Hindu Administrative Institutions c5.6

c5.6

That this is not altogether drawn from the imagination will become clear if a careful comparison be instituted between the Kauṭilīyan polity and the polity lying behind the inscriptions and edicts of Asoka. Such details as we get in the edicts of Asoka seem to go only to confirm that the polity behind the edicts is the Kauṭilīyan polity. There seems therefore no very particular incompatibility between the administration of a kingdom, even a comparatively small kingdom, and the Mauryan Empire so far as a treatise on political institutions can make out. What therefore the Arthaśāstra lays down as the necessary machinery of administration of the head-quarters of the kingdom, when understood properly, would prove to be adequate to the needs of the empire. Such details as we get of a real and reliable character from Megasthenes and writers of that kind would only go to confirm this position if too much is not made of differences and omissions that we may note in the account of Megasthenes as compared with that of the Arthaśāstra. ‘The government contemplated by the Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra appears to be that of a relatively small state, such as Magadha may have been in the early period of Chandragupta’s reign, before his dominions had been much extended by conquests, and, although the Mauryan Empire, when fully developed through the policy of systematic aggression inculcated in this treatise, was of the decentralized Indian type, each of its outlying provinces enjoying a measure of independence, yet it is natural to suppose that, by the time Pāṭaliputra had become the centre of a great federal state, a somewhat more elaborate form of administration had developed in the home provinces, and especially in the capital, than had sufficed for the original kingdom of Magadha. We may expect, then, to find in this *Arthaśāstra*, not exactly the administration described by Megasthenes, but institutions which might have grown in the course of a quarter of a century or thereabout into that described by him.'