The Mauryan Polity c5.s2.1

c5.s2.1

From the accounts given in the Purāṇas one fact emerges, namely, that Kauṭalya was the moving spirit during the reign of the first emperor of the Mauryan dynasty, if not also of the second. Recently a notable work on ancient Indian polity entitled *Kauṭalya’s Arthaśāstra* was discovered by Śāma Śāstri of Mysore who edited and then translated it. The editor of this remarkable treatise and other scholars, European and Indian, examined its antiquity and came to the only possible conclusion that this work must be the work of the famous Minister of Candragupta Maurya. But scholars like Professors Keith and Winternitz have questioned the authenticity of the work and they hold, in spite of a volume of opinion based on facts to the contrary, that it belongs to the School of Kauṭalya and that it must have been a composition of the second or third century after Christ. The following pages are based on the theory that *Kauṭalya’s Arthaśāstra* is a work of the fourth century before Christ and it will not be out of place here to examine the arguments for, and against, the theory and arrive at some definite conclusion.