It consists of 15 adhikaranas or books, mainly in prose, with 380 shlokas occurring at the end of the various chapters. It is a treatise on artha written about 2,300 years ago and attributed to a person named Kautilya. A cursory search of the internet will throw up pages of purported quotes from Chanakya, many of them being untrustworthy. Since then, the Arthashastra has enjoyed a revival of sorts with its precepts being used and quoted in books on history, economics, politics, management, religion, spirituality and any other subject on which books are written in English. So what was to be made of the spectacular ruins on the banks of the Indus and lost Saraswati, dating to millennia before 323 BCE? Similarly, to find an ancient Indian treatise on statecraft and economics upset the ideas of the rulers about the uncivilised and unsophisticated nature of the colonised Hindus. In that case, history was known to have begun with Alexander’s arrival in India. It created a storm for all the wrong orientalist reasons- similar to the upheaval caused by the discovery of remains in Harappa and Mohenjodaro. Shamasastry of the Mysore Oriental Research Institute in Sanskrit, in 1909, and in English in 1915. It was translated and presented to the world by R. The Arthashastra is so much a part of modern Indian vocabulary on politics, economics and society that it is hard to imagine that this was a book unknown to the English-speaking world until an old manuscript was discovered in 1904.
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