Chanakya's paper trail

 Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan

A writer argues that India's most celebrated strategist was inserted into the Mauryan story long after the fact. Historians are unconvinced, but the quarrel is really about who owns the past

 

Few figures loom larger in India's political imagination than Chanakya. Politicians who win elections are hailed as the new Chanakya; managers are urged to read his treatise on statecraft; schoolchildren learn that he made Chandragupta king and ran the Mauryan empire from behind the throne. Ashoka, Chandragupta's grandson, is a different sort of historical presence. He speaks to posterity directly, from rocks and pillars across the subcontinent, in edicts that were deciphered in the 1830s. Chanakya, by contrast, says nothing anywhere in stone.

Rajive Patel thinks that silence is the story.

His case has four legs. The first is epigraphic. Ashoka's reign is documented in inscriptions from Kandahar to Karnataka; had Chanakya been the formidable minister of legend, Mr Patel reasons, someone would have chiselled his name into rock, the preferred medium of the age. Nobody did. The second is material. The works attributed to Chanakya, the Arthashastra and the Chanakya Niti, are associated with paper and manuscripts, and paper had not been invented in Mauryan times. Writings that surface later, he infers, were written later.

The third concerns the sources. The two works that make Chanakya a man of flesh, the Arthashastra and a play called the Mudrarakshasa, cannot, in his view, be traced to the Mauryan period. He puts the first in the ninth century AD or after, and notes that no original manuscript of the second has turned up in an excavation. The fourth leg is a silence. Before British scholars and archaeologists, among them James Prinsep and Alexander Cunningham, dug the Mauryas back into view, Mr Patel says, local tradition had no stories of Chanakya at their court.

From these gaps Mr Patel draws a conclusion that is as much sociological as historical. Chanakya, he says, is an "implanted" character. Once the British had shown how magnificent the Mauryan empire was, the argument runs, India's Brahmins wrote a Brahmin into it as the mastermind behind the throne, so that credit for its achievements would flow to them rather than to its rulers.

The ploy had other uses. By placing Chanakya in the fourth century BC, Mr Patel contends, its authors backdated the caste system, which he holds emerged only around the eighth or ninth century AD, and so made it seem intrinsic to India's golden age. It also kept the majority deferential, "mentally enslaved" in his phrase, by teaching that even great kings needed a Brahmin to think for them. And a group short of achievements of its own, he adds less charitably, had every reason to borrow someone else's.

Historians will not accept all of this, but nor will they dismiss all of it. Start with what Mr Patel gets right. Nobody claims a contemporary record of Chanakya. The earliest accounts of him are Buddhist and Jain legends set down centuries after the Mauryas, among them a commentary on the Mahavamsa and Hemachandra's twelfth-century Parishishtaparvan. The Mudrarakshasa, a political drama by Vishakhadatta, is dated anywhere between the fourth and eighth centuries AD. Thomas Trautmann, an American historian, calls Chanakya "semi-legendary". Patrick Olivelle, whose annotated translation of the Arthashastra is a leading modern edition, goes further: there is, he says, "no evidence whatsoever" for equating Kautilya, the treatise's author, with Chandragupta's Brahmin minister. The equation seems to date from the Gupta period, and a Brahmin adviser, he has argued, was projected back onto the Mauryan past. Even if Chanakya existed, his role in founding the empire is undocumented.

But the leap from late legend to deliberate implantation is a long one, and several of Mr Patel's supports give way. The Arthashastra is not a ninth-century book. The manuscript R. Shamasastry found in Mysore's Oriental Library in 1905, and published in 1909, is no doubt medieval, like every surviving copy; that says more about how texts survive than about when they were composed. Mr Olivelle puts the treatise's core at around 50-125 AD and its final form at around 175-300 AD. The paper point is a red herring. Nor is the lack of inscriptions decisive: no inscription of Chandragupta himself survives, and Ashoka's own edicts name no minister. Caste, for its part, was not a late arrival; those edicts repeatedly urge respect for brahmins and ascetics. And Chanakya was hardly unknown before the British: Buddhist and Jain storytellers were busy with him centuries earlier.

Scepticism among scholars, moreover, is about evidence, not motive. They speak of legend accreting over centuries, not of a plot hatched after the dig. Legends, like ships, gather barnacles.

Why should a quarrel over a man dead for some 2,300 years animate anyone? Because Chanakya has become more than a historical figure. Nehru and later nationalists admired him, and his treatise is cited as proof that India had its own tradition of statecraft. For Mr Patel he is the emblem of something else: a caste's claim on the nation's past. Each side, in other words, is arguing about the present.

That is why manuscripts are unlikely to settle the matter. The scholarship points, if anywhere, to something duller than either story: a minister, perhaps real and perhaps composite, around whom later generations stacked a treatise, a play and a reputation. Ashoka, who carved his thoughts in stone and left little room for doubt, would have found the whole business baffling. A man who left no inscription has, it turns out, left a great deal of argument.