Episode 5: Kautilya: India’s Forerunner to Machiavelli?

Kautilya’s approach to strategy included an understanding of inter-polity relations that assumed that one’s ‘enemy’s rear-enemy’ would be a good ally against the shared enemy: in other words, ‘make friends with your enemy’s enemy’. Meanwhile, insurgents would get support from other polities, and aggressors could be just, or just greedy. He thus paired ‘realist’ views with moral elements.

Also referred to as Chanakya or Vishnugupta, Kautilya was adviser to two successive emperors of the Mauryan Empire in India. He was thus not only a theoretician but also had considerable political influence. His main body of work is the Arthashastra, an ancient Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, political science, economic policy and military strategy. While one is hard-pushed to argue that he had a lasting influence on the following millennia of political or strategic thinking in India, his views are worth pondering, as they cast fresh light on strategy and on relations between states.

Kaushik Roy is Guru Nanak Chair Professor in the Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India and a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway. He obtained his PhD from the Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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Kautilya, The Arthashastra, ed., rearranged, translated and Introduced by L N Rangarajan, (1987, reprint, Penguin: New Delhi, 1992).

Roger Boesche, Kautilya: The First Great Political Realist (2002, reprint, Noida: HarperCollins, 2017).

Torkel Brekke, 'Wielding the Rod of Punishment – War and Violence in the Political Science of Kautilya’, Journal of Military Ethics, vol. 3, Issue 1 (2004), pp. 40–52.

Kaushik Roy, Hinduism and the Ethics of Warfare in South Asia: From Antiquity to the Present (New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Kaushik Roy, 'Just and Unjust War in Hindu Philosophy’, Journal of Military Ethics, vol. 6, issue 3 (2007), pp. 232–45.

Torkel Brekke, ‘Between Prudence and Heroism: Ethics of War in the Hindu Tradition’, in Brekke (ed.), The Ethics of War in Asian Civilisation: A Comparative Perspective (London/ New York, Routledge, 2006), pp. 113–44.

Kaushik Roy, Modern Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: A Global History (London: Routledge, 2022).

Kaushik Roy, Battle for Malaya: The Indian Army in Defeat, 1941–1942 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019).

Kaushik Roy, Brown Warriors of the Raj: Recruitment and the Mechanics of Command in the Sepoy Army, 1859–1913 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008).