An Ancient Treatise and the Making of Modern India

Alte Kataloge in neuem Gewand, 2024

The story of a unique manuscript: the Case of Arthaśāstra The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra is an extraordinary text that has been a source of fascination for scholars, historians and political thinkers for over a century. Although it was written nearly two millennia ago, the Arthaśāstra contains valuable insights for the modern world, touching on everything from politics and economics to ethics and the public good. But what exactly is this text, and why does it continue to resonate with us today? (A much more beautiful presentation of the same text you can find here: https://od-portal.hypotheses.org/3433 )

The discovery of Arthasastra ascribed to Kautilya , the legendary minister of Chandragupta Maurya , in the beginnings of the 20 th century dramatically altered the perception of Indologists and political theorists about classical India. It helped to explode many myths, including that of Macaulay, who infamously remarked that he had never found one among Indologists who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia and that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. It also negated yet another stereotyped perception of India as a land of spirituality which had little concern on matters of the mundane world .Here was a text which single handedly discussed, debated and theorized the a to z of statecraft in an amazingly comprehensive way with a level of sophistication which could match the most sober deliberations of polity of the contemporary world. Needless to say, the 'discovery' of the seminal text has also opened up a plethora of problems related to its actual role and relevance in Indian History as a document of precepts and practices. The astounding range of subject matter of the text and the thoroughgoing discussions of many interesting problems in it show that the text is the embodiment of the collective wisdom of generations. The present paper proposes to discus two important issues related to the text. Do the conditions envisaged in the text reflect the historical and political realities of any particular period of ancient India, like the Mauryan saga? Has the text been regarded as a manual of statecraft embodying the political and administrative principles actually followed by rulers of ancient India ? Only an interdisciplinary approach to the multi layered text will be able to answer these questions. Tradition identifies the author of the text, Kautilya alias Visnugupta as the sagacious minister of the Sudra king Chandragupta Maurya , who reigned at Pataliputra(modern Patna) in340-298BC.It is believed that the cunning minister helped Chandargupta to overthrow the Nandas and usurp the thrown and thus to become the founder of the Maurya dynasty. In fact, there is a full fledged Sanskrit drama called Mudrarakshasa which deals with the intrigues of Kautilya which helped him to create a cleavage in the enemy camp and thus to bring Rakshasa, the honest minister of the Nandas to Chandragupta's side. If this could be taken to be historically valid, it would help us to place the text to the fourth century B.C. If it were true, the text could be regarded as a manual of statecraft written by one of the most seasoned experts of the field, reflecting the socio political and economic conditions of the Mauryan empire of the fourth century B.C. But there are some very valid objections raided against this identiofication which merit some serious considerations.

Introduction toLucretius Poet and Philosopher. Background and Fortunes of 'De Rerum Natura' (ed. by Philip Hardie, Valentina Prosperi, Diego Zucca)

This is the Editors' Introduction to the recently published book "Lucretius Poet and Philosopher. Background and Fortunes of 'De Rerum Natura' (ed. by Philip Hardie, Valentina Prosperi, Diego Zucca), deGruyter 2020.

2008

Global Intellectual History, 2020

One may easily discern a rapid upsurge in the re-readings of the famous classical Indian text, Arthaśāstra. Possibly, this text is gaining growing recognition in today’s globalized world due to its non-Eurocentric philosophical content. Yet, its historiography has provoked a fierce debate. There are persisting disagreements about not only the sequential evolution of Arthaśāstra, but also its authorship. These disagreements, in turn, have put a number of question marks on the basic credentials of Arthaśāstra – Is Arthaśāstra composed by the sole author Kautilya, or is it an artifact of the joint authorship of Kautilya and other scholars? When did Kautilya live and what was his ideological outlook? What was the political motivation behind designing Arthaśāstra? And was this political motivation secular or theological? Was the legal attitude of Arthaśāstra more tilted toward spiritualism or materialism? And did this legal attitude permit a preferential treatment to the respective self-interests of the rulers, or the royal counsellors, or the people? Besides, should we see Arthaśāstra as an empirical or a non-empirical document? On the whole, what are the overarching (a)moral qualifications of the textual tradition of Arthaśāstra? Mark McClish’s book 'The History of the Arthaśāstra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India' is a brilliant attempt to respond to all these critical questions.

2014

This book deals with a fascinating episode in the history of philosophy, one from which those who are interested in the nature of modernity and its global origins have a great deal to learn. I believe that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a remarkable project began to take shape in the Sanskritic philosophical world. Early modernity in India consists in the formation of a new philosophical self, one which makes it possible meaningfully to conceive of oneself as engaging the ancient and the alien in conversation. The ancient texts are now not thought of as authorities to which one must defer, but regarded as the source of insight in the company of which one pursues the quest for truth. This new attitude implies a change in the conception of one’s duties towards the past. Having reconstructed the historical intellectual context in detail, and after developing a suitable methodological framework, I review work on the concept of inquiry, the nature of evidence, the self, the nature of the categories, mathematics, realism, and a new language for philosophy. A study of early modern philosophy in India has much to teach us today—about the nature of modernity as such, about the reform of educational institutions and its relationship to creative research, and about cosmopolitan identities in circumstances of globalisation. Readers may also want to consult my essay "Philosophical Modernities: Polycentricity and Early Modernity in India" (Philosophy, 2014). "Jonardon Ganeri's book is a treasure trove of new insights and fascinating figures that leaves this reader craving much more. He weaves a rich tapestry where ideas come to life, reinvigorating our understanding of Indian philosophy and the important lessons it can teach us today. The book is refreshing and exciting . . . Anyone interested in learning about early modern Indian philosophy will have the best work I know of on the subject in their hands. And those interested more in the philosophical issues than in comparing traditions will also profit greatly. . . a fascinating view of Indian philosophy and how its insights have genuine relevance for contemporary debates. I could not recommend it more highly" —Thom Brooks, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2012 “Jonardon Ganeri’s The Lost Age of Reason … is a book that Indologists and students of Indian philosophy cannot afford to ignore” —Andrew Nicholson, Journal of the American Oriental Society 2013. “[The Lost Age of Reason] is packed with attention to unjustly neglected philosophers, fluent translation of difficult texts, excellent exegesis and a challenging historical argument. This is a volume that deserves to be taken seriously by a broad readership in philosophy […] This volume is highly recommended to Western and to Indian philosophers.” —Jay L. Garfield, The Philosophical Quarterly 2013.

Indian Historical Review, 2018

This is a book that is intellectually both engaging and entertaining: engaging in its attempt to raise and resolve many pressing questions related to Anglophone Indian thought and entertaining on account of the fresh and fulsome feeling that the interested reader is bound to derive from even a hurried reading of the text. Given my own interests in the history of ideas this is a work that I have been awaiting a long time and am indeed delighted to find myself among its reviewers. The book is spread over thirteen chapters of which at least six (Chapters 2-7) are clearly historical in orientation and nature. The remaining chapters get closer to philosophical disputation, emanating in both academic and non-academic circles. There is an excellent introduction (Chapter 1) which outlines the agenda set by its authors and puts forth with admirable lucidity and directness, the major arguments on which their thesis hangs. Broadly speaking, the authors contest the commonplace perception that Indian thought in the colonial era suffered from a lack of vitality or that it was somehow discontinuous with Indian intellectual history of the past since it was primarily expressed in the English language. Indeed, my generation was given to believe that in modern era, having ceased to grow in philosophical thought we substituted that with histories of philosophy. Our authors, on the contrary, argue that it was in this period that Indian thought more effectively related to its own past and address new issues arising in the contemporary world. Prima facie, this alone dispels the argument that such thought was either stagnant or insular. The authors also make the important point alongside that while contact with the West created new categories of thought, such thinking was always linked to an identifiably Indian agency and subjectivity. In the chapters that follow the introduction, a wide variety of individual thinkers and their ideological agendas are outlined and discussed. A good part of this discussion covers the nineteenth century, including the major movements of social and religious reform, the birth of a new Anglophone intelligentsia and the ways in which the very concept of a 'renaissance' came to be discursively defined. However, the real strength and originality of the work lies between Chapter 8 and Chapter 12 where there is an engaging account of certain twentieth-century Indian thinkers as for instance, Ananda

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 84.1, 2021

2010

Lucretius’ De rerum natura is one of the relatively few corpora of Greek and Roman literature that is structured in six books. It is distinguished as well by features that encourage readers to understand it both as a sequence of two groups of three books (1+2+3, 4+5+6) and also as three successive pairs of books (1+2, 3+4, 5+6). This paper argues that the former organizations scheme derives from the structure of Ennius’ Annales and the latter from Callimachus’ book of Hynms. It further argues that this Lucretius’ union of these two six-element schemes influenced the structure employed by Ovid in the Fasti. An appendix endorses Zetzel’s idea that the six-book structure of Cicero’s De re publica marks that work as well as a response to Lucretius’ poem