Mark McClish's The History of the Arthaśāstra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India is simply the most interesting and provocative monograph on classical Indian political theory (arthaśāstra) yet written. The book redefines the tradition itself, definitively establishing its original autonomy vis-à-vis the ancillary discipline of legal theory, dharmaśāstra. A testimony to the power of patient, highly specialized philological work, this kind of fundamental re-evaluation proceeds from a passionate, long-term love affair with a single Sanskrit text; which spawns a vibrant conversation between traditional textual criticism and bold social and intellectual history. In its entertainment of both the smallest and largest questions – the dialectical entanglement of general and particular to which it here holds fast – philology reveals its inherent freedom from the positivism to which it is so often reduced. The cumulative effect is a major, paradigm-jolting contribution to the study of political science in premodern South Asia.
The Arthaśāstra attributed to Kauṭilya (traditionally identified as a minister of Candragupta Maurya, c. 325 bc), constitutes the uncontestable foundation of classical Indian political science, equally from an emic or etic point of view. Political science is itself often referred to by the name of this text, metonymically, but also literally, since it is considered either to contain or constitute the paradigm for everything. To analyse it is, in a meaningful sense, to analyse an entire tradition.
The argument begins from the identification of two major layers in this monumental text. An “ambivalence” internal to the extant AŚ on “the question of sovereign power and its limits”, provokes a fundamental question about the relationship between politics (artha) and right (dharma) (p. 4). Is the political (artha) an autonomous domain with its own distinct telos? Or is it instead merely semi-autonomous, a means to the ultimate end of dharma? The AŚ says both. McClish's intervention presents these opposed statements as chronologically distinct moments in the text's composition. Drawing on exhaustive independent evidence – external intertextualities, internal inconsistencies, and countless other devilish details – the author contextualizes the AŚ's stratigraphy. The evidence for this division is distinct from the conceptual and sociocultural incongruity it explains.
Layer 1 – which he christens “Daṇḍanīti” – was an independent treatise dating to the Śuṅga period or thereabouts, presenting the essentials of what we think of as the classical Indian statecraft tradition: a more or less realist exploration of strategy, tactics, alliances, modes of warfare, etc.; unburdened by religious considerations, except those instrumental to maintaining political stability and hegemony. This layer's character is emblematized for me by a fact which I have personally puzzled over: the AŚ's discussion of philosophical inquiry (ānvīkṣikī) – integral to would-be kings’ cultivation – identifies it with only three schools: sāṃkhya, yoga, and lokāyata. The last named “sensualist-materialist” school is not just non-Brahmanical, it is anti-Brahmanical. The former two arguably constitute the classical darśanas with the least organic connection to Brahmanism. The Daṇḍanīti-theory explains the enigma.
True to the this-worldliness of the sensualist-materialist (lokāyata) school it promotes, the Daṇḍanīti's political theory was answerable to political, and not ethico-legal concerns: artha stood on its own legs without the crutches it would later take from dharma, and even kāma, traditions. Then, in the context of a “Brahmanical revival” marking the centuries following the turn of the millennium, the text was augmented and redacted. In what was itself probably an act of Realpolitik, the older tradition fused, more or less intact, with a new, overtly Brahmanical framework. The name – and in time, the legend – “Kauṭilya” was affixed to the fusion.
The yin-yang model of sovereignty and hieratic religion (brahma kṣatreṇa saṃgatam, Mbh 1.70.12) was both a cause and an effect of what happened to the AŚ. This dharma-infused artha paradigm was crystallized in the rājadharma chapter of Manu's canonical Dharmaśāstra, which itself likely influenced the AŚ's second-layer redaction. And yet classical Indian political theory remained independent and defiantly true to its original concept, despite the unsteady dharma crown it came to wear.
The book is a tribute to this outcome's radical contingency. And like any great history, it leaves the reader astonished by what actually happened. The text's materiality takes centre-stage throughout and plays so many roles. The AŚ enacts a historical process.
The book is written for the scholar, though not exclusively the specialist, and I predict that it will enable a long overdue re-engagement with this tradition's subtleties on the part of social scientists and historians at large. Its discussion of major concepts is likewise accessible to the general reader who can dodge stray chips from the philologist's workshop by skipping the middle chapters, as the author graciously advises some readers. The book is aware of its own productive bipolarity, as much as that of the AŚ. Even if one skips to the conclusion, it is impossible to miss that the book's achievement is a product of neither empirical depth nor theorizing alone, but their dynamic interaction.
Stepping back, one must acknowledge the grand, ancient Indian tradition of dharma's essential contradictoriness or irresolvable subtlety, most famously instantiated in the Mahābhārata. McClish's conclusion is not the only one possible, as he readily acknowledges. In later artha traditions such as Kāmandaki's Nītisāra, political realism is explicitly, self-reflexively theorized to serve dharma with exquisite comfort, a kind of Realdharma (which political scientist Stuart Gray finds integral even to the AŚ). A text's contradictions do not on their own require the assumption of multiple stages of non-contradictory intentionality. Yet McClish forces us to ask whether the seemingly comfortable contradiction might not in fact be a kind of compromise formation or rationalization, crowning a tradition once at odds with what it would become. Here is where the independent text-critical evidence is key. Its explanatory power is undeniable. Mark McClish has convinced at least one reader that artha once stood far apart, before becoming re-acculturated at the Brahmanical court.
