The History of the Arthaśāstra

Since its rediscovery in the early twentieth century, few texts in the modern study of Sanskrit literature have held as much promise as the Arthaśāstra, the famed political treatise long attributed to Cāṇakya, a supposed minister in the Mauryan court of Candragupta in the late fourth century BCE. Filled with ruthless pragmatism, the treatise has always carried an air of worldliness into ancient South Asian history, a realm long captive to otherworldly tropes of sacrifice, spirit and transcendence. Yet despite efforts by several generations of Sanskritists, this potential has been hampered in part by persisting text-critical quandaries. Anyone who has worked with the text, even in translation, will mark the breadth of its topics and the opacity of its overall structure—not to mention its bewildering numbering system. Mark McClish’s book forms a ground-breaking advance in the history of the Arthaśāstra, setting the study of early South Asian political

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