Author: Sunil Khilnani
Category: Nonfiction
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It’s not that Panini and his system somehow “froze” Sanskrit, stultifying the language even as they made it more broadly accessible. As Pollock points out, despite the normative influence that the Ashtadhyayi exerted, Sanskrit continued to evolve, just as it had in Panini’s day. That the language eventually declined had to do most likely with global and local politics, especially the rise of Persian, which was spread, often by the sword, by central Asian Muslim empires that conquered northern India at the start of the thirteenth century.
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Today, you can hear Sanskrit intoned in temple and family rituals and practiced in classrooms, but it’s no longer a language of intellectual inquiry or debate. Governments can proclaim “Sanskrit weeks,” and millions of students are made to endure Sanskrit classes each year in Indian schools, but most learn absolutely nothing. In 2014 some ministers in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, revivalist in their hopes, even took their Cabinet oaths in the language. Yet it’s all a bit of a sham.
With the decline of Sanskrit learning came a decline in popular interest in Panini, though the novelist Vikram Chandra recently did his part to reverse the trend. A former computer programmer, he wrote a book about software and Sanskrit called Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty—in its way, an ode to the great grammarian.
To Chandra, the lack of appreciation for Panini reflects a “kind of post-colonial amnesia,” a condition that endures despite the many realms in which Panini’s influence can still be felt. “He plays a very important role in the growth of modern linguistics,” Chandra says, “and in a very strange way he’s connected to the world that we live in today, because all the programming languages that we use to change our landscape are in some sense dependent on some of his insights and ideas.”
While there are resonances between Panini’s work and the way computer programmers operate, any direct inheritance from his grammar to computer code is fanciful. Still, there may in fact be a more oblique connection between the decline of Sanskrit scholarship and the success of Indians in the world of information technology. Pollock puts it this way:
Did the best minds go into Western science? Did the best minds go into business? Did the best minds go into politics? Did the best minds start writing code? If you look at the backgrounds of a lot of the kids in Bangalore—they’ve told me, “Oh, you are a Sanskritist. My great-grandfather was a wonderful Sanskritist.” So, long traditions of literacy, particularly in Sanskrit, have produced the kind of brilliance that has allowed India to emerge as one of the great IT capitals of the world. I don’t think that it’s accidental that India makes software and China makes hardware. Software requires a certain kind of literacy, and I think this was in part a Sanskritic literacy.
Sanskrit’s decline represents a serious break in contact with India’s classical traditions—and with it, a loss of the multiplicity of voices, often dissenting and inventive, that those traditions contained. For Sanskrit became something more than just the prerogative of the Brahmins. From its origins as the language of power, it became the language in which people sought to disrupt power, and to explore the literary imagination. Unlike other global languages—Latin, Arabic, or English—Sanskrit spread not through conquest or colonization, but because it served a purpose. It’s consoling to imagine it has a new purpose, helping to build a new cosmopolis, the global world of IT.
4
KAUTILYA
The Ring of Power
First century BCE/CE
A little over a hundred years ago, in southern India’s princely state of Mysore, a humble librarian chanced upon a monumental discovery. Rudrapatnam Shamashastry worked at the Mysore Government Oriental Library, a cream-colored jumble of classical Greek pillars and faux-Hindu architectural motifs, built in 1887 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Shamashastry’s job was to look after the library’s ancient manuscripts, many of which were fragmentary and crumbling. One day, shortly before 1905, a nameless “Brahmin from Tanjore” arrived at the library and handed him a manuscript made out of dried palm leaves. Although Shamashastry had never seen anything like it, he quickly realized its significance. Here was a Sanskrit text that may have lain unread for almost a thousand years—and that would revolutionize our sense of the Indian past.
Written on those palm leaves was the two-millennia-old Arthashastra, a massive, detailed treatise on statecraft and the art of government. The opening folios enumerated the contents of the work, ranging from chapters on the “Establishment of Clandestine Operatives” and “Pacifying a Territory Gained” to the “Surveillance of People with Secret Income” and “Investigation Through Interrogation and Torture.” Eerily contemporary, this is the only complete text on nonreligious matters to reach us from the classical or early period of Indian history. Its discovery summarily exploded a Western cliché: that Indians were primarily ethereal, spiritual thinkers. Here was a strategic work focused on worldly ends, advocating ruthless means to achieve and maintain power.
Shamashastry started to publish bits of the Arthashastra in English translation in 1905. The reaction in India and beyond was electric. He released more sections of the text, rather like a Victorian serialized novel, as the audience grew. Soon the mysterious treatise not only was providing historians with an unprecedented wealth of detail about early India, but had proven to be a timely gift for those seeking freedom from colonial rule.
The publication of the first translations coincided with an event that led many in Asia, and in India, to believe that their star was now ascendant while the West’s was in decline: 1905 was the year of the naval battle at Tsushima, in which the Japanese dealt Russia a shocking defeat. It was the first modern victory of an Asian nation over a Western power, and it encouraged Indians to think of themselves as part of a common Asian world. (On hearing news of the Japanese victory led by Admiral Togo, a fifteen-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru, then on his way to boarding school at Harrow, sent a one-line postcard to his cousin: “Three Cheers for Togo.”) The ancient manuscript would help Indian nationalists imagine a realpolitik for an aspiring India of the twentieth century. Here was a self-help manual for a start-up nation.
After the Indian uprising of 1857, when violence across northern and central India seriously threatened colonial rule (see 23, Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi), there had been a hardening of British attitudes toward the country. “The narrative shifted,” says Shivshankar Menon, a former national security adviser to the Indian prime minister, and one of the country’s most distinguished diplomats. “Many of the subsequent histories written by outsiders were about how there was no domestic tradition of history, which is false; that there was no domestic tradition of statecraft, which is also false. This is why the discovery of the Arthashastra, rightly or wrongly, was so useful to the nationalists to help build a consciousness, a sense of India’s own past and what India could do.”
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At the Mysore library, now known as the Oriental Research Institute, the Arthashastra is presented like a sumptuous dish, or a holy icon, on a plate bedecked with fresh flowers. Their scent mixes with the aroma of citronella oil, which the library uses to preserve its store of palm-leaf manuscripts. The pages are held together by a single length of string, and filled with the beautifully precise letters of the fifteen-hundred-year-old Grantha script. They look almost as if they have been printed, but the words have all been meticulously inscribed by hand.
This manuscript would have been produced more than a thousand years after the Arthashastra was first composed. The original author is thought to have been a man known variously as Kautilya and Chanakya. Some have argued that he was the minister of the great king Chandragupta, who, in the fourth century BCE, laid the foundations of the Mauryan Empire, India’s first and for a long time its largest imperium (see 5, Ashoka). Although the manuscript would be forgotten, Kautilya, or Chanakya, became the subject of stories and legends throughout Indian history.
As far back as the Gupta
Empire, in the fifth century CE, we find a dramatization of the life of Chanakya, or Kautilya—both names are used, along with a third one, Vishnugupta—set in the Mauryan court. The Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa, or “The Ring of Power,” by Vishakhadatta, sought to embellish the imperial ambitions of the Guptas by linking their reign back to the era of the Mauryas, some seven hundred years previously. It is an early example of the kind of appropriation of past lives that recurs across Indian history, as Indians search for glorious precursors to embody their aspirations. In the fifth century CE play, Kautilya comes into possession of a signet ring belonging to the minister of a rival king, and uses it to impersonate and intrigue so that his own king ascends to the imperial throne.
In another popular story, Kautilya overhears a mother telling off her hungry, impatient child for burning his hand by sticking it in the middle of a bowl of hot gruel. Eat from the edges of the bowl, the mother says. It’s cooler there. From this, Kautilya develops an innovative theory of conquest: Don’t attack an opponent’s capital. Move in, stealthily, from the periphery. As a result of such stories, Kautilya is often presented as the Bismarckian mind behind the great Mauryan emperor Chandragupta’s conquests. Sadly, recent scholarship says the dates of the two men don’t align. Yet if Kautilya the man remains veiled, the Arthashastra itself stands out within the Indian tradition—and beyond. The conception of power it embodies includes military might, but goes well beyond it, encompassing the use of wit and intellect as well as guile, cunning, and deceit. “An arrow unleashed by an archer may kill a single man or not kill anyone,” the author writes. “But a strategy unleashed by a wise man kills even those still in the womb.”
If we lay the Arthashastra alongside other accounts of power and politics from its broad historical era—the works of, say, Plato or Aristotle, with their focus on moral virtue—we can see how unique its perspective is. Many compare it to the treatise that disrupted Western ethical and religious beliefs in the sixteenth century, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. But Max Weber, the German social theorist, thought such a comparison anodyne. To him, the Arthashastra’s radicalism made The Prince look “harmless.”
Kautilya’s work suggests he inhabited a world unlike the clan-led oligarchic society into which the Buddha (1) and Mahavira (2) were born. His world was one of kings in perpetual conflict. “Kautilya for the most part is a political strategist,” says Patrick Olivelle, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, and the most recent translator of the Arthashastra. “He is serving a king and trying to enhance that king’s power. And for ‘king’ he uses a very technical term in Sanskrit, vijigishu, which means a person who is yearning, desiring to conquer. So conquest, expanding one’s power, is at the heart of the Kautilyan strategy.” Kautilya specifies no particular territory or space to be subjugated; it is potentially and rightfully the entire earth.
The grandiosity of these imperial ambitions embodies a high degree of fantasy, but the world Kautilya imagined—of circles, or mandalas, of competing influence and interests, in which one’s enemy’s enemy was one’s friend—is a familiar one. “This man was thinking about the same problems that we think about,” Shivshankar Menon says. “And he was thinking about it in a situation where there were many states, which is very much like the situation we’re in today—a multi-polar world.” According to Menon, this was a vision of politics that would only coalesce in the West after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War by establishing a system of sovereign states in Europe.
A ruthless, if strategic, expansionary policy was only part of Kautilya’s vision for the state. However much his ideal king might dream of exercising power without restraint, he was always enmeshed in dependencies—the concentric circles of enemies, and the allies needed to subdue them. Above all, the king (drawn from the Kshatriya, or warrior, varna) could never gain authority simply by amassing power. He was caught in a dilemma facing all rulers in India: how to combine his power with the authority only the Brahmin priestly order could claim. Some have called this India’s “inner conflict of tradition.” To acquire legitimacy, a ruler has to show his disinterest in worldly power for its own sake and to manifest a renunciatory streak—but never so much as to hobble his pursuit of power. The never-ending struggle to achieve that balance continues to challenge India’s rulers today.
In part to address this dilemma, Kautilya urged his king to adopt a benign aspect. “Power is sought after for itself—that’s one side of it,” Olivelle says. “But the Indian concept of kingship has a different angle also. The king is viewed as a father, as the person who is actually looking after the interests of his subjects, who are called prajaa, which also means children. So in a sense Kautilya weaves into his narrative these two somewhat opposite and irreconcilable goals of political power.”
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In the balancing act between liberty, security, and prosperity, the Arthashastra places its weight behind the latter two. To fulfill his functions, a king requires wealth and the means to maintain a well-ordered state. These concerns are very much at the center of the Arthashastra, whose title means something like the “Treatise on Success.” Four main sources of wealth were central to the empire that Kautilya imagined: resources acquired through imperial expansion; revenues from royal monopolies; trade with other kingdoms; and taxes collected from private enterprise, especially agriculture. Indeed, Kautilya was no early advocate of the free market. Olivelle characterizes his prescriptions as “a mixed economy,” not unlike the one practiced by post-Independence India—or the British East India Company. At the same time, “a lot of private enterprise was allowed and encouraged,” Olivelle says, particularly through the relief of taxation, the creation of infrastructure, and the maintenance of security.
The government Kautilya describes was a vast bureaucracy designed to regulate both economic and social life. And the watchers had, above all, to be watched; Kautilya mentions forty forms of embezzlement and, in a memorable image, captures the endemic, often invisible corruption that is present even in India today: “Just as it is impossible to know when fish, moving about in water, are drinking water, so it is impossible to know when officers appointed to carry out tasks are embezzling money.”
The sovereign’s tools of control included not only officialdom, but also propaganda, coercion, domestic espionage, and violence. Among other things, Kautilya offers extensive guidance on how a ruler should win over his own people by “seduction”: the king should perform illusory acts to give him the aura of miraculous powers, and should make liberal use of manipulation. He should also cultivate an army of spies, and Kautilya devotes a whole section of his treatise to “Secret Conduct.” Quite often these agents were “monks” (men with “shaven heads or matted hair”) and even nuns. They flitted among the populace, collecting information and, if necessary, seeding uncertainty, mistrust, and fear, thus reinforcing the need for a powerful, paternal king.
Kautilya seems to have taken particular pleasure in the details of punishment. Wherever lèse-majesté was exposed, strict royal action was needed. Here, for instance, is his catalogue of the “eighteen-fold torture” to be meted out to real reprobates:
Nine strokes with a cane, twelve whiplashes, two thigh encirclings, twenty strokes with a nakta mala stick, thirty-two slaps, two scorpion bindings, and two hangings-up, needle in the hand, burning one joint of a finger of one who has drunk gruel, heating in the sun for one day for one who has drunk fat, and a bed of balbaja points on a winter night.
Beatings, exposure to extreme temperatures, suspension torture—not so different from what’s in the 2014 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Indeed, Kautilya’s conception of the state is disturbingly familiar today: like an iceberg, one part towers above us, a beacon of majestic power, while another part hides in the deep—a state of secrecy, duplicity, manipulation, and constant surveillance.
Yet this sort of power p
roves, in the end, to be a trap. A ruler cannot trust his own officials. Kautilya warns, “Even if it is possible to know the path of birds as they are flying in the air, it is never possible to know the path of officials as they move with concealed designs.” He must ever be wary of his retinue. As Patrick Olivelle puts it:
The subject of the king’s food becomes important because poisoning the king is one of the easiest ways to get rid of him. There are all these people, including his family, who are the greatest threat to him personally, who are vying to get rid of him. It becomes a real treadmill: he does not know where a threat may come from—and it can come from anywhere.
If this sounds like the kind of paranoia worthy of Saddam Hussein or Colonel Gaddafi, there’s another piece of Kautilyan practice that they both followed: reduce the risk of assassination by employing a double. The author of the Arthashastra was a man who clearly understood the travails of power and captured the paradoxical instabilities of those who rule: their minds are eternally filled with the fear of losing what they have acquired.
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Kautilya’s treatise eventually proved too radical in at least one respect: it showed no deference to Brahminic conceptions of dharma, to religious ethics and moral duties. You might call it a profoundly disenchanted work. As Olivelle has argued, the text must have been modified a few centuries after it was composed in order, in part, to bring the decidedly secular Arthashastra “more into line with the mainstream of Brahminical social ideology.”
In this century, in a subcontinent where kings no longer reign, the Arthashastra has been repurposed. It’s become a how-to guide for ambitious entrepreneurs seeking to amass wealth in an increasingly competitive and globalizing country, much in the same way that Sun Tzu’s Art of War has become a manual for the world’s aspiring business leaders. It’s also become a touchstone for foreign policy wonks in the nationalist slipstream, struggling to devise a distinctively Indian view of international relations and India’s place in the world. And in the Pakistani military, Kautilya’s work gets assigned to young officers to give them insights into the supposed deviousness of the Indian mind.