Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s20.4

c11.s20.4

Some of the objections taken are trivial and due to misunderstanding of Indian literary practice or of the Sanskrit idiom. That Kauṭilya (Crooked) is not a name that a great minister of State would have borne, that if he was the author he would not cite himself as ‘iti Kauṭilyaḥ’, much less refute himself, and that Daṇḍin refers to the work of ācārya Viṣṇugupta as recent, are examples. Other objections, vague and inconclusive, are of value only as indices to the prejudices of those that propose them : such are, for instance, the view that the Chancellor of the first Mauryan emperor had enough to do otherwise and could not have found time to write so systematic a treatise on politics and administration ; that the Arthaśāstra is so full of pedantry and schematic classifications that it could only have been written by a Pandit and no practical administrator or statesman ; that the polity of the Arthaśāstra is a small state and not an all-India empire like that of the Mauryas. The last statement appears a little more plausible than the rest only if we forget that the Arthaśāstra contains a specific reference to the whole of India being the Cakravartikṣetram (IX i), that Indian imperialism seldom resulted in the destruction of the polity of subject states, and that in the whole range of Indian political literature there is no other work with a better claim than the Arthaśāstra to be considered a manual of Imperial polity.