if they promote the king’s interests. In a society steeped in the ethical visions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, the amoral pragmatism of the Arthasastra could seem shocking and degenerate.
The name Kautilya, thus, might seem to give us some insight into the man himself. There is, however, the strong possibility his name has nothing to do with crookedness, but was simply a patronymic derived from the name of an eponymous family patriarch (Kutila or Kutala).
We learn from this book that Kautilya’s original composition, which closely resembled the version of the Arthasastra that has survived to modern times, underwent revision at the hands of at least one editor or redactor. This redactor did not extensively alter the structure or content of the text, although he did add certain sections and passages found in the extant treatise.
The motive for redacting the Arthasastra arose from its use within some kind of academic curriculum: the various “topics” of the original text were redivided into “chapters” of a minimum length and each chapter was given a memorable verse at the end to make them more teachable sections.
Most likely, we owe the preservation of the Arthasastra to its inclusion in educational curricula. It survived the centuries by being transmitted from teacher to student as part of an elite education.
Thus, while Kautilya’s original work is still strongly present in the surviving version of the Arthasastra; the text as we have it was also shaped by its consequent social life.
This particular reader presents us with four major advantages:
1) It consists of English translations of extracts from the Arthasastra selected and arranged by topic so as to present the instructions of the text in a manner affable to the interests of modern readers and students.
2) Each excerpt is introduced by an explanatory passage intended to provide the interpretive background necessary to understand it. Technical terms and concepts benefitting from further explication are discussed in footnotes.
3) Special care is taken all the way through, to distinguish between what is normative in the text (how things ought to be) from what is descriptive (how things are).
4) The inaccessibility of the Arthasastra from the postulations and priorities of today’s world requires that readers render themselves sentient with the classical South Asian intellectual, cultural, and political milieu. To that end, the authors have provided a coherent Introduction which lends provides critical background on the composition of the Arthasastra, its historical context, and its perspective on statecraft and governance.
Thoroughly recommended!
January 9, 2015
Worth mentioning that there is far more analysis than selection of the original text. Still, its a great overview of one of the most important and earliest works in political theory.
December 29, 2025
kautilya discusses topics related to statecraft, law, economics, espionage, & war. theres quite a personal rather than institutional conception of the state, all stemming from the ruler, & i found the discussion on agriculture, trade, & law particularly interesting. he's often compared to machiavelli, but while hes pragmatic, sometimes ruthless, fundamentally concerned with the ruler, & sees religion as a subordinate tool of the state, in some ways he's relatively humanitarian, or atleast advises it for achieving certain ends for instance, while he recognises caste & social status in matters of law & litigation, he allows for exceptions & certain rights for women in marriage, divorce, & inheritance. he doesn't believe that torture is necessarily effective in extracting info & advises that it just shouldnt be used for certain vulnerable peoples. he advises mercy in conquest & winning over the populace w/ favours & shows of benevolence. not to say that he's not pragmatic, but it seems to be more nuanced than that. its a selection w/ extensive commentary, but its quite good
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