1

Published in The Journal of the History of the Present, 2(1), spring 2012

Chanakya/Kautilya:

History, philosophy, theatre and the 20th

century ‘political’

This essay is part of an ongoing project on possible histories of our political present,

written from perspective of colonial/postcolonial Bengal. Here I explore how in the

early twentieth century, Chanakya/Kautilya, an ancient Indian political figure and

putatively the author of the Arthasashtra, a treatise on statecraft, gets re-imagined –

though not quite successfully – as the figure of the quintessential political man of

India. At stake in the story is the question of how to think the political in the first

place.

In modern times, thinking about politics has always been seen as a

philosophical endeavour. At least, this has been the European tradition – of thinking

the political via political philosophy, through a narrative of great thinkers such as

Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Marx and so on. My purpose here is to de-naturalise

this politics-philosophy coupling. The reason for this is simple. We have all grown up

knowing intuitively that 20th

century India is a deeply politicized society, that the

story of India’s modernity is indeed a political story. And yet we seem to lack a

tradition of political philosophy. Or to say it differently, traditions of Indian thought,

whether precolonial or colonial, rarely seem to translate into what we recognize as

political philosophy. Our academia, even today, teaches political thought as almost

entirely Western political thought. And courses on Indian political ideas – which

teach thinkers such as Rammohan, Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi and so on,

duplicating the typical Western great-thinker intellectual tradition – inevitably

flounder on the ‘non-political’ elements in their ideas. The non-political – variously

seen as the religious, spiritual, ontological, even sexual surplus in their oeuvres –

seems to compromise and eventually prevent the rise in India of the purely political

idea. To me, this seems to be the defining irony of our contemporary political

experience – that is, the irony of being intensely political and yet insufficiently

philosophical. Today’s middle-class lament about the lack and loss of ideology in

Indian politics, I believe, is a reincarnation of our historical longing for a cogent

moral and political philosophy in place of the pure contingencies of politics.

2

To me it appears that there is only one way out of this impasse – to reopen the

category of the political itself via differed genealogies of the present. Needless to say,

this would also entail a history of the changing imaginations of what the non-political

could be. Here we are caught between two well-known positions. The first –

produced by nineteenth-century historicism – saw the political as to do with the state

and the party, everything else being pre- or non-political. The second – produced in

reaction by feminist and poststructuralist critiques since the 1960s – saw the political

as everyday and everywhere, and therefore in no way requiring theoretical

specification. Between politics as high politics and politics as life itself, one would

any day choose the latter – as indeed has modern Indian historiography – except that

such a seamless generalization of politics renders the very category of the political

merely descriptive, and even superfluous. We are then left with no history, no

genealogy of the term political – only with a universalist sense of our imbrication in

everyday operations of power and governmentality. And this conveniently hides the

originary claims made by European modernity over the very term political, through

the enunciation of the domains of the polis, the demos and indeed philosophy itself.

One way to historicise the political would be to ‘provincialise’ European

political philosophy, i.e. render its local as well as Judaeo-Christian manners

visible. But this too would falter before what appears as the contemporary universality

of political language across the globe. Arguing against Benedict Anderson, Partha

Chatterjee has called for a freedom of imagination, which recognises that the

colonized imagined political community in ways very different from Euro-American

nationalisms. But even he seems to accept that in the imagination of the state, and

therefore in the imagination of democracy, the colonized simply took to western

definitions.1 In other words, the political (not incidentally like the economic) appears

in today’s world as universal, the corollary being that the particular and the alternative

must necessarily therefore be social and/or cultural. It is in counterpoise to this very

contemporary experience of the universal political – in spite of the nation-state, and

perhaps because of it – that I would like to locate my attempt at rewriting the

relationship between politics and philosophy.

1 Partha Chatterjee The Nation and it’s Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Delhi, Oxford

University Press, 1994, 10-11.

3

It is this larger concern that inspires me to tell the story of Chanakya.

However, I must admit right here that more than Chanakya, it was the figure of

Krishna which dominated the field of political thought in India, late nineteenth-

century onwards. Krishna’s influence on political thinkers as diverse as Bankim,

Tilak, Gandhi and Aurobindo was predicated upon the modern career of the

Bhagavad Gita, which was extricated from the epic Mahabharata and reconstituted

into an autonomous, politico-philosophic text par excellence for India. Krishna, as

the enunciator of the Gita, became thus at once the metaphysical, philosophical and

the narrative font of the Indian political. Not accidentally, south Asian historiography

today shows a renewed interest in the Gita as a critical moment in India’s modern

intellectual history.2 Chanakya, on the other hand, did not quite make it to the same

status as Krishna, even though he continued to invite public engagement because of

his seemingly purely political character. At the end of the essay, then, I shall cross-

reference Chanakya’s modern career with Krishna’s – precisely because this brings

out with renewed force the question of philosophy. I shall also bring in theatre, as the

provisional other of philosophy, not only to highlight questions of text and genre

which complicate the idea of 'idea' as it were but also to demonstrate how Krishna and

Chanakya fared differently in realms where philosophy was made to 'perfom' rather

than simply ‘be’ philosophy.

I work through the troubled nature of the modern Chanakya story at three

levels. I show how acts of contemporanising Chanakya got caught up in the question

of discipline and genre – i.e. in debates about whether Chanakya is best thematised

through history or philosophy. Questions of discipline, genre and form had

implications for the kind of publics that the figure of Chanakya could project and

materialise at critical moments.3 I also show that the consolidation of Chanakya as a

singular, foundational figure for modern times stumbled over the historical nature of

the Arthasashtra as text – bringing to the surface questions of the untimely and the

anachronistic at the heart of the political present. Finally, I argue that this

2 See the special issue, edited by Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji, on ‘Bhagavad Gita and Modern

Thought’ of the journal Modern Intellectual History, 7(2) 2010. 3 The notion of multiple publics is inspired by Ravi Vasudevan’s formulation about cinematic publics

in his recent book The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema, Delhi,

Permanent Black, 2010.

4

philosophical and historical impasse was intensified by the modern caste question.

Here theatre became the site where the figure of the philosopher got inextricably

entangled with the figure of the political Brahman. The question running through all

this is obvious – in what ways do our present lend itself to an extended temporality

and to historical depth, if for us, time must move across epistemic and political

ruptures of the kind embodied by colonialism. Are the ways offered by modernity –

such as history, genealogy, succession – adequate? Or are we in need of more radical

acts of ‘contemporanising’?

I

The early twentieth-century interest in Chanakya can be traced to the

‘discovery’ of two manuscripts of the Arthasashtra by a Tanjore pandit, their

handing-over to the Mysore Government Oriental Library, and the immediate

publication of a paper by R. Shamasastry in the Indian Antiquary in 1905.

Shamasastry went on to publish the edited text of the manuscript in the same journal

in 1909 and then the translated text as a book in 1915. Not that Chanakya was

unknown till then. References to Chanakya were found in pre-colonial niti texts,

stories and drama – such as in Kamandaka’s Nitisara, Banabhatta’s Kadambari,

Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa, the Buddhist Somadeva’s Nitivakyamrta,

Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagara, the Nandisutra and as late as in the 14th

century text

of Mallinatha. In Bengal, niti was already being translated and edited in modern

times – e.g. Manmatha Nath Dutt’s English rendering of Kamandaka in 1896.4 Even

though the Arthasashtra was unknown, Western Indologists discussed the ‘political

science’ of Chanakya through studies in Kathasaritsagara and Kamandaka.5

4 Very recently, historians of pre-colonial India are beginning to reconstruct the niti tradition, in which

they place the Arthasashtra but many other texts too. Niti here is seen as a tradition of secular political

thinking, distinct from both the traditions of law-making a lá dharmasashtra-s and the traditions of the

six darshana-s or philosophies. See Upinder Singh, ‘Politics, Violence and War in Kamandaka’s

Nitisara’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, 47 (29) 2010, 29-62; Sanjay Subrahmanyam &

Velecheru N. Rao, ‘Notes on Medieval and Early Modern South India’, Modern Asian Studies, 43(1)

2009, 175-210. 5 Carlo Formichi, 1899, quoted in Benoy Kumar Sarkar ‘Hindu Politics in Italian’, Indian Historical

Quarterly, hereafter IHQ, 1(3), 1925, 545-60.

5

Chanakyasutra-s too were familiar till well into the twentieth-century as popular wise

sayings, and were often incorporated in colonial-modern school readers for children

(as, however, moral rather than political lessons). And yet, it was quite another thing

to have the full treatise of Arthasashtra at hand. Expectedly, there was much

nationalist celebration and colonial scepticism around the discovery of the text and

around the possibility of a classical political figure for India.6

What interests me here is a very specific debate that took place in the mid-

1920s in the pages of the journal Indian Historical Quarterly. What was at stake in

this debate was the question of whether Chanakya was a philosopher or a politician,

i.e. a theoretical or a historical figure. It is easy to understand the particular intensity

of this debate. Faced with the European imagination of the political as philosophical,

the colonised felt it necessary to claim a political philosopher for India. Even better if

he was of great antiquity, like Plato and Aristotle. And yet, there was also the

influential colonial opinion that Indian philosophy was inexorably idealist, structured

around dharma (morality/law/religion) and moksha (liberation/transcendence).

Indians, therefore, lacked practical reason, and consequently any kind of political

dynamic. The need to show up Chanakya as being steeped in the actual practice of

politics and by that logic, his text as a historical-factual document, then, was no less

compelling.

Benoy Kumar Sarkar, sociologist, philosopher, polyglot, founder editor of a

journal of economics in Bengali Arthik Unnati and editor-translator of a medieval

political treatise Sukraniti, argued that it was not only German Orientalism of the Max

Mueller kind but German philosophy itself, especially Hegel, which caused Indian

scholars to wrong-headedly talk of a Hindu spirit in opposition to a European one.7 If

however one takes into consideration political figures such as Chanakya or

Kamandaka, it becomes clear that the political must really be thought as a universal

question. This universality of the political, according to Sarkar, was indeed the

universality of the philosophical idea – demonstrable through the analogy between

Chanakya and Machiavelli. Sarkar further argued that this analogy, despite the very

6 S. C. Mishra Evolution of Kautilya’s Arthasashtra: An Inscriptional Approach, Delhi, Anamika Pubs,

1997, 17-8. 7 Sarkar, ‘Hindu Politics in Italian’, IHQ, 1(4), 1925, 742-56, 751-52.

6

different time and location of the two thinkers, was grasped by neither Indologists nor

historians, whether Indian or English or German. It were only Italian scholars who

recognised this because of their long tradition of philosophical history, i.e. ‘ideal and

universal history’ a la Vico.8

In other words, it was imperative that a figure such as Chanakya be read

philosophically. The problem with Indian scholars, Sarkar lamented, was that they

inevitably reduced the question of the political man to a historical question. From this

ground, Sarkar went on to criticise books by many a historian who wrote on early

Indian politics, leading to an intense debate that went on for years but expectedly

remained inconclusive. My argument is that implicit in this debate – which was

ostensibly about disciplines such as history, philosophy and political science – was

the question of genre. What this colonial modern debate showed up – but did not

quite admit – was that philosophy was not only a matter of ideation but a particular

mode of writing, a mode which presented itself as not just abstract (that being merely

philosophy’s self-image) but as – chronologically and logically – prior to history.

Critical to this debate about history and philosophy was the matter of

separating the political from the moral, and thereby of exploring the relationship

between the arthasashtra and the dharmasashtra. Chanakya was made famous by his

alleged ‘end justifies the means’ kind of political rationality, referred to, amongst

others, by Max Weber in his ‘Politics as Vocation’ lecture.9 The historian Kalidas

Nag, however, took great pains in arguing, in his 1923 book Les Theories

Diplomatique, De L Inde Ancienne et L Arthacastra, that Kautilyan political

(a)morality had been historically abandoned by India. The Arthasashtra was actively

rejected, within a century of Chanakya, by the king Asoka in his turn from artha to

dharma as the basis of just rule. Thereafter, the tradition of pure political theorising

was gradually subsumed by ethical discourses such as in the Mahabharata.10

(One

must remember, of course, that this was also the time of the rise of Gandhian politics

in India; and that Gandhi himself pitted the idea of pure politics against his vision of

righteous public life, dedicated to the quest for truth, dharma and moral means

8 Sarkar, ‘Hindu Politics in Italian’, IHQ 2(2), 1926, 351-72, 368, 370, 372.

9 Max Weber, ‘Politics as Vocation’, 1919 in The Vocation Lectures, eds. David Owen and Tracy B.

Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Indianapolis: Hackett Company, 2004. 88. 10

Kalidas Nag, ‘Prof. Benoy Kumar Sarkar and the “New Machiavelli”’, IHQ 2(3), 1926, 650-54.

7

towards just ends.) India’s turn from the political to the moral/ethical, Kalidas Nag

argued, can be read in early Indian kavya or poetic traditions. Thus, he quoted the

early Indian poet Banabhatta as saying that Chanakya niti was maranatmaka or ‘of

the spirit of death’.

Reacting against this valorisation of the moral against the political via literary

evidence, Benoy Sarkar sarcastically remarked upon the historian’s generic confusion

– of trying to read the political in the literary, which was like reading Shakespeare for

his references to Cicero or Seneca.11

What we see here already emerging within the

debate is a disjunct between Chanakya as a literary protagonist and Chanakya as a

theoretician – which is where, soon, theatre will come into play. R. P. Kangle, well-

known for his 1965 authoritative edition and translation of the Arthashastra, argued

that Chanakya figures in early Indian kavya as a player in the complex conflictual and

dialogical world of characters debating artha, niti and dharma. Dandin or Banabhatta

or Kalidas’s references to Chanakya, then, should not be read directly either as

reflection on the Arthashastra or as ‘source’ of historical facts about Chanakya. In

other words, Chanakya, as he figured in early Indian kavya, was a dramatic character

– something that we shall return to later in the essay. In any case, Kangle argued, it

was only law, and not politics, which could be effectively appropriated by the

dharmasashtra-s from within the whole corpus of the Arthasashtra. He further argued

that Kautilya was by no means immoral. When talking of the individual, including

the king, he recommended high moral principles and self-discipline. He only said that

the conduct of public political life should be subject to different principles.12

Benoy Sarkar sees exactly this as what is common to Machiavelli and

Chanakya – this pioneering acknowledgement of politics and morality as two,

distinct, incommensurable orientations, and the emancipation of the political as such

as an autonomous subjectivity.13

In other words, Sarkar was pitching for an

extrication of the political imperative from the everyday conduct of social and

individual life subject to ethical principles. Kalidas Nag, however, held his position,

invoking other historians like Narendranath Law and V. Ramchandra Dikshitar. It

11

Benoy Sarkar, ‘Hindu Politics in Italian III’, IHQ 2(1), 1926, 146-57. 12

R. P. Kangle, The Kautilya Arthasastra: A Study, Bombay, University of Bombay, 1965, 280-81. 13

Benoy Kumar, ‘Hindu Politics in Italian’, IHQ, 2(2), 1926, 370.

8

was a fatal confusion, he said, identifying the fate of Chanakya as a character to the

Arthashastra as text and tradition. Chanakya continued to be nominally invoked

through centuries as a protagonist in kavya, while the arthasashtra as textual tradition

was appropriated by moral and legal discourses of the dharmashastra-s. In other

words, historians like Kalidas Nag insisted on a disjunct between Chanakya and the

Arthasashtra, between the ‘dramatic’ life of the man and the epistemological life of

the text – disallowing by this move the foundational coupling of the philosopher and

his treatise, which was constitutive of the Western metaphysical tradition.

It must be clear by now that Benoy Sarkar’s stake in creating an analogy

between Machiavelli and Chanakya was to institute the latter as the inaugural moment

of a line of political philosophers for India – in the way that the former was seen to be

the origin-point of modern political thought in Europe. Historians such as Kalidas

Nag, however, implied that Chanakya was actually the end of a line, given that the

tradition of arthashastra fell into disuse in India soon afterwards. But the question

was not merely that of the autonomy or continuity of Chanakya niti. It was also the

question of the generic nature of the text of Arthashastra. At one level, the entire

debate on the historicity of Arthashastra revolved around the question of whether

there was a single author to the text at all. At the other level, it remained uncertain

what historical period the text belonged to.14

I shall not go into this historiography,

because the impossibility of assigning a singular author and a singular time to early

Indian treatises was common to almost all texts, and lay at the heart of the question of

their possible nature as sources of history. What must be noted for our purpose is the

predicament that such a “historians’ question” produced for the twentieth-century

political project of reinventing Chanakya himself as a self-same philosophical and

authorial figure.

V. R. Ramchandra Dikshitar argued, even while admitting that the

Arthashastra was invoked as late as in the eighteenth century, that it could not be said

that Chanakya was the first to inaugurate an autonomous and new political thinking in

India. Even if we assume that the Chanakya of legend was the Brahman minister of

Chandragupta Maurya, who in turn was the very same person who wrote the

14

Thomas Trautmann, Kautilya and the Arthasastra: A Statistical Investigation of the Authorship and

Evolution of the Text, Leiden, Brill, 1971.

9

Arthashastra, the point remains that Chanakya himself saw the Arthashastra as part

of a long, established tradition – indeed, Chanakya ‘bowed to tradition’, invoking no

less that ten prior theoreticians of artha and niti.15

It is clear that Dikshitar was

gesturing towards the textual technique of setting up a genealogy and a purvapaksha –

the prior ‘tradition’ vis á vis which any theoretical act might happen – which was

critical to the nature of shastra as genre. In other words, the Arthashastra could not

quite be pitched as original or originary in any sense and Chanakya could not be

proved as authoritative/authorial in relation to the treatise.

Benoy Sarkar, however, responded by saying that it was precisely this

historian’s predicament that proved to us that history as a mode of intellectual

apprehension was inappropriate to Chanakya niti as a tradition of thought. Historians

failed to recognise philosophy when they saw it. It is only because the Arthashastra

was written in the form of sutras, he argued, that we fail to recognise its philosophical

nature, and Hegelians mistake its genre for poetry.16

But it is in the nature of Indian

philosophy that it is written in the form of condensed statements, meant for

elaboration and discussion in sabhas and goshtis (assemblies), rather than as finished,

readymade products of autonomous, individual ratiocination.17

In other words, Indian

philosophy had less stake in establishing the philosopher as singular authorial figure,

more in inviting the interlocution by readers and commentators into the very act of

philosophising itself .

‘It must never be forgotten, be it repeated, that the authors of the Kautilya

cycle were philosophers. They were dealing with the theory of the state, the

ideals of statesmanship, the knowledge as to the ways and means of prithivya

labhe palane (the acquisition and maintenance of the earth). As theorists,

idealists, logicians of rajarsi [renunciate king] and of “world conquest” they

were not necessarily bound to take their inspiration from their own

environment.18

Sarkar argued that Chanakya could not and must not be seen as a historical-contextual

figure, whose words reflected particular political practices determined by time and

15

V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar, ‘Kautilya and Machiavelli’, IHQ 3(1&2) 1927, 176-80. 16

Benoy Sarkar, reflecting on Carlo Formichi’s 1899 lecture on ‘Hindus and their Political Science’, in

‘Hindu Politics in Italian’, IHQ 1(3), 1925, 544-60, 532-33. 17

Sarkar, ibid. 18

Benoy Sarkar, ‘Hindu Politics in Italian’, IHQ 1(4) 1925, 743-56, 755.

10

space. Any attempt at establishing or disestablishing the Mauryanism of the

Arthashastra is pointless, he said.19

It was precisely the error of historicism that made

historians reduce artha and niti principles to a theory of Hindu kingship. U. N.

Ghoshal and Sarkar had a particularly bitter debate on this point – Sarkar asserting

that the Arthashastra is universal Kautilyadarshanam, Ghoshal pointing out that

darshan is not always philosophy and indeed in Kautilya’s case, darshan is only

political opinion, even if of a master politician, in service of reified, kingly power.

Sarkar’s criticism was that historians like Ghoshal, who talked kingship in the

name of Kautilya, were blind to the fact that in the arthashastra tradition the king was

only one component of the saptanga (seven limbs) of the state. In early India,

kingship was not sovereignty in the Western, absolutist sense. Dandaniti or the

meting of justice here was a principle that was prior to and greater than royal decree,

indeed prior to even the concrete institution of kingship itself. In other words, niti and

arthasashtra constituted a theoretical principle.20

Ghoshal, on the other hand, argued

that even though the saptanga concept in the Arthasashtra might encourage a co-

theorisation of jurisprudence, political economy, inter-state relations and so on, such a

co-theorisation was no longer possible in modern times. For these different facets of

the political had become by now the distinct disciplinary domains, such as of

economics, international relations and law, and could not be reconstructed by

historians in the form of a unitary and singular imagination of the political. Ghoshal

then went on to make a further distinction between theory and thought. Political

thought is greater than political theory, he said. For theory is the speculation of

certain thinkers in abstraction, sometimes even self-consciously removed from the

actual facts of lives and times. Thought, however, is immanent philosophy of the

whole age, which determines actions and shapes life. Theory is explicit, self-

conscious, detached. Thought is implicit, unconscious and immersed in the stream of

‘vital action’ – and therefore only historically graspable.21

Consequently, Ghoshal,

19

Ibid., 755. 20

Benoy Sarkar, in a long footnote critiquing U N Ghoshal’s 1923 magnum opus Hindu Political

Theories, ‘Hindu Politics in Italian’, IHQ 2(2), 1926, 359. 21

U N Ghoshal, ‘More Light on Methods and Conclusions in Hindu Politics’, IHQ 3(3&4) 1927, 625-

58, 640, 650.

11

whose book was called Hindu Political Theory, went on to claim that he had really

meant to dwell on the question of Hindu Political Thought.22

It must be clear by now that this contest over whether Chanakya was a

philosopher or a historical figure was really a contest over how to thematise politics –

as theory or as practice. Or to say the same thing differently, the question was

whether the political, because philosophical, was conceptually prior to history or the

political was imbricated in the larger, more encompassing narrative of history. The

theory-practice binary thus effectively took the form of a disciplinary opposition

between philosophy and history. Yet there was also a critical third term here over

which there was almost total silence – namely, the term shastra, which was

generically irreducible to either history or philosophy as modes of writing. There

was some discussion over the term artha in arthasashtra, of course. Thus, against the

tendency amongst many historians to reduce the term artha to an economic principle

(Shamasashtry’s first essay, on discovering the Arthasashtra was typically on

‘Chanakya’s Land and Revenue Policy’23

) or at best, to a secular-material principle of

conquest and holding of land (á la references to artha in the traditional lexicon

Amarakosa), a more political meaning for the term could be argued, for instance

through asserting an identity between artha and niti or through the other lexical sense

of the term artha, which meant ‘to act towards’ or ‘purposive action’.24

But there was

hardly any exploration of shastra itself as a term or as particular form of textuality,

even though the shastric form was precisely a specific kind of thematisation of the

question of theory and practice.

Through a reading of a variety of shastras – from those on dharma to those on

cooking and medicine – Sheldon Pollock has argued that shastra is a genre that

presents itself as knowledge or grammar that is prior to, indeed the very condition of,

correct and perfect practice. Therefore, central to this genre is the problematic of

innovative and new practices, which inevitably emerge without prior shastric

injunction. Indeed, it is especially in the domains of artha and kama (politics and

22

Ghoshal, ibid. 23

R. Shamasastry, Indian Antiquary, XXXI, 1905, 5-6. 24

Sir Monier Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary: Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with

Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European Languages, 1899, Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1976,

see entry for artha.

12

sexuality, but also in poetics) that new experience and innovative practice dominate

and even assume the guise of opposition to established tradition.25

It seems to me then

that Chanakya getting caught up in the philosophy/history binary was owing to an

interesting misrecognition of the genre of artha- and nitishastra in the first place – and

the modern rendering of a generic question into a disciplinary question. Indeed, when

Chanakya argued that his text was an engagement with earlier theoreticians, rather

than a novelty or an innovation (which was exactly what Benoy Sarkar was hoping

for, so he could pitch Chanakya as the inaugural moment of a modern Indian politico-

philosophic tradition) he was quite in line with the protocols of the shastric form.

Shastra-s necessarily set up a prior, and yet more prior, origin of knowledge – to the

extent of regressing into a primordial moment of revelation by a god or gods. In the

Mahabharata retelling, the arthashastra tradition too was presented as originating out

of godly pronunciation. But if this was an ideological and disciplinary ruse for the

Brahmanical control of and authority over knowledge, it was also an epistemological

and argumentative principle, which could at times be harnessed for oppositional

purposes – for instance, by showing up innovative practice as immanent to and

produced out of tradition itself. The famous purvapaksha of shastric disputation, after

all, was an elaborate restatement of tradition, within and against which critiques got

generated. It was this textualisation and argumentative procedure which made it

appear as if all thought was conditional upon practices of prior thought, without which

thought appeared unthinkable. In other words, thought or ideation in the shastric form

never appeared as the purely interior or mentalist operation of a singular human

subject, in full authorial possession of idea and text.

II

It is at this point that I would like to take the question of form and genre in a

different direction – for if there was one possibility, in the twentieth century, of

releasing Chanakya from the fraught question of the textuality of Arthashastra, it was

in theatre. Of course, the rendering of Chanakya into a dramatic character par

excellence already had a pre-colonial moment – namely, Vishakhadatta’s play

25

Sheldon Pollock, ‘The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory in Indian Intellectual History’,

Journal of American Oriental Society, 105(3), 1985, 499-519.

13

Mudrarakshasa, placed by historians around the 7 or 8th

century CE. Remarked upon

by critics as an exception to the tradition of Sanskrit plays, which were largely

structured around poetic renditions of beauties of nature and travails of love,

Mudrarakshasa was a play about intricate political moves and countermoves by two

protagonists, Chanakya and Rakshasa, the latter being the minister of the Nandas,

who were deposed by Chanakya in alliance with the king Chandragupta Maurya. The

play was made available by H. H. Wilson in his early Orientalist collection of Sanskrit

plays, and was later reincorporated in the English collection of translated Sanskrit

plays by P. Lal. 26

Mudrarakshasa interestingly had a renewed life in colonial and

postcolonial times, along with another Sanskrit play, the Mrichhakatika. I find it

interesting that someone like Habib Tanvir – with his militant Marxism, his Indian

People’s Theatre Association links, his expressed interest in Brecht and Ibsen, his

formal experiments with folk performers – would also produce and direct a classical

Sanskrit play such as Mudrarakshasa, as he did in 1964. Talking about his choice of

the play, Habib Tanvir said that it was remarkable for being a purely political play, so

intricate that he had to read it twice himself and even use visual insignia to

disaggregate the complex web of identity and allegiance of the many different

characters. He also said, in more general terms, that his choice of Sanskrit plays was

an attempt at rescuing their theatrical nature, for they were erroneously framed in

scholarly convention as kavya and through rasa theory.27

Mudrarakshasa, as another

critic remarked, was exceptional because its purely political nature resisted classical

rasa analysis.28

Of course, Habib Tanvir was not the only one. Vijaya Mehta, of the

theatre group Rangayan and later director of the well-known film Pestonjee (1987)

produced/directed Mudrarakshasa in 1975 for the Sahitya Sangh. B. V. Karanth, the

doyen of Kannada and Indian stage, did the same in 1978.

There also emerged a new theatrical life to Chanakya in the twentieth century,

through a long series of Indian language plays – beginning with Dwijendralal Roy

(1911) in Bengali. One could mention plays by N. C. Kelkar (1913, Marathi),

Badrinath Bhatia (1915, Hindi), Jayashankar Prasad (1931, Hindi), Balkrishna Kar

26

H. H. Wilson Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus, Calcutta, Holcroft, 1827, vol I; P. Lal

Great Sanskrit Plays, in Modern Translation, New York, New Directions Pubs, 1957. 27

Habib Tanvir ‘Interview: It Must Flow, A Life in Theatre’, Seagull Theatre Quarterly, 10, June

1996, 3-38, 13, 16-18. 28

Sisir Kumar Das A History of Indian Literature 500-1399: from the Courtly to the Popular, Delhi,

Sahitya Akademi, 2005, 58-59.

14

(1926, Oriya), K. Mamman (1919, Malayam), K. Vasudevan Musatu (1927,

Malayalam), V. Krishnan Thampi (1930, Malayalam) and more recently G. P.

Deshpande’s 1987 Marathi play Chanakya Vishnugupta. There were instances of

novels and poems too – thus, Harinarayan Apte’s 1905 Marathi novel Chandragupta,

later translated to Hindi in 1924, Vidyananda Paramhansa’s 1917 Kannada novel and

P. Avittam Tirummal Tampuran’s 1920 Malayali poem Chandragupta Vijayam.29

Indeed, it is believed that the first novel in Kannada, Mudramanjusa (1823) of Kempu

Narayana was inspired by the classical Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa in which

Chanakya appears as a central protagonist.30

Yet plays by far seemed the most popular

genre vis á vis Chanakya. Or so they remained till a number of films also came to be

made, beginning with a cinematic rendition of D. L. Roy’s play Chandragupta in

1939. Interestingly, the famous Bengali stage-actor Sisir Kumar Bhaduri’s career took

off with playing Chanakya in D. L . Roy’s play and he then went on to act and direct

the 1939 film. Then came Chanakya (Saila Barua, 1959, Oriya), Chanakya

Chandragupta (N. T. Rama Rao, Telegu, 1977), Chanakya Sapatham (K.

Raghavendra, Telegu, 1986), Chanakya Soothrangal (Somanathan, Malayalam, 1994)

and Chanakyam/Chanakyan (Rajeev Kumar, Telegu/Malyalam, 1989).31

Indeed, G.

P. Deshpande also acknowledged inputs by the cinematic imagination of Govind

Nihalani in his Chanakya play.32

With the coming of television, we have had

Chandraprakash Dwivedi directing (and playing) Chanakya (1991) for the mass

audience. For the last two years, Manoj Joshi, film- and theatre-actor, has been

staging his Chanakya play across cities in India, dedicating his January 2009

production in Mumbai to Tukaram Ombale, the police constable who died on duty on

the 26/11 terror attack.

It seems to me thus that Chanakya as a figure has been particularly amenable

to theatrical rendition – but one must add, in a way somewhat different from the

standard tradition of historical plays, and indeed historical novels, that emerged in

India since the colonial times. As we know, there emerged in Bengal, late 19th

29

Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature 1800-1910, Delhi, Sahitya Akademi, 1995, 113-14. 30

Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology, volume one – surveys and poems, ed. K. M. George, Delhi,

Sahitya Akademi, 1992, 167. 31

Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman, Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, Delhi, OUP, 2002

(1994). 32

G. P. Deshpande, Chanakya Vishnugupta, translated from original Marathi by Maya Pandit, Calcutta,

Seagull Books, 1996, ix.

15

century onwards, a powerful theatrical (as well as literary) tradition around kingly

figures from the past – from Girish Ghosh’s Siraj-ud-daula (1905) to D. L. Roy’s

Shahjahan (1910) to, somehow differently, Rabindranath Tagore’s Raktakarabi

(1926). At one level, these plays, because historical, were meant to produce a new

kind of affect – so Tagore would go on to say that a new rasa (effect/mood), namely,

the aitihasik or historical rasa, must be added to the existing nine rasas of Indian

poetic tradition in modern times.33

At another level, and specific to theatre this time,

these kingly stories were meant to articulate best the instability and the implosion of

the purely political self. Needless to say, this was not just a Bengali tradition – the

numerous adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear or Macbeth across India or

contemporary Indian plays such as Girish Karnad’s Tuglaq (1964) immediately come

to mind. It seems then that all the while that historians and political theorists agonised

to find a non-monarchical, quasi-democratic tradition in India’s past34

, it was the

monarch himself who would be repeatedly invoked in theatre in order to adequately

stage the political, precisely because the kingly figure answered the democratic

demand of presenting the political self for spectatorship. What is different about the

Chanakya plays is however the interesting dispersal of the political across the two loci

of king and of minister – through which caste would be brought to the fore.

For it is less Chanakya per se, more the Chanakya-Chandragupta pair that

becomes important in modern theatre – because this pairing allows the thematisation

of the low-born king and the political Brahman together. Mark that D. L. Roy’s play

was not called Chanakya, but Chandragupta, and a later editor of the play dwelt at

great length on what we may see as the dichotomous relationship between

Chandragupta as hero of the play and Chanakya as its central character.35

Also note

the contrast with Jayshankar Prasad’s Hindi play, known to be otherwise influenced

by D. L. Roy’s, in which the playwright goes to great length to prove that

Chandragupta was indeed a kshatriya or a warrior and that it were anti-Buddhists of

early India who, to avenge Asoka’s rejection of Brahmanical sacrificial religion for

33

Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Aitihasik Upanyas’, in Rabindra Rachanabali, XIII, Calcutta, West Bengal

Government, 1962, 818. 34

Thus K. P. Jayaswal would quote precisely the Arthasashtra and mentions therein of the term

janapada to prove the existence of republics in ancient India. K. P. Jayaswal, Hindu Polity, 2parts,

Calcutta, 1924. 35

Sukumar Bandopadhyay in ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in D. L. Roy, Chandragupta, ed. Sukumar

Bandopadhyay, Calcutta, Modern Book Agency, 1969, 17-18.

16

Buddhism, accused his ancestor of being a low-caste shudra.36

That it is this

Brahman-shudra couple which was meant to encompass the question of power and

subjection is also clear in another way, for unlike in precolonial play Mudrarakshasa,

in the plays of D. L. Roy and G .P. Deshpande, there were far fewer characters. The

flower-seller, the many spies in disguise, the snake charmer, the servants etc of

Mudrarakshasa, who peopled the play-world through the use of Prakrit linguistic

registers and the technique of sociological mimesis, are palpable by their absence in

the modern plays, which are fully centred around the Chanakya-Chandragupta pair.

Not that there are no other characters in the later plays, but they are clearly

overdetermined by the binary framing. In G P Deshpande’s play, it is primarily

Buddhism (in the form of Chandragupta’s ex-lover turned Nanda queen turned

bhikshuni or Buddhist nun) who works as the language of alterity to the purely

political. In D. L. Roy’s play, criticised sometimes for its unwieldy subplots and

surplus characters, it is really the imagination of the pre-political which acts as the

other voice.

Let me then refer the Chanakya of theatre back to the Chanakya of history and

philosophy, who I had begun with. D. L. Roy was writing precisely around the time

that the scholarly debate around a rediscovered Arthasashtra was picking up pitch. In

his play, therefore, we find a clear resonance of the philosophy question. It is for that

reason that the presence of the Greeks is so marked in his play. Chanakya here is seen

as the one who – through a perfect combination of shudra power and Brahmanical

knowledge – brings about a marriage between Helen, the daughter of Seleucus, and

Chandragupta – a marriage which explicitly stands for a marriage between Greek and

Brahmanical/Hindu philosophy. To the altar of this philosophical union is sacrificed

– or almost sacrificed – the other possible union, between Chandragupta and Chhaya,

the innocent, selfless, woman of the hills, who loves Chandragupta, even though he

only has eyes for the philosophically erudite Helen. Chhaya’s brother – created in the

image of the dark, valorous ‘primitive’ of Bengali imagination – too sacrifices

himself, despite being spurned by Chandragupta, in an act of pure friendship,

fraternity and pre-political solidarity.

36

Jayashankar Prasad, ‘Chandragupta’ (1931), Sampurna Natak, Kanpur, Chintan Prakasan, 1998, 51.

17

In D. L. Roy, therefore, it is the intimate, the immediate and the pre-political

which is distributed across the characters - the ‘primitive’ unconditionally pre-

political, Chandragupta, the shudra-king torn between the political and the pre-

political, Chanakya, the Brahman, purely cerebral and unqualifiedly political. And

yet, in his monologues, Chanakya, the philosopher and political man par excellence,

reveals his secret self, traumatised by loss of wife and daughter, almost moved to tears

by the songs of wandering mendicants. Chanakya, in a weak moment, invokes the

virtue of perfect devotion – love, friendship, motherhood, the obliteration of the self

as such – as he mutters before a Bengali audience, familiar above all with shakta and

vaishnav traditions of devotion and music, about the ongoing flow of the river of

bhakti.

D. L. Roy’s play to me is interesting particularly for the way in which it sets

up the tension between Chandragupta and Chanakya. They remain engaged in a

relentless struggle throughout the play over who ultimately is the source of political

authority, the king or the philosopher, political power or the political principle, the

shudra-turned-king or the Brahman-renunciate. Despite insults by Chandragupta,

Chanakya refuses to relinquish his political role – for the sake of the political

principle. But he does renounce it finally, on finding his long lost daughter, and

rediscovering his own pre-political past of pure and passionate devotion and love.

Roy’s was a commercial play, distinct from the later form of amateur political

theatre that would dominate the Bengal theatrical scene and presumably it was its

mass appeal that encouraged the later turning of it into a film. Here, then, we have

Chanakya being put up for spectatorship before a mass audience – a public

fundamentally different from and far more heterogeneous than that addressed by the

historians and sociologists in scholarly-cum-political debates about the classical

Indian political man. The theatrical form gives us interesting clues to the working out

of Chanakya as character here. Thus, even as Chanakya gets pitched as the sombre

philosopher-politician, there remains a subtext that makes fun of philosophy, in the

guise of a minister of the Nandas whose obsession with the ancient grammarian

Panini is presented as absurd and comic. Again, Chanakya, while otherwise steadily

philosophical, is often made to just about verge on the manic, who, in his

monologues, gives vent to self-irony and to a perverse desire, indeed love, for the

18

beautiful-ugly goddess of death, destruction and desolation. Indeed, Chanakya is seen

to frequent the cremation ground, a rather unlikely location for philosophy; and a

counterpoise to the city of politics and the forests of innocence. And above all, the

political narrative of the play is repeatedly interrupted with songs – about nature,

about love, about devotion. Indeed, D. L. Roy was as well known a song-writer as he

was a playwright, and his songs often took on a life independent of his plays. This

mixing of genres – across philosophy, theatre, song, history – had the effect of

reconstituting Chanakya as a somewhat eccentric character, whose purely political-

philosophical persona was really the expression of a besieged and secret self – that of

a kaliyug Brahman sans traditional power and legitimacy, that of a man sans

women.37

G. P. Deshpande’s much later play Chanakya Vishnugupta is an interesting

counterpoint to this, for a variety of reasons. First, because of the Marxist disposition

of the later playwright and because of the by-then-established tradition of left political

theatre, which Deshpande inherited and which was very different in its nature of

address from early twentieth-century commercial mass-theatre. Two, because of the

strikingly different trajectory of caste question in Maharashtra. And three, because

the image of Brahmanical power in pre-colonial Maharashtra had once fired the

imagination of Bengali political thinkers, so much so that Benoy Sarkar, in 1933,

elaborately analysed the eighteenth-century adjnapatra of Ramchandra Pant Amatya

of Kolhapur, as an instance of the extant and functioning nature of Chanakya niti in

early modern India.38

Note that in Deshpande’s play, Chanakya is yet to finish the

Arthashastra. He can only write up his theoretical treatise in the future, after the end

of the play, having to first accomplish in practice the political task of overthrowing

the unjust Nanda dynasty. The play, in this way, sets up the political as practice

before philosophy. And yet, the critique of Kautilya niti here is a self-consciously

philosophical critique too, coming from the mouth of Suwasini, Chandragupta’s ex-

lover, who first marries the Nanda king, then takes up the reins of power herself and

finally converts to Buddhism and enters a Buddhist sangha. Suwasini speaks against

the sacrifice of individual freedom to the political machine, as it were, and warns of

37

Kaliyuga was the last of the epochs of traditional Puranic imagination, which was marked by the rise

of the shudra and the woman and decline of Brahmanical authority. 38

IHQ

19

the imminent arrival of the just and emancipatory Buddhist way. Though he is

instrumental in her losing Chandragupta, Chanakya is compelled to agree with her in

the end, even as he reminds her that as a political Brahman, he too – like Buddha – is

one who renounces power for the sake of the ultimate task of philosophy.

Already, in the scholarly debates of the mid-1920s, Buddha figured as a

possible alternative to Chanakya. Benoy Sarkar accused U. N. Ghoshal of reducing

Buddha to a moralist instead of accepting him as political philosopher. In turn, U. N.

Ghoshal accused Benoy Sarkar of blindness to caste – in effect though not in so many

words saying that Sarkar tries to sanitise the figure of the political Brahman by

rendering him into a philosopher, thus denying his imbrication in the concrete

institutions of kingship and the varnashrama caste-order. Buddha and Chanakya, in

other words, could not be placed in the same universalist category of political

philosophy. Buddha and his contract theory of sovereign power was a minor

philosophical exception within a more dominant kingly and Brahmanical tradition of

monarchical statecraft.39

It must be noted that this contest over Buddha as a possible

counterpoint to Chanakya did not quite take off within this scholarly debate as it

would in Maharashtra, with Ambedkar and his placement of Buddha alongside, not

Chanakya but Karl Marx. The well-known dalit ideologue and political thinker,

Kancha Illiah would later go on to make this explicit in our contemporary times, in his

tract God as Political Philosopher: Buddhism’s Challenge to Brahmanism, where he

finally in so many words displaced Chanakya by Buddha as India’s quintessential

political man.40

In D. L. Roy too Buddhism figures, fleetingly but very interestingly,

in the form of Chanakya’s own foreboding over the decline of Brahmanical power.

D. L. Roy’s Chanakya presents himself as the spurned but self-conscious kaliyuga

Brahman, who in, a last dying flash of political acumen, inaugurates the rise to power

of the shudra, as was anyway fated – by history and by the puranas. He is the one

who foresees the Buddhist revolution, in a way engineering it, rather than being

passively swept away by it.

39

Benoy Sarkar, ‘Hindu Politics in Italian’, IHQ, 2(2) 1926, 351-72, 360-61; U. N. Ghoshal, ‘Reply to

Benoy Kumar Sarkar’, IH Q 2(2) 1926, 420-30, 422.

40

Kolkata, Samya, 2000.

20

What does bringing in theatre, then, do to the problematic of the political man,

whose home otherwise seems to be in the terrain made up of the history-philosophy-

shastra triad? Without going into all that has been written on the productive

asymmetry between the political and the cultural, the textual and the performative, let

me simply put it this way. Staging Chanakya was in a way contemporanising him,

against the work of historicism. Of course, philosophy too struggled with history in

order to contemporanise Chanakya, or rather to render him irrespective of time,

though not timeless – so the argument that despite his antiquity, Chanakya was a

‘modern’ political philosopher.41

But philosophy stumbled on the mismatch between

the man and his text. Theatre, on the other hand, through the very mode of enacting

and performing the figure, could release Chanakya from his imbrication in the

historical text and activate the quintessential political man in the present. But

precisely by virtue of this present-ness, the Chanakya of theatre would remain

unstable – thematised anew every time across time, space and audience. In other

words, on stage Chanakya could never be rendered into a Plato, into a classical

authority as such. Even more so, by holding out Chanakya, frontally and in glaring

light, before an unspecified and unregulated mass of spectators, theatre undid the

solitary, safe and interior space of philosophical operations just as it undid the

secretive space of elite political intrigue associated with the Chanakya of popular

sense. This restaged Chanakya, unlike the pedagogical Chanakya of Arthashastra,

was destined to talk to his ‘non-contemporaries’ – to Buddha, to the shudra and to the

woman, who were meant to rise up in rebellion in kaliyuga. But above all, this

Chanakya had to talk to that other, most threatening of his contemporaries, namely,

the mass man of twentieth-century politics and market.

III

In conclusion, let me offer a bit of a comparison between the two rivals for the

historic place of the classical Indian political man – Krishna and Chanakya. It is well-

known that Krishna’s reinvention in late nineteenth and early twentieth century

happened through a foregrounding of the heroic Krishna of Mahabharata, indeed of

41

In Deshpande’s play, the sutradhar, who appears in a Nehruvian jacket but still wears a dhoti, says at

the very beginning: “The tale we are about to narrate is about the man who presented modern political

thought in the third century BC.” (emphasis mine). G. P. Deshpande, Chanakya-Vishnugupta, 1.

21

the Bhagavad Gita, at the cost of the Krishna of popular imagination and medieval

devotional traditions. Gaudiya Vaishnavism, that had historically congealed around

the figure of Krishna through the mediation of the sixteenth-century figure of the

bhakti saint Chaitanya , was a powerful late medieval-early modern presence in

Bengal. As a tradition, however, it was heterogeneous. It produced numerous

heterodox sects amongst the poor and often worked as the principal ground for low-

caste political mobilisation as well as for the playing out of popular affect, sentiment,

aesthetics and philosophies of transcendence. To be made a purely political man in

modern terms, however, this Krishna had to be taken out of his myriad performative,

emotive as well as mobilisatory contexts and relocated in the stable site of what

modern Bengali men saw as philosophy. The modern political Krishna, therefore, was

laboriously set apart, by middle-class, upper-caste literate men such as

Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Aurobindo Ghosh and

Mahatma Gandhi, from the traditional infant-God, the cowherd, the lover, the divine

object of passionate desire and bhakti, who inspired radhabhav or feminine longing

amongst devotees, rather than a masculine activism amenable to the early twentieth-

century imaginations of political action.

What I want to emphasise here, however, is something slightly different from,

though connected to, this process of the modern refashioning of Krishna. I want to

emphasise the fact that the reinvention of the modern political Krishna was also a

forgetting of the Krishna of lila or play, who had been the central protagonist of

popular theatre, both in Bengal and in north India. Here is Girish Ghosh, the late

nineteenth-century pioneer of the Bengali commercial stage, lamenting the loss of the

popular jatra of Bengal as the loss of Krishnalila:

Vulgar and obscene slangs disappeared with the disappearance of the Jatras,

but along with it the sweet songs of Badan Adhikary and Govinda Adhikary

also were gone for good. The sweet songs of the deep emotion of the old

Krishna Lila disappeared from the country. People then lost their originality

and took to imitation [of Western theatre].42

In other words, the politico-philosophical life of Krishna emerged at the cost of his

theatrical life. In the case of Chanakya, on the other hand, the trajectory was quite the

42

Quoted by Hemendra Nath Dasgupta in his The Indian Theatre, 1988, Delhi, Gyan Pubs, reprint

2009, 138.

22

opposite. Indeed, through time, Chanakya emerged as the most long-standing and

frequently renewed characters in theatre in Bengal and India. At another level,

however, Chanakya lost out to Krishna, because his treatise was seen as inadequately

philosophical, especially in comparison to the Bhagvad Gita of Krishna. The very

tradition of artha and niti as a realm of theoretical and practical reason went into

dormancy because it did not fit the schema of colonial modern disciplinary

knowledges, including history and philosophy. And as for the text of Arthashastra , it

failed to make it to a ‘philosophical’ status and went on to merely become a ‘source’

of history, read not interpretively for its own sake but instrumentally as resource for

historical reconstructions of past ‘facts’ – not about the purely political, as Benoy

Sarker had hoped, but about administration and governance.

This contrast between Krishna and Chanakya, of course, can be read as as

much a comment on the nature of ‘political theatre’ in India as on the figure of

Chanakya himself. But it would be a mistake to presume that Chanakya thrived in

theatre solely through enactments of him as dramatic character. At stake on stage was

philosophy itself, though not textually. Read, for instance, what G. P. Deshpande

says in his introduction to his play Chanakya Vishnugupta:

It would be essential, I presume, to write a couple of words about the

philosophical debate referred to in the play. Indian philosophy, logic, had

scaled new heights in those days. But that was rendered useless by the varna

system …society was in a transitional phase, passing from the varnas to the

jatis. On one level, there was a deep-rooted fear that the creativity of society

itself was on the brink of death, yet there was also the possibility that the new

political process would usher in a new era of creativity. …

Chanakya’s treatise also must be considered an expression of such

revolutionary creativity. The relationship between the creation of an empire

(in other words, new political movements) and production of books is, thus, an

inherent one. The play attempts, among other things, to make a statement on

that relationship. And this is the reason why Chanakya is convinced that his

success won’t be complete until the completion of the manuscript of

Arthasashtra.43

43

Deshpande, Chanakya-Vishnugupta, xi.

23

The point, then, is to note the critical difference between the ways in which

philosophy gets mobilised, indeed performed, around the two figures of Chanakya

and Krishna.

The Chanakya story, as must be obvious from Chanakya’s theatrical career,

emerged in modern times as a story of a war of philosophies (though

not ideologies, in the current sense). Thus, D. L. Roy’s 1911 play sought to put to

encounter Greek, Brahmanical, Buddhist and popular devotional and heterodox

traditions of thought. Deshpande’s 1980s play made Buddhism, Vedantism and

materialist Carvaka philosophies engage in sharply argumentative polemics. In other

words, around Chanakya, philosophies themselves appeared on stage as protagonists

and counter-protagonists in an overall political narrative. The Krishna story was quite

different, being a matter of philosophical synthesis rather than conflict. As is well-

known, by late eighteenth-early nineteenth century, the Bhagvad Gita had become –

primarily through the intercession of German thinkers such as Johan Gottfried Herder,

Friedrich and August Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, G. W. F. Hegel and

Schopenhauer44

– a singular philosophical text, seemingly synonymous to Indian

philosophy as a whole. The Gita thus not only became India’s ‘national’

philosophical export to the global community of philosophers45

and a must read in

philosophy curricula of all Indian universities, it also came to be, for all practical

purposes, extricated from the larger, heterogeneous, ethico-political narrative of the

epic Mahabharata, where it traditionally resided in popular common sense. Not

surprisingly then, Benoy Kumar Sarkar would self-consciously struggle against

German philosophy itself in his attempt to reinstate Chanakya and therefore implicitly

dislodge the Gita of Krishna from its hegemonic philosophic position in twentieth-

century India!

It is worth noting here that the scene of philosophising in the case of the

Bhagvad Gita is the mother of all battle-fields, the Kurukshetra of Mahabharata.

And yet, Krishna’s utterances therein show no signs of philosophical struggle. As the

inimitable ancient historian D. D. Kosambi shows in his reading of the Gita, Krishna,

44

Bradley L. Herling, The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of

Indian Thought, 1778-1831, London, Routledge, 2006. 45

See Chris Bayly, ‘India, the Bhagavad Gita and the World’, Modern Intellectual History, 7(2) 2010,

275-295.

24

who fills the heavens, the earth and the underworlds and embodies time itself,

appropriates and synthesises all contemporary philosophical systems, seamlessly,

within the singular discourse of godly utterance at Kurukshetra.46

In the time of

actual war, in other words, Krishna offers philosophical certainty or at least

wholeness, by virtue of his divinity. In other words, even if the Gita was philosophy,

Krishna was not quite a philosopher – being rendered godly, mythic, iconic (like the

Spirit of Hegelian metaphysics?) – thus lending an ideality and wholeness to the Gita

that would warm the hearts of idealist philosophers of totality such as Hegel.

It was this apparent unitary and ‘totalitarian’ nature of the Gita which made

Krishna amenable to nationalist politics in early twentieth century Bengal. Thus, as

Andrew Sartori shows, Bankimchandra, known as the father of modern Bengali

language, literature and patriotic rhetoric, argued in late nineteenth century, that the

Gita was ‘for all men’.

It is the best dharma for him who believes in reincarnation just as well as for

him who does not. It is the best dharma for him who is devoted to Krishna as

well as for him who is not. It is the best dharma for him who believes in God,

and also for him who does not.47

Mark how different this imagination of ‘Indian/Hindu’ philosophy is from

Chanakya’s dramatic location amidst multiple Brahmanic, Buddhist and Carvaka

philosophies, swirling around the difficult questions of power, ethics, morality,

godlessness and liberation. To Aurobindo Ghosh, revolutionary nationalist turned

spiritual recluse, the Gita appeared similarly ‘universal’, even if he was quite

differently positioned from Bankimchandra in terms of his politics. The Gita was not

a philosophy contending with other possible philosophies. Rather it was the

subsumption of the partial truths of all philosophies under the sign of the One – the

philosopher-god Krishna – whether it be, as Sartori shows, Sankhya philosophy’s

question of the duality of purusha (self) and prakriti (matter, nature), Yoga’s thesis of

unity with the absolute, Mimamsa’s idea of sacrifice, Tantra’s harnessing of the

dualistic nature of reality as an approach to the absolute, Mahayana Buddhism’s ideal

46

D. D. Kosambi The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India: A Historical Outline, Delhi, Vikas,

1970, 186. 47

Hans Harder, ed., Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srimadbhagabadgita: Translation and

Analysis, New Delhi, Manohar, 2001, 60, quoted in Andrew Sartori, ‘The Transfiguration of Duty in

Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita’, Modern Intellectual History, 7(2), 2010, 319-334, 324.

25

of the boddhisattva dedicated to universal redemption, or indeed Advaita Vedanta’s

imagination of monism.48

In Aurobindo’s own words, the Gita was a ‘wide,

undulating, encircling movement of ideas which is the manifestation of a vast

synthetic mind and a rich synthetic experience . . . It does not cleave asunder, but

reconciles and unifies’ through a ‘universal comprehensiveness’.49

It produces the

‘mind’ of the nation, as it were, as a statement of the universal human condition.

No wonder, then, that the dark, lower-caste, pastoral god – who was admitted

rather late and rather reluctantly into the Brahmanical pantheon 50

and who is till date

seen by many, such as by contemporary ‘backward’ caste Yadavs of Uttar Pradesh51

,

as the quintessential practical politician of India – in the conventional reading of the

Mahabharata and the Gita, remains curiously uninvolved in the actual action.

Krishna vacillates between the roles of deus ex machina and mere menial charioteer,

but through the Gita, solicits selfless and desireless political action from others. Of

course, read differently, the Mahabharata also tells us of the death and decline of

Krisha and his own dynasty in a final and dramatic universal event of destruction –

the pathos of power, as it were – but the modern readings of Gita remain insulated

from that epic story. The figure of Chanakya, however, unlike Krishna, remains caste-

marked and therefore particular – the shudra being alienated and projected onto his

other, i.e. onto the king/conquerer. Chanakya also dirties his hands in acts of rule,

conquest and political brinkmanship. He even appears schizophrenic, both in theatre

and in scholarly debate, torn between the imperatives of political action and political

philosophy, stretched between the exercises of renunciation and technologies of

power.

In other words, in Krishna, philosophy is put to service of politics, and for that

reason philosophy is rendered synthetic and whole. It is given the task of gathering

the community, the nation, and teeters on the verge of becoming theology. It seeks to

become, in the name of philosophy, a theory of everything – namely, of the world and

of its microcosm, the nation. In Chanakya, on the other hand, the politics of

48

Sartori, 327. 49

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, Calcutta, Arya Publishing House, 1944, 10, quoted

in Sartori, 327. 50

Kosambi, Culture, 83. 51

Lucia Michelutti, ‘We the Yadavs are a caste of politicians: Caste and Modern Politics in a North

Indian Town’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 38(1-2), 2004, 43-71.

26

philosophy itself gets exposed, as multiple and particular philosophies perform and

engage – on stage as on battleground. Philosophy loses its seclusion from the world

of work and war, and thus gets contaminated with practice, poetics and prejudice –

and indeed with caste and gender. Hence the centrality of theatre, as we saw, where

philosophies work as characters.

And hence the sense, at the very end of the story, that it is no longer

philosophy, indeed it never was philosophy, that is the stake here. The stake is

perhaps simply the art of being politic, of living through vagary and contingency of

politics and of cultivating the difficult skill of negotiating regimes, in peace and in

war. In early India, this could go by the name of niti. Calling it politics in colonial

modernity brought in the question of philosophy. And along with it came the

question of whether this philosophy, indeed philosophy as such, could ever become

common art – as it would necessarily have to be in the era of democratic, mass

politics. Or whether by virtue of being philosophy, political philosophy would

forever remain segregated in a jealously guarded, quasi-Brahmanical epistemic site.

For the Chanakya of popular sense, however, this was never the issue. For

Chanakyasutras – aphorisms attributed to Chanakya that widely circulated orally as

well as part of a variety of collections and compilations well into the modern times –

taught humans to precisely be politic rather than simply moral or ethical in their

everyday lives. One cannot help but feel that this was a mode of being commonly

political that flew in the face of the Gita-inspired Gandhian vision of the political

man, as a singular, disciplined and normative subject.

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