Arthasastra and Koutilya

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thanjavooran
Posts: 2972
Joined: 03 Feb 2010, 04:44

Arthasastra and Koutilya

Post by thanjavooran »

A share from my friend

ALL ABOUT ARTHASASTRA AND KAUTILYA
Rudrapatnam Shamasastry (1868–1944) was a Sanskrit scholar and librarian at the Oriental Research Institute Mysore. He discovered and published the Arthashastra, an ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, economic policy, and military strategy.

Shamasastry was born in 1868 in Rudrapatna, a village on the banks of the Kaveri river in Karnataka, to a Sankethi Brahmin family. His early education started in Rudrapatna. He later went to the Mysore Samskruta patasala and obtained the Sanskrit Vidwat degree with high honours. In 1889, Madras University awarded him a BA degree. Impressed by his ability in classical Sanskrit, Sir Sheshadri Iyer, the then Dewan of Mysore Province, nurtured him and helped him to join the Government Oriental Library in Mysore as its librarian. He "had mastered Vedas, Vedanga, classical Sanskrit, Prakrit, English, Kannada, German, French and other languages."

THE DISCOVERY

The Oriental Research Institute was set up in 1891, as the Mysore Oriental Library. It housed thousands of Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscripts. Shamasastry, the librarian, examined these fragile manuscripts daily, to determine their contents and catalogue them.

In 1905 he discovered the Arthasastra among a heap of manuscripts. He transcribed, edited and published the Sanskrit edition in 1909. He proceeded to translate it into English, publishing it in 1915.
The manuscript was in the Grantha script. Other copies of the Arthashastra were discovered later in other parts of India.

It was one of the manuscripts in the library that had been handed over by 'a pandit of the Tanjore district' to the Oriental Library.

Until this discovery, the Arthashastra was known only through references to it in works by Dandin, Bana, Vishnusarma, Mallinathasuri, Megasthenes, etc. This discovery was "an epoch-making event in the history of the study of ancient Indian polity". It altered the perception of ancient India and changed the course of history studies, notably the false belief of European scholars at the time that Indians learnt the art of administration from the Greeks.

The book was translated into French, German and many other languages.

ABOUT THE “ ARTHASASTRA “

The Arthashastra is an ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, economic policy and military strategy, written in Sanskrit. It identifies its author by the names "Kauṭilya" and "Vishnugupta" both names that are traditionally identified with Chanakya (c. 350–283 BCE), who was a scholar at Takshashila and the teacher and guardian of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya, founder of the Mauryan Empire. The text was influential until the 12th century, when it disappeared. It was rediscovered in 1904 by R. Shamasastry, who published it in 1909. The first English translation was published in 1915.

Roger Boesche describes the Arthaśāstra as "a book of political realism, a book analysing how the political world does work and not very often stating how it ought to work, a book that frequently discloses to a king what calculating and sometimes brutal measures he must carry out to preserve the state and the common good."

Centrally, Arthaśāstra argues how in an autocracy an efficient and solid economy can be managed. It discusses the ethics of economics and the duties and obligations of a king. The scope of Arthaśāstra is, however, far wider than statecraft, and it offers an outline of the entire legal and bureaucratic framework for administering a kingdom, with a wealth of descriptive cultural detail on topics such as mineralogy, mining and metals, agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine and the use of wildlife. The Arthaśāstra also focuses on issues of welfare (for instance, redistribution of wealth during a famine) and the collective ethics that hold a society together.


Pratyaksham Bala
Posts: 4164
Joined: 21 May 2010, 16:57

Re: Arthasastra and Koutilya

Post by Pratyaksham Bala »

For downloading Arthasastra in Sanskrit & its English translation:-
http://www.sanskritebooks.org/2009/11/a ... anslation/

Ponbhairavi
Posts: 1075
Joined: 13 Feb 2007, 08:05

Re: Arthasastra and Koutilya

Post by Ponbhairavi »

This reminds me of a Hoax played by Thuglak magazine decades back; In every issue of his fortnightly Cho wrote in one of his serials his own concoction in tamil and attributed them to artha sasthra of Kautilya.This went on for months together and no one called the bluff- until finally he himself declared it.

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