Chanakya/Kautilya: History, Philosophy, Theater and the Twentieth-century Political

Author(s): Prathama Banerjee

Source: History of the Present , Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 24-51
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/historypresent.2.1.0024

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/historypresent.2.1.0024?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
History of the Present

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Chanakya/Kautilya:
History, Philosophy, Theater
and the Twentieth-century Political
Prathama Banerjee
This essay is part of ongoing work on possible histories of our political pres-
ent, written from the perspective of colonial/postcolonial Bengal. Here I
explore the twentieth-century recasting, not entirely successful, of Chanakya
as the figure of the quintessential political man of India. Chanakya, also
known as Kautilya and Vishnugupta, was an ancient Indian political figure.
He is believed to be the author of the Arthashastra (The science of wealth and
governance), an early Indian treatise on statecraft. He is also believed to
have been the legendary Brahman minister of King Chandragupta Maurya
(340–293 BCE) and the real brain behind the overthrow of the then-ruling
dynasty of the Nandas and the establishment of the Mauryan empire, the
earliest imperial formation in Indian history. Historians disagree on the
exact date and location of Chanakya. He is placed sometime between the
third century BCE and the first and second centuries CE. He is alternately
claimed to have been from Magadha in eastern India, from Takshashila in
the northwest, and from Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south. Despite these
debates around the real-historical Chanakya, Chanakya has remained a
popular and reckonable name throughout the centuries. He was invoked
in precolonial political treatises, classical Sanskrit plays, and collections of
popular tales. In modern times, he continues to be invoked in journalism,
comics, cinema, and theater. Chanakya is also famously referred to as the
Indian Machiavelli, that is, as the one who for the first time asserted the
autonomy of political reason in India. In other words, Chanakya remains
very much part of India’s national and popular common sense. In this essay,
I explore the ways in which Chanakya is mobilized as the fount of the Indian
political. At stake in the story is the question of how to think the political
in the first place.
Driving my story is a dissatisfaction with what I see as a conceptual
poverty in the understanding of the political in the Indian, perhaps more

History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 2012.
Copyright © 2012 University of Illinois Press

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

generally the colonial/postcolonial, context. I find this conceptual poverty

operating at two related, but distinct, levels. The first, at the level of com-
mon sense, admits to the intensely political nature of India and yet wonders
at the lack in India of political philosophy in the conventional European
sense. Here the assumption is that the political can only be thought via
philosophy—through a narrative of such great thinkers as Plato, Aristotle,
Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Karl Marx, or through a similar narrative
of Indian thinkers such as Rammohan Roy, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Mo-
handas Karamchand Gandhi, who, often in spite of themselves, are made
to perform the philosopher’s role for the sake of the political. 1 Of course,
these figures do not always “fit” the philosophical role, resulting in their
fundamental misrecognition as “not-quite” political. That is, they appear as
always already contaminated by an undigestible surplus of the “nonpoliti-
cal.” This nonpolitical often appears as a kind of spiritual, cultural, or sexual
surplus in their thought, which seemingly prevents the rise in India of the
purely political idea as it were. In my story, therefore, I seek to denaturalize
this politics-philosophy coupling and displace philosophy from being the
natural ground of the political into being merely one of the protagonists
struggling around the question of the political.
The second level of conceptual poverty, as I see it, lies in the assumed uni-
versality of the political as such. This assumed universality is twofold. At one
level, the political is presented as universal in the sense of being global and
modern. Take the case of Partha Chatterjee as an instance. Arguing against
Benedict Anderson, Chatterjee calls for a freer intellectual imagination, one
that is able to grasp the fact that the colonized imagined political community
in ways very different from Euro-American nationalisms. But even he seems
to accept the idea that in the imagination of state and governmentality, and
therefore in the imagination of democracy, the colonized simply took to mod-
ern Western definitions.2 In other words, the political (not incidentally like
the economic) appears by default as universal/global/modern, the corollary
being that the particular and the alternative must necessarily, therefore, be
social and/or cultural. Or, to say the same thing differently, the political does
not seem amenable to “provincialization” in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s sense;
or, even if it might be, such provincialization does not suffice to undo the
contemporary universality of political imaginations in the world.3
At the other level is the seeming universality of politics itself as something
that can be found and read in all aspects of life and society. This imagina-

25

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

tion of the political as all pervasive, we know, emerged historically (and was
radically theorized by feminist thought) in opposition to earlier imaginations
of the political as confined to the state and to realms of high politics. I feel,
however, that we have reached an impasse in our contemporary thinking of
the political as everyday and everywhere, because such a seamless general-
ization of politics renders the very category of the political merely descrip-
tive, 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.
It is this larger concern that inspires me to tell the story of Chanakya,
which allows me to theoretically and historically specify and delimit the
political as such. It also allows me to bring to the fore the fraught question
of philosophy and politics. My story is structured in three sections. In the
first, I reconstruct an early twentieth-century debate around the discovery
of the manuscript of the Arthashastra. In this debate, Chanakya struggles to
emerge as the bearer of the pure political (the Indian Machiavelli, it was
said). This project, however, remains unfulfilled in the maze of claims and
counterclaims that history and philosophy make upon Chanakya. Here,
acts seeking to “contemporanize” Chanakya get caught up in questions of
discipline and genre, bringing to the surface the question of the historical,
the untimely, and the nonmodern at the heart of the political present. To this
debate, I counterpoise, in the second section, the story of multiple popular
renditions of Chanakya in theater, where the character of the political Brah-
man comes to refract new kinds of caste and gendered conflicts and thus, to
differently present the political before a common spectatorial public. What is
most important to me here is that it is in theater that a sense of philosophy
emerges as a more embodied and embattled intellectual tradition, which is
neither abstracted idea nor simply political practice.
The third section is more speculative, and in the nature of an epilogue.
Here I tentatively introduce the counterfigure of Krishna, because it was
Krishna who actually dominated the field of political thought in India from
the late nineteenth century onward. Krishna influenced political thinkers of
diverse hues. Krishna was a great influence on Gandhi, mass leader par excel-
lence of Indian nationalism and progenitor of his unique brand of politics of

26

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

truth and nonviolence. Krishna also influenced the writings of Bankimchan-

dra Chattopadhyay, the late nineteenth-century novelist, satirist, essayist,
thinker, and progenitor of modern literary and conceptual Bengali. Krishna
was similarly important to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the “extremist” national-
ist from Maharashtra, who became a mass leader through his journalistic
writings, his politicization of Hindu public festivals and campaigns amongst
peasants, just as he was important to Aurobindo Ghosh, author, revolu-
tionary nationalist, philosopher, and eventually, spiritual master. Krishna’s
influence, as is well known, was predicated upon the modern career of the
Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita (literally, The song of god) is an approxi-
mately seven hundred-verse text that is part of the ancient Sanskrit epic of
the Mahabharata. However, over time the Gita became a freestanding text
and was ascribed the status of an Upanishad, one of several texts that make
up the general Vedic tradition. The enunciator of the Gita is Lord Krishna,
the manifestation of the One. The Gita is set up as a conversation between
Krishna and Arjuna, the Pandava prince, in the middle of the battlefield, just
before the start of the war of Kurukshetra, with Pandava and Kaurava armies
on both sides ready to battle. Responding to Arjuna’s moral anxiety about
fighting his own kin, even though they were tyrants and usurpers, Krishna
explains to Arjuna his duties as a warrior and a ruler and elaborates a theory
of action by synthesizing different philosophical schools of early India. The
Gita was translated and analyzed numerous times, from the late nineteenth
century onwards and was thus decisively extricated from the epic Mahab-
harata and reconstituted into an autonomous, politico–philosophic text. The
Gita also became India’s national text par excellence, in the hands of its many
Western translators and interpreters, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, Johann Gottfried Herder, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emer-
son, Carl Jung, Herman Hesse, Aldous Huxley, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Krishna, as the enunciator of the Gita, thus became at once the metaphysical,
philosophical, and narrative fount 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.4 Chanakya, on the
other hand, did not quite make it to the same status as Krishna, even though
he continued to invite public engagement by virtue of his dramatic potential
as a figure. At the end, therefore, I cross-reference Chanakya’s modern career
with Krishna’s—precisely because this brings out with renewed force the
question of philosophy and universality. I also invoke the differential career

27

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

of the two in theater, 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
“perform” or “work” rather than simply “be” philosophy.

I
The early twentieth-century interest in Chanakya can be traced to the “dis-
covery” of two manuscripts of the Arthashastra by a Tanjore scholar, their
handing-over to the Mysore Oriental Library, and the immediate publication
of a paper by R. Shamashastry in the Indian Antiquary in 1905. Shamashastry
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 until then. References to Chanakya were found in precolonial
texts of niti, a tradition of thought that dwelt on politics, policy, and more
generally, principles of secular action, and also in early Indian stories and
drama—such as in Kamandaka’s Nitisara, Banabhatta’s Kadambari, Vishakha-
datta’s Mudrarakshasa, the Buddhist Somadeva’s Nitivakyamrta, Panchatantra,
Kathasaritsagara, Nandisutra and as late as in the fourteenth-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
1896.5 Even though the Arthashastra was unknown as a text, Western Indolo-
gists discussed the “political science” of Chanakya through studies in the
collection of stories, Kathasaritsagara, and Kamandaka’s treatise Nitisara.6
Chanakyasutras, aphorisms attributed to Chanakya that widely circulated
orally as well as part of a variety of collections and compilations, too were
familiar until well into the twentieth century as popular wise sayings, and
were often incorporated in colonial–modern school readers for children
(though as moral rather than political lessons). And yet, it was quite an-
other thing to have the full treatise of Arthashastra at hand. There were much
nationalist celebration and colonial skepticism around the discovery of the
text and around the possibility of a classical political figure for India.7
What interests me here is a very specific debate that took place in the
mid-1920s in the pages of the Indian Historical Quarterly. 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 particu-
lar intensity of this debate. Faced with the European imagination of the
political as philosophical, the colonized felt it necessary to claim a political

28

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

philosopher for India—all the better if he were 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 (moral-
ity/law/religion) and moksha (liberation/transcendence). Indians, therefore,
lacked practical and political reason. The need, then, to show Chanakya as
being steeped in the actual practice of politics and by that logic define his
text as a historical–factual document, was no less compelling.
Benoy Kumar Sarkar was a public intellectual, social scientist, econo-
mist, literature student, philosopher, and polyglot rolled into one, who
founded a Bengali journal of economics, Arthik Unnati, and edited and trans-
lated the medieval political treatise, Sukraniti. He argued in the pages of the
Indian Historical Quarterly that Chanakya and the Arthashastra were philoso-
pher and philosophy respectively, on the grounds that the political could
only be grasped as a universal, and therefore, philosophical principle. It
was under influence of German Orientalism—indeed, German philosophy
itself, especially Hegel—that Indian scholars wrongheadedly talked of a
Hindu spirit in opposition to a European one.8 By setting up an analogy be-
tween Chanakya and Niccolò Machiavelli, however, one could demonstrate
the opposite—namely, that the universality of the political was indeed
the universality of the philosophical idea. Sarkar further argued that this
analogy, which held true despite the very different time and location of the
two thinkers, was grasped by neither Indologists nor historians, whether
Indian, English, or German. Only Italian scholars recognized this, he said,
because of their long tradition of philosophical history, that is, “ideal and
universal history” à la Vico.9
The problem with Indian scholars, Sarkar lamented, was that they in-
evitably reduced the question of the political man to a historical question.
From this ground, Sarkar criticized books by historians who wrote on early
Indian politics, leading to an intense debate that went on for years, but
unsurprisingly 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—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 and abstracted from the empirical–his-
torical (that being merely philosophy’s self-image) but as chronologically
and logically prior to history.

29

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

Critical to this debate about history and philosophy was the matter of
separating the political from the moral, and thereby exploring the relation-
ship between the arthashastra (secular political thinking as a genre, of which
Chanakya’s own Arthashastra was seen as a founding text) and the dharma-
shastra (caste-based, Brahmanical thinking on law, morality and religion,
of which the Manusmriti was seen as a founding text). Chanakya was made
famous by his alleged “end justifies the means” form of political rational-
ity, referred to, amongst others, by Max Weber in his “Politics as Vocation”
lecture.10 The historian Kalidas Nag, however, took great pains in arguing,
in his 1923 book, Les Théories Diplomatique, de L’Inde ancienne et L’Arthacastra,
that Kautilyan political (a)morality had been historically abandoned by In-
dia.11 The Arthashastra was actively rejected, he argued, within a century of
Chanakya, by King Ashoka in his turn from artha (wealth/power/land) to
dharma (morality/spirituality) as the basis of just rule. Thereafter, the tradi-
tion of pure political theorizing was gradually subsumed under ethical dis-
courses such as those in the Mahabharata.12 (One must remember, of course,
that this was also the time of the rise of Gandhian politics in India; Gandhi
himself counterposed an idea of instrumental politics against his vision of
righteous public life, quest for truth, dharma, and moral means towards just
ends.) Nag further argued—quoting the seventh-century poet-playwright
Banabhatta’s statement that Chanakya niti was maranatmaka, or “of the spirit
of death”—that early Indian kavya, or poetic traditions, demonstrated India’s
unique turn from the political towards the moral/ethical. Historian and San-
skritist R.P. Kangle, famous for his definitive edition and study of the Artha-
shastra, argued in response, however, that it was only law, and not politics as
such, which was effectively appropriated by the dharmashastras from within
the whole corpus of the arthashastra.13 He further insisted that Chanakya was
by no means immoral. When talking of the individual, including the king,
he recommended high moral principles and self-discipline. Chanakya only
said that the conduct of public political life should be subject to principles
other than that of morality.14
Sarkar argued that morality and politics were two incommensurable ori-
entations, and that what was common to Chanakya and Machiavelli was
precisely this pioneering acknowledgement of the distinction between the
political and the moral imperative. Sarkar, by constructing an analogy be-
tween Chanakya and Machiavelli, sought to emancipate the political as an
autonomous subjectivity.15 In other words, he was asking for an extrication

30

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

of the political imperative from the everyday conduct of social and individual
life subject to ethical principles. Nag, however, held his position, invoking
other historians like Narendranath Law and V. Ramchandra Dikshitar. It
was a fatal confusion, he said, to identify the fate of Chanakya as character
with the fate of Arthashastra as text and tradition. Chanakya continued to
be nominally invoked through centuries as a protagonist in kavya while the
arthashastra as a textual tradition was absorbed by the moral and legal dis-
courses of the dharmashastras. In other words, historians like Nag insisted
on a critical distinction between Chanakya and the Arthashastra, between
the “dramatic” life of the man or the figure and the epistemological life of
the text. Needless to say, this move disassembled the foundational coupling
of the philosopher and his treatise that was conventional to the Western
metaphysical tradition.
Sarkar’s stake in creating an analogy between Machiavelli and Chanakya
was to institute Chanakya as the inaugural moment of a line of political
philosophers for India in the way that Machiavelli was seen to be the origin
point of modern political thought in Europe. Historians such as Kalidas
Nag insisted, to the contrary, that Chanakya was actually the end of a line,
given that the tradition of arthashastra fell into disuse in India soon after-
wards. But the question was not merely that of the autonomy or continuity
of Chanakya niti but also of its historical–textual nature. At one level, the
entire debate on the historicity of Arthashastra revolved around the question
of whether there was a single author of the text at all. At the other level, the
exact historical period to which the text belonged remained uncertain.16
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. This is also what
disables easy “contextualist” readings of such early Indian texts. What must
be noted for our purpose, however, is precisely the predicament that such a
“historian’s question” produced for the twentieth-century political project
of reinventing Chanakya as a selfsame philosophical and authorial figure
who could found an Indian concept of the political.
Writing in the same period, V. R. Ramchandra Dikshitar, while admitting
that the Arthashastra was invoked as late as in the eighteenth century and
was thus a continuous tradition, argued that Chanakya was not the first
to inaugurate an autonomous and new political thinking in India. Even if
it was assumed that the Chanakya of legend was the Brahman minister of

31

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

Chandragupta Maurya, who in turn was the same person who wrote the
Arthashastra, he said that the point remained that Chanakya himself saw
the Arthashastra as part of a long, established tradition; indeed, Chanakya
“bowed to tradition,” invoking no less than ten prior theoreticians of artha
and niti.17 It is clear that Dikshitar was gesturing towards the textual tech-
nique of setting up a genealogy and a purvapaksha (the prior argumentative
side vis-à-vis which theoretical acts were undertaken), which was critical
to the nature of shastras (science or technical treatises) as an early Indian
genre. In other words, for Dikshitar, the Arthashastra could not quite be seen
as original or originary in any sense, and Chanakya could not be proved as
authoritative/authorial in relation to the treatise.
Sarkar, however, responded by saying that this historian’s predicament
proved precisely that history as a mode of intellectual apprehension was in-
appropriate to Chanakya niti as a tradition of thought. Historians failed to
recognize philosophy when they saw it. It was only because the Arthashastra
was written in the form of sutras, or verses, he argued, that historians failed
to recognize its philosophical nature and Hegelians mistook it for poetry. 18
But it was in the nature of Indian intellectual traditions that philosophy was
articulated in the form of condensed statements, meant for elaboration and
discussion in sabhas (assemblies) and goshtis (meetings), rather than as fin-
ished, readymade products of autonomous, individual ratiocination.19 In other
words, according to Sarkar, Indian philosophy had less stake in establishing
the philosopher as singular authorial figure, and more in inviting the interlocu-
tion by readers and commentators into the very act of philosophizing itself.
Sarkar went on to say: “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.”20 In Sarkar’s argument the point was that
Chanakya could not and must not be seen as a historical–contextual figure,
whose words reflected particular political practices determined by time and
space. Any attempt at establishing or disestablishing the Mauryanism of the
Arthashastra was pointless, he said.21 It was a historicist error to reduce artha
and niti principles to a localized and past system—namely, to a contextual-
ized theory of Hindu kingship.

32

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

Sarkar and U.N. Ghoshal, historian and Indologist from Calcutta Uni-
versity, had a particularly bitter debate on this point—Sarkar asserting that
the Arthashastra was universal Kautilyadarshanam, Ghoshal pointing out that
darshan in the case of Chanakya was not quite philosophy but merely political
opinion, though of a master politician, in service of ancient, reified, kingly
power. In other words, Sarkar was trying to make Chanakya contemporary
by rendering him philosophical and thus, timeless, while Ghoshal insisted
that Chanakya was inexorably historical, that is, of the time of kingship and
as a result, anachronistic in the present.
Sarkar insisted that empiricist historians, who read ancient texts instru-
mentally as merely “sources,” would naturally find in the Arthashastra an
archaic political form—namely, kingship. This empiricism blinded them
to the philosophical fact that in the arthashastra tradition the king was only
one component of the saptanga (seven limbs) of the state (the other limbs
being the minister, the treasury, the land and people, the ally and so on). In
early India, thus, kingship was not equivalent to sovereignty in the Western,
absolutist sense. Dandaniti, or the working of justice, was a principle that was
prior to royal decree, indeed prior to even the concrete institution of king-
ship. In other words, niti and arthashastra constituted a theoretical principle
and not a local, empirical political form.22 Ghoshal, on the other hand, argued
that the saptanga idea was fully past and ended. For it sought, in ancient
times, to co-theorize law and jurisprudence, political economy, interstate
relations, and diplomacy under the single rubric of the political. All this,
in modern times, had become distinct domains of practice. They had thus
become subjects of different disciplines such as economics, international
relations, and law. They no longer constituted a single or singular political
and therefore could not be textualized in a single narrative.
Ghoshal then went on to make a further distinction between theory and
thought. Political thought is greater than political theory, he said. For the-
ory 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 ac-
tions and shapes life. Theory is explicit, self-conscious, detached. Thought
is implicit, unconscious, and in the form of ideas immersed in the stream
of “vital action,” and therefore only historically graspable.23 Consequently,
Ghoshal, whose book was called Hindu Political Theories, went on to claim that
he had really meant to dwell on the question of Hindu political thought.24

33

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

Accordingly, in the 1950s, he would go on to revise his text and rename it

Indian Political Ideas, thus abandoning any claim to theory.25
One could read this contest over whether Chanakya was a philosopher or
a historical figure as a contest over how to thematize 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
immanent to an encompassing narrative of history. The theory–practice
binary, in this debate, effectively took the form of a disciplinary face-off
between philosophy and history. Yet there was also a critical third term on
which there was total silence—namely, the term shastra itself, which was
generically irreducible to either history or philosophy as modes of writing.
There was some discussion over the term artha in arthashastra, of course.
Some objected to the tendency of many historians to reduce the term artha
to an economic principle (Shamasashtry’s first essay, on discovering the Ar-
thashastra was characteristically on “Chanakya’s Land and Revenue Policy”).
Others understood artha to be a secular–material principle of conquest and
landholding (à la references to artha in the traditional lexicon such as the
Amarakosa). Others offered a more political meaning for the term, by as-
serting an identity between artha and niti, or by introducing the other lexical
sense of the term artha, which meant “to act towards” or “purposive action.”26
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 thematization 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, he suggests that it is especially in
the domains of artha and kama (politics and sexuality) that new experience
and innovative practice dominate and even assume the guise of opposition
to established tradition.27 It seems to me then that Chanakya getting caught
up in the philosophy/history binary was based on an interesting misrecogni-
tion 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 Sarkar was

34

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

hoping for, so he could position Chanakya as the inaugural moment of a

modern Indian politico–philosophic tradition), he was quite in line with the
protocols of the shastric form. Shastras necessarily set up a prior origin of
knowledge—to the extent of regressing into a primordial moment of revela-
tion 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 au-
thority 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 rather than as “outside” of it. The famous purvapaksha
of shastric disputation, after all, was an elaborate restatement of tradition,
within and against which critiques were generated. It was this textualiza-
tion and argumentative procedure that made it appear as if all thought were
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 and “untimely” question of
the textuality of Arthashastra, it was in theater. Of course, the rendering of
Chanakya into a dramatic character par excellence already had a precolonial
moment—namely, Vishakhadatta’s play Mudrarakshasa, placed by historians
around the seventh or eighth 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, Mudra-
rakshasa 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 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 col-
lection of translated Sanskrit plays by P. Lal.28 Mudrarakshasa had a renewed
life in colonial and postcolonial times, along with another Sanskrit play,
the Mrichhakatika. I find it interesting that the leftist theater legend, Habib

35

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

Tanvir—with his militant Marxism, his Indian People’s Theatre Association

links, his expressed interest in Bertolt Brecht and Henrik Ibsen, his formal
experiments with folk performers—would also produce and direct a classi-
cal Sanskrit play such as Mudrarakshasa, as he did in 1964. Talking about his
choice of the play, Tanvir said that Mudrarakshasa 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, or literature, and through classical rasa (effect/affect) theory.29 Mu-
drarakshasa, as another critic remarked, was exceptional because the purely
political nature of the play resisted rasa analysis in classical aesthetic terms,
even if it was indeed a “classical” play.30 Of course, Tanvir was not the only
one. Vijaya Mehta, of the theater group Rangayan and later director of the
well-known film Pestonjee (1987), produced and directed Mudrarakshasa in
1975 for the Sahitya Sangh. B. V. Karanth, the doyen of Kannada and Indian
stage, did the same in 1978.
A new theatrical life for Chanakya also emerged in the twentieth cen-
tury through a long series of Indian language plays beginning in 1911 with
D. L. Roy’s in Bengali. One could also mention plays by N. C. Kelkar (1913,
Marathi), Badrinath Bhatia (1915, Hindi), Jayashankar Prasad (1931, Hindi),
Balkrishna Kar (1926, Oriya), K. Mamman (1919, Malayalam), K. Vasude-
van Musatu (1927, Malayalam), V. Krishnan Thampi (1930, Malayalam)
and more recently G. P. Deshpande’s 1987 Marathi play Chanakya Vishnu-
gupta. 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.”31 Indeed, it is be-
lieved that the first novel in Kannada, Mudramanjusa (1823) by Kempu Na-
rayana, was inspired by the classical Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa in which
Chanakya appears as a central protagonist.32 Yet plays by far seemed the
most popular genre for Chanakya, or so they remained until 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 when he portrayed Chanakya in D. L.
Roy’s play. He then went on to act in and direct the 1939 film. Then came

36

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

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 (Ra-
jeev Kumar, Telegu/Malayalam, 1989).33 G. P. Deshpande also acknowl-
edged influences by the cinematic imagination of director Govind Nihalani
on his own Chanakya play.34 With the coming of television, we have had
Chandraprakash Dwivedi directing (and playing) Chanakya (1991) for a mass
audience. For the last few years, film and theater actor Manoj Joshi 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 in the November 26, 2008 terrorist attack.
It seems to me thus that Chanakya as a figure has been particularly ame-
nable to theatrical rendition, but, one must add, in a way somewhat different
from the standard tradition of historical plays, and indeed historical novels,
written in India since colonial times. A powerful theatrical (as well as liter-
ary) tradition around kingly figures from the past emerged in Bengal from
the late nineteenth century onward, from Girish Ghosh’s Siraj-ud-daula (1905,
about the Bengal ruler who lost out to the British in the battle of Palasi in
1757, inaugurating colonial rule in India) to D. L. Roy’s Shahjahan (1910) to,
somehow differently, Rabindranath Tagore’s Raktakarabi (1926). At one level,
these plays, because they were 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.35 At another level, and specific to
theater this time, these kingly stories were meant to articulate 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 agonized to find a nonmonarchi-
cal, quasi-democratic tradition in India’s past, it was the monarch himself
who would be repeatedly invoked in theater in order to adequately stage
the political, precisely because the kingly figure answered the democratic
demand of presenting the political self for mass spectatorship.36 What is
different about the Chanakya plays is, however, the interesting dispersal of
the political across the two loci of king and minister—through which caste
and gender would be brought to the fore.

37

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

For it is less Chanakya per se, and more the Chanakya–Chandragupta

pair that becomes important in modern theater because this pairing allows
the thematization of the lowborn king and the political Brahman together.
Note that D. L. Roy’s 1911 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.37 Also note the contrast with Jayashankar
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 warrior, and that it was the anti-Buddhists of early In-
dia who, to avenge King Asoka’s rejection of Brahmanical sacrificial religion
for Buddhism, accused his ancestor of being a low-caste Shudra.38 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 the precolonial
play Mudrarakshasa, the plays of D. L. Roy and G. P. Deshpande have far fewer
characters. The flower seller, the many spies in disguise, the snake charmer,
and the servants of Mudrarakshasa, who peopled the play-world through the
use of Prakrit linguistic registers and the technique of sociological mime-
sis, are remarkable for their absence in the modern plays, which were fully
centered upon the Chanakya–Chandragupta pair.39 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) that works as the language of alterity to the purely politi-
cal. In D. L. Roy’s play, criticized sometimes for its unwieldy subplots and
surplus characters, it is really the imagination of the prepolitical which acts
as the other voice.
Let me then refer the Chanakya of theater back to the Chanakya of history
and philosophy with whom I began. D. L. Roy was writing precisely around
the time that the scholarly debate around a rediscovered Arthashastra explod-
ed. In his play too 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. The other
possible union, that between Chandragupta and Chhaya, the innocent, self-

38

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

less woman of the hills, who loves Chandragupta, even though he only has
eyes for the philosophically erudite Helen, is sacrificed—or almost sacri-
ficed—at the altar of this philosophical union. Chhaya’s brother—created
in the image of the dark, valorous “primitive” of Bengali imagination—also
sacrifices himself, despite being spurned by Chandragupta, in an act of pure
friendship, fraternity, and prepolitical solidarity.
In D. L. Roy, therefore, the intimate, the immediate, and the prepolitical
are distributed across the characters: the “primitive hill-tribe” that is un-
conditionally prepolitical; Chandragupta, the Shudra-king torn between the
political and the prepolitical; and Chanakya, the Brahman, purely cerebral
and unqualifiedly political. And yet, in his monologues, Chanakya, the phi-
losopher and political man par excellence, reveals his secret self, traumatized
by the 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 he mutters in a powerful soliloquy about the relentless and compel-
ling flow of the river of bhakti (devotion), before a Bengali audience, familiar
above all with shakta (following Shakti/Mother Goddess/feminine primal
force) and vaishnav (Krishna/Vishnu) traditions of love, desire, and music.
D. L. Roy’s play is interesting to me particularly for the way in which it sets
up the tension between Chandragupta and Chanakya. The two remain en-
gaged 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,
upon finding his long-lost daughter, and rediscovering his own prepolitical
past of pure and passionate devotion and love.
Roy’s was a commercial play, distinct from the later form of amateur politi-
cal theater 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 presented 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.
Even as Chanakya gets characterized as the somber philosopher–politician,

39

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

the plot is animated by a subtext that also makes fun of philosophy, which is
caricatured in the form of the character of a minister of the Nandas, whose
obsession with the ancient grammarian Panini is presented as absurd and
comic. Again, Chanakya, while otherwise steadily and steadfastly philo-
sophical, is often made to verge on the manic. In his monologues, he gives
vent to self-irony and to a perverse desire, indeed love, for the beautiful-ugly
goddess of death, destruction, and desolation. Indeed, Chanakya is seen to
frequent the cremation ground, a rather unlikely location for philosophy, 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, love, and devotion. D. L. Roy was as well known as a songwriter
as he was a playwright, and his songs often took on a life independent of his
plays. This mixing of genres across philosophy, theater, song, and history
had the effect of reconstituting Chanakya as an eccentric character, whose
purely political–philosophical persona was really the expression of a be-
sieged and secret self—that of a kaliyug Brahman lacking traditional power
and legitimacy and that of a man without women.40
G. P. Deshpande’s much later play, Chanakya Vishnugupta, is an interesting
counterpoint. First, the later playwright’s Marxist disposition and location in
the by-then-established tradition of left political theater produced an aes-
thetics that was quite distinct from D. L. Roy’s Bengali nationalist aesthetics.
Amateur left theater’s mode of address and pedagogic relationship with the
spectator, too, was fundamentally different from the address and pedagogy
of early twentieth-century commercial mass theater. Second, in comparison
to Bengal, the caste question had historically taken a strikingly different
trajectory in Maharashtra. In immediate precolonial times, Peshwa rule in
Maharashtra took the form of an orthodox Brahmanical regime. From early
colonial times onward, therefore, caste became a modern political ques-
tion in western India. Maharashtra produced two of the most sophisticated
critics of caste in India—Jyotiba Phule and later B. R. Ambedkar. In Bengal,
however, while caste continued to be an active and palpable phenomenon,
it remained repressed as a question in mainstream political rhetoric, over-
written as it was by the landlord–peasant/Hindu–Muslim “communal”
question. Third, Bengalis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
developed a relationship of desire with Maratha history, especially its kingly,
warrior, and patriotic traditions vis-à-vis the Mughals of north India. The
Marathas seemed, for a while, to replace the Mughals in imperial ambi-

40

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

tion and even raided territories in Bengal, producing popular Bengali songs
and poems about Maratha fighters. Incidentally, Sarkar, in a 1936 essay,
elaborately analyzed the eighteenth-century adjnapatra (document/order)
of Ramchandra Pant Amatya of Kolhapur, as an example of the extant and
functioning nature of Chanakya niti in early modern western India.41
In G. P. 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 the political task of overthrowing the un-
just Nanda dynasty. The play, in this way, sets up the political as practice
before philosophy. And yet, the critique of Kautilya niti is a self-consciously
philosophical critique too, coming from the mouth of Suwasini, Chandra-
gupta’s ex-lover, who first marries the enemy Nanda king, then takes up
the reins of power herself, and finally converts to Buddhism and enters a
Buddhist sangha (monastery). Suwasini speaks against the sacrifice of indi-
vidual freedom to the political machine and warns of the imminent arrival
of the just and emancipatory Buddhist way of equality between castes and
classes. Although he is instrumental in her losing Chandragupta, Chanakya
is compelled to agree with Suwasini 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.
Buddha is already figured as a possible alternative to Chanakya in the
scholarly debates of the mid-1920s. Sarkar accused Ghoshal of reducing
Buddha to a moralist instead of accepting him as political philosopher. In
turn, Ghoshal accused Sarkar of blindness to caste, in effect saying that
Sarkar tried to sanitize the figure of the political Brahman by rendering
him a philosopher, thus denying his imbrication in the concrete institu-
tions of kingship and the varnashrama (hierarchical) caste-order.42 Buddha
and Chanakya, in other words, could not be placed in the same universalist
category of political philosophy. Buddha and his contract theory of sov-
ereign power was a minor democratic exception within a more dominant
kingly and Brahmanical tradition of monarchical statecraft.43 This contest
over Buddha as a possible counterpoint to Chanakya did not quite take off
within this scholarly debate in Bengal as it would in Maharashtra, when
Ambedkar placed Buddha, not alongside Chanakya, but Marx. Well-known
“Shudra intellectual,” Kancha Illiah would later go on to make this explicit
in his contemporary tract, God as Political Philosopher: Buddhism’s Challenge
to Brahmanism (2000), where he finally displaced Chanakya for Buddha as

41

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

India’s quintessential political man.44 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. Roy’s Chanakya presents himself as
the spurned but self-conscious kaliyuga Brahman, who, in a dying flash of
political acumen, inaugurates the rise to power of the Shudra, as was fated
by history and by the myths of the puranas. He is the one who foresees the
Buddhist revolution, in a way engineering it, rather than being simply swept
away by it.
What does bringing in theater, then, do to the problematic of the political
man, whose home otherwise seems to be 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 ef-
fectively protected him from the work of historicism. Of course, philoso-
phy too struggled with history in order to modernize Chanakya, or rather to
render him irrespective of time, though not timeless; hence, the argument
that despite his antiquity, Chanakya was a “modern” political philosopher.45
But philosophy stumbled on the mismatch between the man and his text,
between author and genre. Theater, on the other hand, through the very
mode of enacting and performing the figure, released Chanakya from his
imbrication in the historical text and activated the quintessential political
man in the present. But precisely by virtue of this presentness, the Chanakya
of theater remained unstable—thematized anew across time, space, and
audience. In other words, on stage Chanakya could never become Plato, the
incarnation of classical philosophical authority.
On stage, on the other hand, philosophy itself appeared different: embod-
ied and embattled, pulled between abstraction and pragmatics, marked by
sex and caste. Even more importantly, by holding out Chanakya, frontally
and in glaring light, before an unspecified and unregulated mass of spec-
tators, theater undid the solitary, safe, and interior space of philosophi-
cal 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
“noncontemporaries”—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 economy.

42

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

III
In conclusion, let me stage a comparison between Krishna and Chanakya—
the two rivals, as it were, for the historic place of the classical Indian political
man. Such a comparison, it seems to me, allows some space for specula-
tion regarding the place of both philosophy and theater in the history of the
political in colonial/postcolonial Bengal. It is well-known that Krishna was
already a popular figure in Bengal prior to colonialism. Krishna is believed
to be the eighth and the most complete avatar (incarnation) of Vishnu, who
comes down to earth to restore justice whenever humanity embarks upon
the path of war and self-destruction. Krishna is worshipped in many forms—
as warrior-god of the epic Mahabharata—but also in forms such as that of
mischievous infant, cowherd and flutist and above all, as the passionate
lover of Radha. In Bengal, the devotional tradition of Gaudiya Vaishnavism
centered on the worship of Krishna as primarily a lover-figure and as the
protagonist of passionate lila, or play, with Radha. The sixteenth-century
figure of the bhakti saint Chaitanya was instrumental in producing this pow-
erful late medieval and early modern form of Krishna or Vaishnav bhakti
in Bengal. Followers of Chaitanya performed their devotion to Krishna as
a process of feminization of the self. Each devotee enacted the process of
becoming Radha, the woman who loved Krishna, to utter distraction and
self-effacement. In other words, Krishna bhakti was also a tradition of enact-
ment in the theatrical sense of the term. As a tradition, vaishnava bhakti was
also highly heterogeneous. It produced, through time, numerous heterodox
sects amongst the poor and low-caste peasantry and often worked as the
primary ground for low-caste political mobilization. It also framed the com-
plex playing-out of popular affect, sentiment, aesthetics, and philosophies
of transcendence. In the late nineteenth century, however, Krishna was re-
invented as primarily a political figure, not only in Bengal but also in other
regions of India such as Maharashtra. To be made a purely political man in
modern terms, this Krishna had to be taken out of his earlier myriad per-
formative, emotive, and mobilizational contexts and relocated in the stable
site of what modern colonial intellectuals saw as philosophy. The modern
political Krishna, therefore, was laboriously set apart from the Krishna of
popular love and devotion by middle-class, upper-caste, literate men such
as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Aurobindo
Ghosh. Krishna was no longer the traditional infant-god, cowherd, lover,

43

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

divine object of passionate desire and bhakti, who inspired radhabhav, or femi-
nine longing, amongst devotees. Instead, he was reconstituted in the image
of a masculine activist amenable to the early twentieth-century notions of
political action. Even Gandhi, who was starkly different in his imagination
of politics from Bankim, Tilak, and Aurobindo and who opposed their ver-
sion of militant nationalist politics, drew deeply upon the Krishna of the
Bhagavad Gita rather than the Krishna of popular bhakti.
What I want to emphasize, however, is something slightly different from,
though connected to, this process of the modern refashioning of Krishna.
I want to emphasize 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 theater, 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 (traveling theater) 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 theater].”46
In other words, the politico-philosophical life of Krishna emerged at the
cost of his theatrical life. In the case of Chanakya, however, the trajectory was
quite the opposite. Indeed, over time, Chanakya emerged as the most long-
standing and frequently renewed character in theater in Bengal and India.
In mainstream politics, however, Chanakya lost out to Krishna, because his
treatise was seen as inadequately philosophical, especially in comparison
to the Bhagavad 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, either of history
or 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”—facts not about the purely political,
as Sarker had hoped, but about techniques of administration, governance,
and economics.
This contrast between Krishna and Chanakya, of course, can be read
as much as a comment on the nature of “political theater” in India as on

44

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

the figure of Chanakya himself. But it would be a mistake to presume that

Chanakya thrived in theater 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 [caste] system. . . . Society was in
a transitional phase, passing from the varnas to the jatis [from the social divisions
of Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra to a plethora of heterogeneous groups that
disrupted the idealized fourfold order]. 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 the 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 Arthashastra.”47

The point, then, is to note the critical difference between the ways in which
philosophy gets mobilized, 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 (although not
ideologies, in the current sense). Thus, D. L. Roy’s 1911 play sought to stage
an encounter among Greek, Brahmanical, Buddhist and popular devotional
and heterodox traditions of thought. Deshpande’s 1987 play made Bud-
dhism, Vedantism, and materialist Carvaka philosophies engage in sharply
argumentative polemics. In other words, around Chanakya, philosophies
themselves appeared on stage as protagonists and counterprotagonists in
an overall political narrative. The Krishna story was quite different, being
a matter of philosophical synthesis rather than conflict. It is well-known
that by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Bhagavad Gita
had become—primarily through the intercession of German thinkers such
as Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich and August Schlegel, Wilhelm von
Humboldt, Hegel, and Schopenhauer—a singular philosophical text, seem-
ingly synonymous with Indian philosophy as a whole.48 The Gita thus not

45

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

only became India’s “national” philosophical export to the global commu-

nity of philosophers 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.49 Not surprisingly
then, Sarkar self-consciously struggled against German philosophy 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 philosophizing in the case of the
Bhagavad Gita is the mother of all battlefields, the Kurukshetra of the Mahab-
harata. Kurukshetra, a place not far from Delhi, is believed to have been the
battleground where the epic war of Mahabharata happened. Kurukshetra,
in time, became a concept-metaphor in most Indian languages for war as
such, war that was always in some sense understood as fratricidal war. And
yet, Krishna’s utterances, despite emanating from this paradigmatic scene
of battle, show no sign of philosophical struggle. As the inimitable ancient
historian D. D. Kosambi shows in his reading of the Gita, Krishna, who fills
the heavens, the earth, and the underworlds and embodies time itself, appro-
priates and synthesizes all contemporary philosophical systems, seamlessly,
within the singular discourse of godly utterance at Kurukshetra.50 In the time
of actual war, 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, and iconic (like
the Spirit of Hegelian metaphysics?), Krishna thus lends 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. As Andrew Sartori shows, Bankimchandra argued in the late nine-
teenth 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.”51
Note 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,

46

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

ethics, morality, godlessness, and liberation. To Aurobindo, revolutionary

nationalist turned spiritual master, 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 phi-
losophies under the sign of the One—the philosopher-god Krishna—whether
it be 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 of the boddhisattva (enlightened
being/Buddha in his previous lives) dedicated to universal redemption; or
indeed, Advaita Vedanta’s imagination of monism.52 In Aurobindo’s words,
the Gita demonstrated “universal comprehensiveness.” He argued that “the
language of the Gita, the structure of thought, the combination and balancing
of ideas belong neither to the temper of a sectarian teacher nor to the spirit
of a rigorous analytical dialectics cutting off one angle of the truth to exclude
all the others; but rather there is 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.”53 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 ad-
mitted rather late and rather reluctantly into the Brahmanical pantheon
(and who is still seen by many, such as the “backward” Yadav caste of Uttar
Pradesh, as the quintessential practical politician of India), remains, in the
conventional reading of the Mahabharata and the Gita, curiously uninvolved in
the actual action.54 Krishna vacillates between the roles of deus ex machina
and mere menial charioteer, but through the Gita solicits selfless and desire-
less political action from others. Of course, read differently, the Mahabharata
also tells us of the death and decline of Krishna and his dynasty in a final and
dramatic universal event of destruction—the pathos of power, as it were—but
the modern readings of the Gita remain insulated from that epic story. The
figure of Chanakya, however, unlike Krishna, remains particular, marked
by caste and gender. The Shudra is alienated and projected onto his other,
the king/conqueror, as are the women protagonists who act as Chanakya’s
critics. Chanakya also dirties his hands in acts of rule, conquest, and political
brinkmanship. He even appears schizophrenic, both in theater and scholarly

47

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

debate, torn between the imperatives of concrete political action and abstract
political philosophy, stretched between the exercises of renunciation and
technologies of power.
In Krishna, philosophy is put to the 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, of the
world and its microcosm, the nation. In Chanakya, on the other hand, the
politics of philosophy itself gets exposed, as multiple and particular philoso-
phies perform and engage on stage as on a battleground. Philosophy loses
its seclusion from the world of work and war, and thus gets contaminated
with practice, poetics, and prejudice, as well as with caste and gender. Hence
the centrality of theater, as we saw, where philosophies work as characters.
And hence, the sense, at the very end of the story, that it is no longer phi-
losophy, indeed it never was philosophy, that is the stake. The stake is per-
haps simply the art of being politic, of living through the vagary and contin-
gency of politics, and of cultivating the difficult skill of negotiating regimes,
in peace and in war. In early India, this would go by the name of niti. Calling
it “politics” in colonial modernity brought up the question of philosophy.
And along with it emerged 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 taught
humans to be precisely politic rather than simply moral or ethical in their
everyday lives. One cannot help but feel that this was a mode of being com-
monly political that flew in the face of the Gita-inspired vision of the modern
political man, as a singular, disciplined, and normative subject.

Prathama Banerjee is a historian at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
(CSDS), Delhi, India. Her earlier work, The Politics of Time (2006), studied contending
notions of time in colonial modernity in diverse sites such as calendrical reform,
epochal thinking, labor and credit markets, as well as the disciplines of history and
anthropology. She is currently working on histories of the political in colonial/post-
colonial Bengal/India. A recent essay from this ongoing work is “Thinking Equality:
Debates in Bengal, 1870–1940,” in Subalternity and Difference, ed. Gyan Pandey (2011).

48

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

Notes
1. Rammohan Ray (1772–1833) was a Bengali thinker who is taken to be the first
Indian liberal, the originary moment of the Indian modern, as it were. Bal Gangad-
har Tilak (1856–1920) was a Maharashtrian from western India credited as the first
to transform Indian nationalism into a mass mobilizatory phenomenon. Gandhi
is of course well-known as the nationalist mass leader, for his critique of western
modernity and as a proponent of nonviolent politics.
2. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
(1994), 10–11.
3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Dif-
ference (2000).
4. See the forum edited by Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji, “The Bhagavad Gita and
Modern Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 2 (2010).
5. Recently, some historians of precolonial India are reconstructing the niti tra-
dition, in which they place the Arthashastra and other texts, as a tradition of secular
political thinking, distinct from both the traditions of law-making in the dharma-
shastras (Brahmanical books of law/religion) and the traditions of the six darshanas,
or philosophies. See Upinder Singh, “Politics, Violence and War in Kamandaka’s
Nitisara,” Indian Economic & Social History Review 47, no. 29 (2010): 29–62; V. N. Rao
and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “An Elegy for Niti: Politics as a Secular Discursive Field
in the Indian Old Regime,” Common Knowledge 14 (2008): 396–423.
6. Carlo Formichi, 1899, quoted in Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “Hindu Politics in Italian,”
Indian Historical Quarterly (hereafter IHQ) 1, no. 3 (1925): 545–60.
7. S. C. Mishra, Evolution of Kautilya’s Arthashastra: An Inscriptional Approach (1997),
17–18.
8. Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “Hindu Politics in Italian,” IHQ 1, no. 4 (1925): 751–52.
9. Sarkar, “Hindu Politics in Italian,” IHQ 2, no. 2 (1926): 368, 370, 372.
10. Max Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” (1919) in The Vocation Lectures, ed. David
Owen and Tracy B. Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (2004), 88.
11. Kalidas Nag was a historian and archaeologist, secretary to the Asiatic Society
of Bengal in the mid-1940s, one of the first nominated members of the Rajya Sabha,
the upper house of the Indian parliament, a proponent of inter-Asia connections
and the greater India idea, and well known for a number of books and for his cor-
respondence with the French writer Romain Rolland.
12. Kalidas Nag, “Prof. Benoy Kumar Sarkar and the ‘New Machiavelli,’” IHQ 2,
no. 3 (1926): 650–54.
13. Kangle wrote profusely in Marathi, and was known, despite being an upper-
caste scholar, to be associated with dalit—former untouchable—leader B. R. Ambed-
kar and Communist and labor leader, S. A. Dange.
14. R. P. Kangle, The Kautilya Arthashastra: A Study (1965), 280–81.
15. Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “Hindu Politics in Italian,” IHQ 2, no. 2 (1926): 370.

49

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History, Philosophy, Theater

16. Thomas Trautmann, Kautilya and the Arthasastra: A Statistical Investigation of the
Authorship and Evolution of the Text (1971).
17. V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar, “Kautilya and Machiavelli,” IHQ 3, nos. 1 and 2
(1927): 176–80.
18. Sarkar, reflecting on Carlo Formichi’s 1899 lecture on “Hindus and their Politi-
cal Science,” in “Hindu Politics in Italian,” IHQ 1, no. 3 (1925): 532–33.
19. Ibid.
20. Sarkar, “Hindu Politics in Italian,” IHQ 1, no. 4 (1925): 755.
21. Ibid.
22. Sarkar, in a long footnote critiquing U. N. Ghoshal’s 1923 magnum opus Hindu
Political Theories, in “Hindu Politics in Italian,” IHQ 2, no. 2 (1926): 359.
23. U. N. Ghoshal, “More Light on Methods and Conclusions in Hindu Politics,”
IHQ 3, nos. 3 and 4 (1927): 640, 650.
24. Ibid.
25. U. N. Ghoshal, A History of Indian Political Ideas (1959).
26. R. Shamasastry, Indian Antiquary 31 (1905): 5–6; Sir Monier Williams, San-
skrit–English Dictionary: Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with Special Reference
to Cognate Indo-European Languages (1899, repr. 1976), s.v. “artha.”
27. Sheldon Pollock, “The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory in Indian
Intellectual History,” Journal of American Oriental Society 105, no. 3 (1985): 499–519.
28. H. H. Wilson, Select Specimens of the Theater of the Hindus, vol. 1 (1827); P. Lal,
Great Sanskrit Plays, in Modern Translation (1957).
29. Habib Tanvir, “Interview: It Must Flow, a Life in Theater,” Seagull Theater Quar-
terly 10 (June 1996): 13, 16–18.
30. Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature 500–1399: From the Courtly to the
Popular (2005), 58–59.
31. Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature 1800–1910 (1995), 113–14.
32. K. M. George, ed., Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology, vol. 1, Survey and Poems
(1992), 167.
33. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman, Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, 2002
(1994).
34. G. P. Deshpande, Chanakya Vishnugupta (1987), trans. Maya Pandit (1996), ix.
35. Rabindranath Tagore, “Aitihasik Upanyas,” in Rabindra Rachanabali (1962),
13:818.
36. Thus K. P. Jayaswal would quote precisely the Arthashastra and mention therein
of the term janapada (land/settlement; often translated as republic, contra rajya, or
kingdom) to prove the existence of republics in ancient India. K. P. Jayaswal, Hindu
Polity: A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times, 2 vols., (1924).
37. Sukumar Bandopadhyay, “Editor’s Introduction,” in D. L. Roy, Chandragupta,
ed. Sukumar Bandopadhyay (1969), 17–18.
38. Jayashankar Prasad, “Chandragupta” (1931) in Sampurna Natak (1998), 51.
39. Women and the low born, in principle, did not have a right to Sanskrit, the

50

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 History of the Present

language of gods and Brahmans. They were therefore meant to speak in either Prakrit
or the vernaculars.
40. Kaliyuga was the last of the epochs of traditional Puranic imagination, which
followed the previous epochs of Satva, Treta and Dvapar and which portended the
rise of the Shudra and the woman and decline of Brahmanical authority.
41. Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “The Maratha Political Ideas of the 18th Century: The
Marathi Rajaniti of Ramachandrapant (1716),” IHQ 12, no. 1 (March 1936): 93.
42. The four varnas of traditional Brahmanical imagination were Brahmana (in-
tellectual), Kshatriya (warrior), Vaishya (producer/trader) and Shudra (servant/
menial). The four ashramas were brahmacharya (celibate studenthood), garhastya
(householder-hood), vanaprastha (solitary contemplation) and sannyasa (asceti-
cism). The Shudra, bound to lifelong labor and service, had no right to brahmacharya,
vanaprastha, or sannyasa by law.
43. Benoy Sarkar, “Hindu Politics in Italian,” IHQ 2, no. 2 (1926): 360–61; U. N.
Ghoshal, “Reply to Benoy Kumar Sarkar,” IHQ 2, no. 2 (1926): 422.
44. Kancha Illiah, God as Political Philosopher: Buddhism’s Challenge to Brahmanism
(2000).
45. In Deshpande’s play, the sutradhar (narrator), who appears in a Nehruvian
jacket but still wears a dhoti (traditional Bengali dress), 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, see G. P. Deshpande, Chanakya–
Vishnugupta, 1.
46. Quoted by Hemendra Nath Dasgupta in The Indian Theater (1988, repr. 2009),
138.
47. Deshpande, Chanakya–Vishnugupta, xi.
48. Bradley L. Herling, The German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German
Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 (2006).
49. See Chris Bayly, “India, the Bhagavad Gita and the World,” Modern Intellectual
History 7, no. 2 (2010): 275–95.
50. D. D. Kosambi, The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India: A Historical Outline
(1970), 186.
51. Hans Harder, ed., Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srimadbhagabadgita: Translation
and Analysis (2001), 60, quoted in Andrew Sartori, “The Transfiguration of Duty in
Aurobindo’s Essays on the Gita,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 2 (2010): 324.
52. Sartori, “Transfiguration of Duty,” 327.
53. Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita: First Series, 10th ed. (1922, repr.1993), 6.
54. Kosambi, Culture, 83; Lucia Michelutti, “‘We (Yadavs) are a Caste of Politicians’:
Caste and Modern Politics in a North Indian Town,” Contributions to Indian Sociology
38, no. 1–2 (2004): 43–71.

51

This content downloaded from

223.238.195.64 on Mon, 13 Nov 2023 10:02:50 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms