Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s20.25

c11.s20.25

O. Stein's attempt to demonstrate that Megasthenes and Kauṭilya could not have belonged to the same period cannot be held a success. The detailed comparison of the fragments of Megasthenes with corresponding passages from the *Arthaśāstra* is valuable so far as it goes; but as Breloer has pointed out the method followed is too superficial and mechanical. On important subjects like the ownership of the soil, slavery, social organisation, legal procedure, and administrative arrangements it is quite possible, as we have seen, to explain the apparent differences and discover much closer similarity than Stein has found between the statements of the Hellenistic ambassador and of the Brahmin Chancellor of the first Mauryan emperor. And Stein apparently fails to note that some of his results e.g. the difference between the two writers on milestones point logically to the conclusion that Megasthenes must have written after Kauṭilya. But we may not follow Breloer the whole length². For we see little reason to accept his view that the theory of State-landlordism was introduced into India for the first time in the Mauryan epoch and borrowed from Ptolemaic Egypt ; as a matter of fact, as Breloer admits, there is no clear statement of this theory in the whole of Kauṭilya's work. According to Egyptian notions, the State was the ‘house’ of the king and its territory his estate¹. Such an idea was not accepted in India even by extreme advocates of State-landlordism who only made the king adhipati suzerain or major partner, whose rights were strictly limited by law and custom. Much less are we persuaded that the Kauṭilyan polity was a completely planned economy after the Nazi model as Breloer seeks to make out in the latest and most comprehensive of his Kauṭilya-studies. The principle of local and sectional autonomy was too deeply rooted in Indian cultural tradition for even the all-powerful bureaucratic control and regulation of the Mauryan empire to extinguish it or even to curtail its operation to any very considerable extent ; witness the multiplicity of metayage arrangements in ch. II 14 on sitādhyakṣa which finds parallels in several other sections of the work. In the war years German scholarship turned, possibly had to turn, to Nazi propaganda which no one should take seriously².