Arthashastra aparnama Rajsiddhanta

Author(s): Kautilya Acharya,
Publisher: Singhi Jain Shastra Shiksha Pith Mumbai

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The
One of these rare, solitary Kauṭalya citations does not appear in Shamasastry's index namely, that in 1.7. However, it occurs in that part of the Southern text which is covered also by the Northern fragment, and is well worth discussing for that reason. In 1.7, the southern texts agree in giving the sentence: artha eva pradhanaḥ iti Kautalyah; artha-mulau hi dharma-kamav iti. North drops out the first half, before our semicolon; neither version fits the context at all well. iti here indicates what is left of a quotation, so that South is more plausible, but the source might not be Kauṭalya himself. The phrase after the semicolon appears again in 8.3, but as part of a quotation from the Parāśara school, to which Kauṭalya is there strongly opposed; it is cited anonymously as a type of maxim in 15.1. The text that precedes the quotation in 1.7 absolutely requires (and appears disjointed for lack of) some discussion of dharma, artha, and kāma, (say: ethics, economics, erotics) in relation to each other. In both North and South, haplography is indicated; the scribe's eye must have jumped to the word artha repeated further on. The mark of such a happening indicates that very few manuscripts of the work existed at that time. This illustrates once again the effect of long disuse and fading away of the level-headed, frankly treacherous, and realistic theory of pre-feudal statecraft.
2
One may feel tempted to make a similar conjecture about the tenth book, where it seems to me that tactical considerations: pattyasva-ratha-hasti-karmani are not sufficiently developed in the southern text that now survives. The main reason would be that the structure and purpose of the army changed. The word patti means the heavyarmed soldier of the line, a hoplite, in the Arth., but a composite squad in later works. New tactical units such as the gulma (which only means thicket or wharf in the Arth.) made up of combined arms were used also for policing the countryside from Satavahana times. This has been argued elsewhere. The only guide we have at present outside the text itself is Kamandaki's Nitisarta", written under the influence, of Caṇakya's work. But this is rather dangerous as a guide because both tone and content show how the basis of society
7). D. D. Kosambi: The Parvasamgraha of the Mahabharata, vol. 66, 1946, pp. 110--117.
8). D. D. Kosambi Introduction to the study of Indian history (Bombay, 1956), pp. 276-8; for the Arth. state, ibid pp. 199-226.
9). Nitisära of Kamandaki. ed. T. Gaṇapati Sastri, Trivandrum Sanskrit Series, No. 14. (1912).
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