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ANCIENT KOSALA AND MAGADHA
201
Mauryan südra is a helot, as had been his predecessor and equivalent, the dăsa in vedic tribal economy; dasa is indiscriminately equated to sudra, servant, and slave. The sudra caste made slavery unnecessary, and yet enabled the forested Gangetic plain to be brought under cultivation.
Thus Megasthenes and the Arthasästra corroborate and supplement each other in a remarkable, unexpected way. The latter work has no feature to give it scale; it can, on a first superficial reading, easily be mistaken for a manual of administration for some princeling who rules no more than a county (janapada). The extraordinary situation revealed to us by the Arthasästra and Megasthenes is that crown property is overwhelmingly the main basis of production, and its profitable administration the chief preoccupation of the state, which replaces private enterprise to an extent never seen before or after in India. Even prostitution, like mining, and wines, is directly under the exchequer with a special ministry (4 2.27). There are no feudal landlords worth notice, nor any nagaratres the like Anathapindika who is richer than the princes whose lands are crossed by his caravans. If Roman and Greek historical writers deal primarily with events of national and international importance, it is only because the exploitation of occupied territory was the natural prerogative of certain classes, not taken over directly by their instrument, the state. With Kautalya's everything is state-regulated to the last detail: cities and markets; road construction and transport; rivers, canals, irrigation; care and convoying of foreigners; land measurement, division, taxation; registration of births and deaths (even now unsatisfactory in India!); levy of sales taxes and tolls of every sort; public supervised sales of manufactured articles, as well as supervision of artizans. (Strabo 15.1.50-52, M 86-88). Both sources agree here, the Indian giving detail, the Greek the immense scale upon which the operations were conducted. Given the caste structure of Indian society, there is absolutely no reason to doubt that the multitude of lower state functionaries would develop into a separate caste, as also the higher ministers, at that period. This is what Megasthenes reports, though the sastras don't trouble to recognize the transient phenomenon, which disappeared with the over-centralized, government-entrepreneur empire, just as the Arthaśästra was forgotten except
14 Dionysus, in Megasthenes, does not indicate the Indian Śiva as so many have assumed without consideration, but obviously the conqueror Indra of the Rgveda, who is so often invited to fill himself with Soma. The three-peaked mountain (M 162) seems to be a development of Trikakud in the Triśiras Tvāśṭra saga. Spatembas would be, in the most reasonable Sanskrit equivalence, Asvatthaman, one of the 7 immortals in later legend though his role in the Mahabharata is not of first rank. The Greek envoy, therefore, gives a better report of Indian tradition than his translators.
15 Ganapati Sastri, in his learned preface, insists that the gotra is Kauṭalya. from Kutala, the change to Kautilya being indicative of the reputation for Machiavellian crookedness ascribed to the author. However, the gotra Kutala, Kautalya, Canaka or Canakya is not found in any surviving list (unless one sees some connection with the Canakaraj-niti in the Tibetan Canon), whereas Kautilya survives in several such lists, and families actually belonging to that gotra exist, as for example among the Madhyandina brahmins of Maharastra. Nevertheless Kautalya is the uniform reading of the 12th century Patan MSS in Mani Jinavijayaji's printed but unpublished edition.
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