चाणक्य Chanakya

चाणक्य Chanakya

Chanakya is remembered as the Brahmin teacher who helped Chandragupta Maurya overthrow the Nanda kings around 321 BCE. Almost all we know of his life comes from Buddhist and Jain legends and a Sanskrit play written centuries later. Tradition also calls him Kautilya and Vishnugupta and credits him with the Arthashastra. Most modern scholars read that text as the work of several hands composed between about 150 BCE and 300 CE.

Curated by Nikhil Sharma: the teacher who, tradition holds, was insulted by one king and made another. His name is tied to the Arthashastra. It is a manual of statecraft that was lost for centuries and found in Mysore in 1905. It asks a ruler to find his happiness in the happiness of his subjects.

An imagined depiction of Chanakya. Commons credits it to the cover of R. Shamasastry’s 1915 Arthashastra translation. No portrait from his lifetime survives. Photograph: Unknown artist, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.
  • 15 Books in the Arthashastra: 150 chapters and 180 topics on running a state
  • 1905 Rediscovered in Mysore: R. Shamasastry identified a palm-leaf manuscript
  • 7 Limbs of the state: Ruler, ministers, land and people, fort, treasury, army and ally
  • 4 Means of policy: Conciliation, gifts, division and force

The facts

Era
Flourished around 300 BCE according to Britannica (Encyclopaedia Britannica: Chanakya)
Also known as
Kautilya and Vishnugupta. Kautilya is a clan name. Only one verse uses Vishnugupta (Wikipedia: Chanakya)
Associated with
Chandragupta Maurya, founder of the Maurya empire, who reigned c. 321 to c. 297 BCE (Encyclopaedia Britannica: Chanakya)
Learning
Studied at Taxila (Takshashila) in what is now Pakistan, according to tradition (Encyclopaedia Britannica: Chanakya)
Known through
Buddhist, Jain and Kashmiri legends and the Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa. No contemporary record survives (Wikipedia: Chanakya)
Texts
The Arthashastra is attributed to him. So is the Chanakya Niti, a later collection of aphorisms (Wikipedia: Chanakya)
Rediscovery
A palm-leaf manuscript at the Mysore Oriental Library was identified as the Arthashastra by R. Shamasastry in 1905 (Wikipedia: Arthashastra)
Dating
Patrick Olivelle dates the text’s layers from about 150 BCE to 300 CE. R. P. Kangle held it was Mauryan (Wikipedia: Arthashastra)

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