Abstract
Patrick Olivelle’s King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra is a tour de force. It is not yet another translation of the classic, but a translation enriched with annotations by one of the most eminent scholars in the field. The ‘Note to the Translation’ (pp. xv–xix), thus, could not have been more succinct, and yet useful, and the Introduction (pp. 1–60) more comprehensive.
Taking a cue from the great late-seventh-/early eighth-century poet and grammarian Daṇḍin, Olivelle suggests that ‘it is not possible to understand this treatise without first acquiring knowledge of the entire range of scholarship’ (p. xv). This is an important statement, one that underscores that neither was Kauṭilya a mere intellectual predecessor of Machiavelli nor is his treatise readily translatable into English or any other modern language for that matter. The reader is thus alerted at once to both the profundity and wide remits of the treatise as well as the complexities underlying this, and indeed any, translation project. Olivelle’s endeavour to tackle the difficulties and challenges of his translation project produces, in the process, no literal translation of the Arthaśāstra (hereafter AŚ), but a critical engagement with earlier translations of, and scholarship on, Kauṭilya’s magnum opus. The reader, in the process, is rewarded with an annotated translation with significant emendations.
Readers—both general and those with special interest as well as expertise in the field of political thought in early India—will find the Introduction to this new translation both informative and scholarly. The Introduction thus covers a wide terrain: from textual issues, such as the compositional history, date and authorship, through the structure and content of the AŚ and finally the later history and reception of the text. Located at the intersection of translation–reception–modern scholarship on the AŚ, Olivelle’s agenda, as outlined in the introductory chapter, also remains acutely sensitised to the ‘latest advances in Kauṭilya studies’ (p. 2). An important hallmark of Olivelle’s intervention, thus, lay in his relating, on the one hand, to generations of scholarship on the AŚ ever since its discovery in the early twentieth century as well as to the diverse medieval commentaries on different aspects of the text on the other hand. The brief section entitled ‘Compositional History’ in the Introduction, moreover, does appreciably well in situating this immensely complex text in the wider family of scholarship on statecraft in early India. This is an important issue, one that foregrounds the distinctive character of the text while also sensitising the readers to the question of continuities and ruptures. Olivelle underscores that there are two separate issues here, namely, ‘whether the author created a fresh text ex novo, or made use of existing material’ and whether the ‘received AŚ is a result of emendations and redactions of the author’s original work’ (p. 6). While scholars by and large agree that the AŚ has to be seen as part of a larger tradition of scholarship on statecraft, the latter—that is, the question of an original text vis-à-vis subsequent redactions—poses a much complex problem, one that Olivelle aptly addresses. He argues that after the original composition of the AŚ—or what he calls the ‘Kauṭilya Recension’—the text was subjected to one major redaction—that is, the ‘Śāstric Redaction’—followed by a number of possible minor revisions (p. 8), although by about the late eighth–early ninth century CE, the text became inaccessible to scholars. In the upshot, the readers are alerted to the different layers in the received AŚ: an original Kauṭilya Recension possibly entitled ‘Daṇḍanīti’ that was not structured in the present format, which was only developed in the course of the Śāstric Redaction even as the text was bowdlerised and brought in line with the hegemonic ‘Brāhmaṇical social ideology’ (p. 8; 8ff.), adhering to the registers of a ‘true scientific treatise (śāstra) compatible with the major principles of Dharmaśāstra’ (p. 14), albeit gradually relegating to obscurity to be finally rediscovered only in the early twentieth century.
The importance of the Śāstric redactoral intervention could be hardly gainsaid since, Olivelle argues, ‘it was this redactor who invented the Kauṭilya tradition as the preeminent school of political science and thereby made the AŚ the preeminent treatise on political science’ (p. 23). At the same time, however, the treatise betrays a critical balance between pragmatic realism, addressing the needs of an absolute monarch, as well as the quintessential brāhmaṇical trait to imparting a timeless character bordering on the ideal-typical (pp. 38f.). Understandably, any assessment of the received AŚ is bound to be contingent on how best one unravels these multiple textual layers and the complexities that they entail. Does it mean then that the extensive nature of the AŚ is an exclusively later development, while the original text had been narrow in terms of its remits to the point that it made the text entirely different in form without any of the traits of the wide-encompassing composition it later evolved into? The answer is in the negative since, as Olivelle posits, Daṇḍanīti could literally mean ‘the administration of punishment but more broadly the exercise of governance’ (p. 8). While a number of scholars have also drawn attention to subsequent redactoral additions, the crux in Olivelle’s intervention lay in the way he aptly delineates in the compass of the prefatory chapter how the broader issues of governance, anticipated in the Daṇḍanīti, coalesced together and graduated into a more coherent structured composition. In this regard, it should be added that this process of continuity also conditioned to a significant degree the subsequent afterlives of the AŚ. The argument emanates from some of Olivelle’s earlier works where he suggested an incorporation of the AŚ first in the work of Manu (mid-second century CE) and gradually in the wider Dharmaśāstra tradition under the rubric of dharma of the ruler, a point also reiterated by scholars such as Donald R. Davis, Jr.
The present translation should be seen against the backdrop of all these complexities in scholarship teasing out questions of antecedents and afterlives. Olivelle undertakes his project commendably well. A further enduring underlying concern that runs through the volume is the approach to translation with particular reference to the technical meanings of key terminologies while at the same time engaging with earlier commentaries and translations by modern scholars. Moreover, readers will find the appendices—on fauna and flora (Appendix 1), weights and measures (Appendix 2) and geographical names (Appendix 3)—extremely useful, and the notes adequate and scholarly. Together they facilitate in crucial ways the reader’s understanding of the technical terminologies, their usages, later commentarial as well as modern scholarly traditions. In short, Olivelle’s book is a project that problematises the passage of a core text to its present received form and in so doing both extends and goes well beyond the remits of a bare literal translation.