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 Indias 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. Todays 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.
1

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 todays 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 its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories , Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994, 10-11. 2

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 nineteenthcentury onwards. Krishnas 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 Indias 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 crossreference Chanakyas modern career with Krishnas 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 Vasudevans formulation about c inematic publics in his recent book The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema , Delhi, Permanent Black, 2010. 3

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?

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 Kamandakas Nitisara, Banabhattas Kadambari, Vishakhadattas Mudrarakshasa, the Buddhist Somadevas 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 Dutts 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 l dharmasashtra-s and the traditions of the six darshana-s or philosophies. See Upinder Singh, Politics, Violence and War in Kamandakas 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. 4

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 mid1920s 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 Kautilyas Arthasashtra: An Inscriptional Approach, Delhi, Anamika Pubs, 1997, 17-8. 7 Sarkar, Hindu Politics in Italian, IHQ, 1(4), 1925, 742 -56, 751-52. 5

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 philosophys 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 9

Sarkar, Hindu Politics in Italian, IHQ 2(2), 1926, 351 -72, 368, 370, 372. 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. 6

towards just ends.) Indias 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 historians 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, wellknown 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 Kalidass 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 12

Benoy Sarkar, Hindu Politics in Italian III, IHQ 2(1), 1926, 146 -57. 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. 7

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 Sarkars 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. 8

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 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 historians 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 16

V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar, Kautilya and Machiavelli, IHQ 3(1&2) 1927, 176 -80. Benoy Sarkar, reflecting on Carlo Formichis 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. 9

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 Kautilyas case, darshan is only political opinion, even if of a master politician, in service of reified, kingly power. Sarkars 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 cotheorisation 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, selfconscious, detached. Thought is implicit, unconscious and immersed in the stream of vital action and therefore only historically graspable.21 Consequently, Ghoshal,

19 20

Ibid., 755. Benoy Sarkar, in a long footnote critiquing U N Ghoshals 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. 10

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 (Shamasashtrys first essay, on discovering the Arthasashtra was typically on Chanakyas Land and Revenue Policy23) or at best, to a secular-material principle of conquest and holding of land ( 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 23

Ghoshal, ibid. 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. 11

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 politicophilosophic 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, Vishakhadattas 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. 12

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 Peoples 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. 13

(1926, Oriya), K. Mamman (1919, Malayam), K. Vasudevan Musatu (1927, Malayalam), V. Krishnan Thampi (1930, Malayalam) and more recently G. P. Deshpandes 1987 Marathi play Chanakya Vishnugupta. There were instances of novels and poems too thus, Harinarayan Aptes 1905 Marathi novel Chandragupta, later translated to Hindi in 1924, Vidyananda Paramhansas 1917 Kannada novel and P. Avittam Tirummal Tampurans 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 vis Chanakya. Or so they remained till a number of films also came to be made, beginning with a cinematic rendition of D. L. Roys play Chandragupta in 1939. Interestingly, the famous Bengali stage-actor Sisir Kumar Bhaduris career took off with playing Chanakya in D. L . Roys 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 30

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

century onwards, a powerful theatrical (as well as literary) tradition around kingly figures from the past from Girish Ghoshs Siraj-ud-daula (1905) to D. L. Roys Shahjahan (1910) to, somehow differently, Rabindranath Tagores 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 Shakespeares King Lear or Macbeth across India or contemporary Indian plays such as Girish Karnads 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 Indias 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. Roys 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 Prasads Hindi play, known to be otherwise influenced by D. L. Roys, 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 Asokas 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 Editors Introduction, in D. L. Roy, Chandragupta, ed. Sukumar Bandopadhyay, Calcutta, Modern Book Agency, 1969, 17-18. 15

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 Deshpandes play, it is primarily Buddhism (in the form of Chandraguptas ex-lover turned Nanda queen turned bhikshuni or Buddhist nun) who works as the language of alterity to the purely political. In D. L. Roys 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. Chhayas 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. 16

In D. L. Roy, therefore, it is the intimate, the immediate and the pre-political which is distributed across the characters - the primitive unconditionally prepolitical, Chandragupta, the shudra-king torn between the political and the prepolitical, 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. Roys 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. Roys 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
17

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 politicalphilosophical 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. Deshpandes 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 Deshpandes 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, Chandraguptas exlover, 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 18

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: Buddhisms Challenge to Brahmanism, where he finally in so many words displaced Chanakya by Buddha as Indias quintessential political man.40 In D. L. Roy too Buddhism figures, fleetingly but very interestingly, in the form of Chanakyas own foreboding over the decline of Brahmanical power. D. L. Roys 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. 19

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-philosophyshastra 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 wellknown that Krishnas reinvention in late nineteenth and early twentieth century happened through a foregrounding of the heroic Krishna of Mahabharata, indeed of
41

In Deshpandes 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. 20

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 lowcaste 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 twentiethcentury 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. 21

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. Chanakyas 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 wont be complete until the completion of the manuscript of Arthasashtra.43

43

Deshpande, Chanakya-Vishnugupta, xi. 22

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 Chanakyas theatrical career, emerged in modern times as a story of a war of philosophies (though not ideologies, in the current sense). Thus, D. L. Roys 1911 play sought to put to encounter Greek, Brahmanical, Buddhist and popular devotional and heterodox traditions of thought. Deshpandes 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 wellknown, 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 Indias 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 twentiethcentury 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, Krishnas 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. 23

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 Chanakyas 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 philosophys question of the duality of purusha (self) and prakriti (matter, nature), Yogas thesis of unity with the absolute, Mimamsas idea of sacrifice, Tantras harnessing of the dualistic nature of reality as an approach to the absolute, Mahayana Buddhisms ideal
46

D. D. Kosambi The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India: A Historical Outline , Delhi, Vikas, 1970, 186. 47 Hans Harder, ed., Bankimchandra Chattopadhyays Srimadbhagabadgita: Translation and Analysis, New Delhi, Manohar, 2001, 60, quoted in Andrew Sartori, The Transfiguration of Duty in Aurobindos Essays on the Gita, Modern Intellectual History, 7(2), 2010, 319-334, 324. 24

of the boddhisattva dedicated to universal redemption, or indeed Advaita Vedantas imagination of monism.48 In Aurobindos 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 castemarked 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 49

Sartori, 327. 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. 25

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.

26

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