The Kautilyan East

Alexandrowicz has been largely known and often pilloried for the so-called “Alexandrowicz Thesis”, the argument highlighting the influence of the law of nations of the East on the West.Footnote ²⁵ Notable was his broad construction of the law of nations of the East, a framework he perceived to be prevalent in much of Asia, particularly as depicted in his East Indies book and previewed in his Hague lectures in 1960 and the British Yearbook article on Kautilya. Alexandrowicz is also known for his rise-and-fall narrative of international law in which the “classic” (his preferred term) writers on “the law of nations” (also his preferred term) of the late medieval and early modern period in Europe held to a natural law theory that viewed all polities internationally as subject to the same universal legal norms, in Alexandrowicz's words, “which according to its natural law premises was a universal and non-discriminatory law operating irrespective of civilisation, religion, race or continent”.Footnote ²⁶ This, too, is tied to his vision of the inter-polity traditions of the East Indies.

Alexandrowicz's Hague lectures, his East Indies book, and the French-language article he published, tellingly, in the house journal of the French Annales school edited by Fernand Braudel (in fact, the same issue in which Michel Foucault published his only contribution to the journal), “Le Droit des Nations aux Indes Orientales”,Footnote ²⁷ each depict the European powers, following Vasco da Gama's landfall, in their confrontation with an East that had a developed inter-statal system well in place. In his Hague lectures, Alexandrowicz argued that “the European newcomer in Asia in the sixteenth century found himself faced with a precise network of inter-State connections” and was “doomed to be caught up in this network”.Footnote ²⁸ Alexandrowicz maintained in his East Indies book:

Also, in his East Indies book, he maintained:

Of particular note here is the value Alexandrowicz placed on equality and tolerance. In his “Kautilyan Principles” article, he wrote that “[r]eferences to the position of foreigners in Hindu States indicate the spirit of tolerance and non-discrimination with which they were treated”.Footnote ³¹ He viewed xenophobia as fundamentally “alien” to Indian politics.Footnote ³² Indeed, Indian polities showed tolerance of European trading settlements and recognized their right to self-government.Footnote ³³ That led to Alexandrowicz's view of the importance of capitulations in the East Asian scheme. He argued that “capitulations in the wider sense of the word existed in Asia long before the arrival of Europeans. It was one of the oldest customs in most Asian countries to grant substantial concessions to settlements of foreign merchants.” Footnote ³⁴ This would counter claims by twentieth-century Western lawyers that capitulations granted by the East were a sign of weakness and inferiority. Rather, it was a standard part of the Asian political arsenal.

Core to this portrait of the East Indies was Alexandrowicz's emphasis on commerce. It was not by chance that he cited J.C. van Leur's pathbreaking Indonesian Trade and Society in the very first sentence of “Le Droit des Nations aux Indes Orientales”, and he did so because of its emphasis on the commercial foundation of the Far East.Footnote ³⁵ Alexandrowicz related in his East Indies book:

Broadening his focus, Alexandrowicz observed that the “Asian maritime powers observed a customary regime of free navigation aiming inter alia at the suppression of anarchy and piracy on the oceanic routes”.Footnote ³⁷

Commercialism in Alexandrowicz's mind was closely aligned with secularism. There was a caste backstory to Alexandrowicz's story of secularism. Ironically, Alexandrowicz, who was quite sympathetic to Ambedkar's caste concerns in post-Independence India as driven by religious blindness – one of the threads of Alexandrowicz's Indian Constitution book – found in India's early division of labour with governance being taken out of the hands of the Brahmins as planting the seed of the secularization in politics. He discerned the “separation of the religious function from political power” and maintained that “[a] logical consequence of this separation of power was the secularization of the royal function in the hands of the ksatryas ”.Footnote ³⁸ If that was part of the history of secularization in Indian politics, the key point was the relative secular character of the Indian historical state that fostered tolerance in its inter-polity traditions. Indeed, he maintained that East Indian inter-polity practice, which, “based on the Kautilyan and post-Kautilyan tradition, was in principle secular and allowed sovereigns in India and Further India to maintain regular relations inter se and later with Islamic rulers, as well as with the European agencies which first appeared in the East [at] the beginning of the sixteenth century”.Footnote ³⁹ Overall, it was this political culture, the broad “influence of Hindu civilization”, that played such a “prominent role in the development of East Indian trade”.Footnote ⁴⁰ That image would bring Alexandrowicz to contrast the secular ethos to cultures driven by religious-based wars, specifically the crusades and jihad. It became an integral part of Indian civilization so that even “[t]he reign of Moghul Emperors Akbar, Jehangir and Shajahan witnessed the victory of a secular policy of inter-group relations in India, no doubt under Hindu influence and in conditions of the decline of jihad ideology”.Footnote ⁴¹

Central to Alexandrowicz's analysis of the Indian interstate network encountered by Europeans was its characteristic modality, the mandala. In his description,

Using the standard balance-of-power analogy, Alexandrowicz described the mandala as a “policy of balance of power within the complicated network of alliances and conflicts conceived in circles of interests”.Footnote ⁴³ But pivotal to the mandala system was its restriction against the complete destruction of one's enemies in war. Instead, there were not only shifting alliances but also shifting suzerain-vassal relationships. Indeed, those shifting relationships were crucial to the maintenance of the system. As Alexandrowicz argued, “[w]hat is characteristic in this suzerain-vassal concept is that it was not conceived as aiming at the absorption of vassals by suzerains which would not have served the idea of unity in diversity”.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was critical, then, that “[t]he vassal ruler was not to be subject to suppression or debellatio”.Footnote ⁴⁵

The “Alexandrowicz thesis” – a name mostly used by his detractors – identified the influence of the values of the East on the West. Thus, for example, Alexandrowicz contended on a broad point that “[t]he European agencies in the East learned the lesson of coexistence of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity in India (particularly on the west coast) and transplanted their experience to the West, which had been so long incapable of extricating itself from the obsession of religious wars”.Footnote ⁴⁶ The related form of Alexandrowicz's argument was to depict the influence of the East as an influence on Western legal theorists. Thus, for example, he might suggest that the principles at the centre of the East Indian system “had an indirect impact on a number of European writers in the eighteenth century”.Footnote ⁴⁷ In his East Indies book, he offered “it may be recalled that Grotius and Freitas appeared as the classic witnesses of legal issues relating to the East Indies in the early seventeenth century”.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Grotius-Freitas debate was born of experience in the East. Specifically, “[t]he Grotius-Freitas controversy … revealed the impact of the maritime regime of the Indian Ocean on the development of our international maritime law”.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, “[i]t may be assumed that Grotius either conceived or perfected the doctrine of the freedom of the sea under the influence of maritime traditions prevailing in the East”.Footnote ⁵⁰ Vital here was the scheme created by Asian states. Alexandrowicz ventured that it would be “possible to assume that Grotius in formulating his doctrine of the freedom of the sea found himself encouraged by what he learned from the study of Asian maritime custom”.Footnote ⁵¹ Aside from the exact exercise of influence, Grotius was decidedly the most significant writer on the law of nations for Alexandrowicz, and core to his engagement with Grotius was the value placed by Grotius on equality between states, commercialism, and secularization, as well as the divisibility of sovereignty that Alexandrowicz saw represented by the mandala, values to be discussed in more detail.

The Author of Kautilya's Arthashastra

Alexandrowicz focused attention on the “Kautilyan principles” and the “Kautilyan tradition” as critical to his larger effort to reintroduce the Indian East as a vital partner in the creation of international law, and he began his “Kautilyan Principles” with the contention that “[t]he historian of the law of nations who intends to ascertain the totality of factors which contributed to the development of our system of international law cannot confine his inquiry to pre-nineteenth-century Europe only”.Footnote ⁵² In discussing what he described as the “Kautilyan tradition”, he focused on Kautilya as an historical figure within the development of Indian political thought. Thus, for example, he wrote in the Kautilya Principles article: “Until Kautilya, Chandragupta Maurya's Chancellor, completed his treatise in the fourth century B.C., politics had not been an independent science in India but remained largely a branch of social ethics.”Footnote ⁵³ Alexandrowicz fully understood that Kautilya stood within a progression of Indian thought. In addition, the elements of the framework Kautilya set out “were the outcome of a more ancient tradition and constituted at the same time a code of provisions from which usages and customary rules were derived during later periods”.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nevertheless, Alexandrowicz still tied the author of Kautilya's Arthashastra to the key historical figure of a minister in the Mauryan empire in the fourth century BCE.

At the start of this Kautilya identification, Shamasastry began the “Preface” to the first full translation of Kautilya's Arthashastra by observing that “[l]ittle that is reliable is known of the author of the Arthaśāstra”.Footnote ⁵⁵ Nevertheless, citing an additional early source, Shamasastry felt sufficiently confident to assert that “Kautilya overthrew the Nandas and placed Chandragupta on their throne”.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the decades following Shamasastry's publication, there has been a continuous debate about the author of the Arthashastra. Some of the debate was over dating the Arthashastra as well as the identity of its author. As to authorship, there has been controversy over whether one could ascribe the work to a single author; that is, between those whom Mark McClish identifies as champions of “unitary authorship”Footnote ⁵⁷ and those who viewed the text as created by multiple authors or having evolved out of a process of accretion. Many scholars felt compelled to enter the dating and attribution debates, and those debates started very early. For example, when Kâlidâs Nâg published Les théories diplomatiques de l'Inde ancienne et l'Athaçâstra in 1923, he wrote about the attribution of the text to the prime minister of the Chandragupta by Shamasastry and others but concluded that “a careful examination of the different parts of the text obliges us to conclude that the hypothesis was not justifiable”.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nâg also referenced the work of the German Sanskrit scholar Alfred Hillebrandt to the effect that the Arthashastra was the work of a school rather than a single individual.Footnote ⁵⁹

By the time Indian Sanskrit scholar R.P. Kangle produced his three volumes in the 1960s – his edited Sanskrit text, his translation, and his study of the Arthashastra Footnote ⁶⁰ – he felt compelled to devote a fifty-nine-page chapter to “Author and Date.” There, he came to a basic agreement with Shamasastry's original assessment by refuting attempts to move the date of authorship or dispute the identity of the author. For example, he rebutted Hillebrandt's argument that Kautilya's practice of referencing himself in the third person was not present in earlier literature by suggesting that this practice of self-citation could be traced to “peculiarities of temperament making themselves felt in an author's work, particularly if the author is known otherwise to have been a masterful personality”.Footnote ⁶¹ Kangle spent a number of pages refuting arguments by Otto Stein, Julius Jolly, and others regarding discrepancies between the Greek diplomat Megasthenes's contemporaneous observations about Mauryan India and the text of the Arthashastra. In response, he reminded his readers that “the Indika of Megasthenes is preserved only in fragments found in the writings of later historians like Strabo, Arrian, Diodorus and others so that a full picture of Megasthenes's description is not available to us”.Footnote ⁶² With that reminder in place, he could protest: “It is, therefore, surprising, to say the least, to find it confidently asserted that the evidence of Megasthenes is against the authenticity of the Arthaśāstra.”Footnote ⁶³

If the major French Sanskrit scholar, Robert Lingat, simply threw up his hands in an aside about the dating of Kautilya's Arthashastra – “the date (or dates) of which are in debate”Footnote ⁶⁴ – Mark McClish provides what I find the most compelling analysis of the authorship and dating of Kautilya's Arthashastra. He engages in a thorough structural, stylistic, and syntactical, subject matter, and doctrinal analysis, and introduces additional elements such as numismatic and other historical evidence to arrive at his verdict. He points, for example, to the alternating formal elements of prose and verse, the uneven division of the Arthashastra's books suggesting later imposed divisions, and the competing viewpoints of different parts of the text. Of course, a number of McClish's observations build on the observations of earlier scholars so that, for example, on the verse sloka elements of Kautilya's Arthashastra, he can draw on the analysis from 1916 of the slokas by A.B. Keith, which, in Keith's words, were “far more classical in type than the Rāmāyana itself [while containing] correct Trishtubh stanzas in regular metre, which is a clear proof of a comparatively recent date”.Footnote ⁶⁵ McClish can then identify these as archaisms rather than truly archaic language. For him, the slokas were later emendations to a pre-existing text, an observation that falls within his overall exercise in a “redaction history” of the Arthashastra.Footnote ⁶⁶ As he argues, “the verses and colophons that conclude each chapter were added during a major redaction of the text, probably sometime in the third century CE”.Footnote ⁶⁷

McClish concludes that the older source text of the Arthashastra consisted of an earlier, purely rational manual of sovereign politics to which religio-moral elements were subsequently added in a later revision. In McClish's words, his study “undertakes a text-critical study of the Arthaśāstra in order to demonstrate that an earlier text, which I will call the Dandaniti, underwent extensive redaction and was recast as the Arthaśāstra of Kautilya”.Footnote ⁶⁸ Indeed, McClish aimed to:

This may be counter to the typical tale of increasing, progressive secularization but the main point is that the source document, which McClish calls the Dandaniti, came from a separate and parallel secular political tradition; in McClish's words, an “earlier statecraft tradition, which must be considered as having existed and developed mostly independently of the dharmaśāstra tradition”.Footnote ⁷⁰

McClish's recent conclusions about Kautilya's Arthashastra stand in sharp relief against the major tradition on the Arthashastra's dating and authorship. I have introduced it not to impeach Alexandrowicz's scholarship. Indeed, Alexandrowicz was just adopting the prevalent view. It was, as mentioned, the view of R.P. Kangle – and Alexandrowicz refers to both Shamasastry and Kangle's translations in his “Kautilyan Principles” article.Footnote ⁷¹ Alexandrowicz may have cited Nâg, one of the early critics of the unitary author position but he did so in a footnote on an unrelated point.Footnote ⁷² U.N. Ghoshal, a towering figure in the history of Indian political thought and a source for Alexandrowicz, adopted the traditional view. That was the case for his History of Hindu Political Theories of 1923, where he wrote in agreement that “Kautilya's treatise is generally assigned to the period of Chandragupta Maurya's reign (c. 322–298 B.C.).”Footnote ⁷³ He would tell us that there was an ancient Arthashastra tradition from which Kautilya was drawing. “Already in the time of Kautilya”, he wrote, “the literature of the Arthaśāstra must have reached a considerable size since he quotes no less than four specific schools and thirteen individual authors.”Footnote ⁷⁴ When Ghoshal expanded his 1923 study as A History of Indian Political Ideas in 1959 he did not necessarily agree with the identification of Kautilya as the chief minister of Chandragupta, referring neutrally to the “orthodox tradition which attributes the authorship of the work to the well-known chief minister of Chandragupta”.Footnote ⁷⁵ Yet, there he made a point similar to that of his 1923 text: “In Kautilya's time the literature of the Arthaśāstra had grown into a tangled maze of divergent ideas.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Despite the maze, the main point was that Ghoshal identified a historical, Maurya-era Kautilya.

The historian A.S. Altekar in his State and Government in Ancient India, also an important source for Alexandrowicz, came to the conclusion that “we could well place him in the Mauryan period”.Footnote ⁷⁷ Altekar further contended that “[t]he above facts as well as the colophon of the work would suggest that its kernel, at any rate, belongs to the Mauryan age and embodies the views of Kautilya”.Footnote ⁷⁸ Similarly, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri – who contributed to the Indian Year Book of International Affairs Footnote ⁷⁹ – wrote in the introduction to his Age of the Nandas and Mauryas, “The Arthaśāstra of Kautilya (Chānakya) holds a place in the literature of Indian polity corresponding to that of the Mauryan empire in Indian history.”Footnote ⁸⁰ It was fully understandable that Alexandrowicz would adopt the unitary authorship position. Yet, it is also the case that the position served him well, allowing the Kautilyan tradition to be personified and have a champion taking a role not unlike Alexandrowicz's Grotius.

Kautilya and Indian Nationalism

As mentioned above, the discovery and publication of Kautilya's Arthashastra represented a paradigm shift in Indians’ views of their political heritage. McClish quotes Johannes Voigt that the discovery and publication created a “sensation of the greatest magnitude” and triggered new views by Indians of the history of their own politics.Footnote ⁸¹ Indeed, McClish observes that “[t]he authoritative disquisitions of the Arthaśāstra were decisive proof of the kind of native political capacity that India was accused of lacking and proved to be of great value for a people consciously developing a self-assertive national identity”.Footnote ⁸² Voigt's chapter on “Nationalist Interpretations of Arthaśāstra in Indian Historical Writing” provides us with an important discussion of the uses to which the sudden appearance of Kautilya's Arthashastra were made, including the importance of state organization in India with, for example, B.K. Sarkar's “coin[ing] for it the term dharmastaaten, a combination of the Sanskrit term dharma and the German word for state, meaning by it what is called in German Rechtsstaat”.Footnote ⁸³ Voigt focused a good deal of his chapter on the bureaucratic and economic role of the government in the eyes of Indian historians. Similarly, Maria Misra recently provided an overview of the Indian Kautilya reception, focusing on the nationalist and materialist strains of that reception, especially in the 1920s and again starting in the 1980s.Footnote ⁸⁴ I will be focusing on a different reception history, on the writing of scholars like Ghoshal, Altekar, and others who were in the frame of Alexandrowicz's reading of Kautilya.

When Ghoshal first wrote his History of Hindu Political Theories, published in 1923 from his 1922 University of Calcutta dissertation,Footnote ⁸⁵ he was quite clear that he was struggling against enormous headwinds. He quoted the nineteenth-century French professor of moral science, Paul Janet, to the effect that “[t]he Orient in general, India in particular, did not conceive the idea of the State . . . To employ a Christian expression, the sole city for the Indian sages is the city divine.”Footnote ⁸⁶ He had to struggle against the heritage of Max Müller with his overly religious image of Indian politics. Ghoshal cited Westel Woodbury Willoughby's Political Theories of the Ancient World to the effect that the civilization of Eastern cultures had an “appeal to dogma rather than to reason, to faith rather than to logically founded belief”,Footnote ⁸⁷ and William Archibald Dunning's History of Political Theories Ancient and Mediaeval to the effect that “[t]he Oriental Aryans never freed their politics from the theological and metaphysical environment in which it is embedded to-day”.Footnote ⁸⁸

Over against those stereotypes, Ghoshal was able to argue, without entirely dispatching the importance of religion, that “[t]he peculiar genius of the Indo-Aryans left its impress upon another aspect of Hindu political thought, namely its intensely realistic character”.Footnote ⁸⁹ He was then able to maintain that “[a] new departure moreover, is signalized by the schools and authors of the Arthaśāstra who bring into being an independent branch of knowledge avowedly concerned with the acquisition and preservation of States”.Footnote ⁹⁰ Thus, when Ghoshal came to publish his much thicker study in 1959, over a decade into Indian Independence, he could write with satisfaction that “[i]t is a welcome sign of the times that, not to speak of the keen interest of the Indian as of other Eastern peoples in the ancient history of their lands after their liberation from colonial rule, there has been a growing appreciation of the abiding value of the secular aspects of non-European civilizations in Western lands”.Footnote ⁹¹ He also sharpened his statement about the Arthashastra writers: “The greatest single contribution made by our ancient authors to the reasoned treatment of political ideas lies to the credit of the schools and teachers of the Arthaśāstra.”Footnote ⁹² Of course, Kautilya had pride of place in both versions of Ghoshal's book. Kautilya was the towering figure of the narrative and Ghoshal could refer to “one striking characteristic of his genius, namely, his sense of balance and harmony”.Footnote ⁹³

If Indian writers on Indian political thought had to refute the charge of over-religiosity, Indian writers on international law had the additional burden of addressing the core conclusions of early twentieth-century international law as to which governmental polities could be regarded as the “subjects” of international law, with the easy understanding that only Christian, European states were subjects and had rights. In 1920, Bandyopadhyay used W.E. Hall as an example and portrayed him as a man “[i]mbued with imperialistic ideas [who] considers International Law as a ‘favoured monopoly’ of the European family of nations”.Footnote ⁹⁴ Countering this set-piece framing by Western writers, Bandyopadhyay exclaimed, and the italics were his: “It is, however, the object of this thesis to establish the apparently incredible fact that the ancient Indians had a definite knowledge of the rules of International Law according to which they regulated their international conduct.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Here, Bandyopadhyay rushed to underscore the failure of international law in the West, that Westerners had:

By comparison, “[t]he ancient Indians had two thousand years before a Grotius, a Rachel or an Ayala recalled Europe to humanity, propounded a body of rules governing the relations between different states into which the continent of India was generally divided”.Footnote ⁹⁷

Similar to Bandyopadhyay, Viswanatha opened the preface to his 1925 study by explaining that “[t]he subject of the following book was suggested to me by the Great War of 1914 which witnessed rather sweeping changes in the European Law of Nations”.Footnote ⁹⁸ He suggested that Indian states may have been working with an Austinian deficit but they did not lose out as a result: “One point of difference which becomes clear to us between ancient Indian International Law and the modern European Law of Nations is that whereas the rules of the latter are based on the ‘common consent’ of the states which came within the bounds of the law, in the case of the former the rules of conduct embodied in Dharma had to be implicitly obeyed by all nations in India, for they were based on a superior ethical sense.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Rebutting the “stale criticism” that Manu, Kautilya, and other Indian writers restricted themselves to an idealized vision rather than describing reality, he responded that Indian political writings “formulated a code of laws which approached the actual to no less an extent than the Code of Grotius, or even the Code formulated at The Hague”.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Alexandrowicz, in “Kautilyan Principles”, reported that “[i]n 1960 an All-India Seminar was held at the University of Delhi which concerned itself with the possible contribution of Indian traditions to the development of international law”.Footnote ¹⁰¹ He provided a short description of the Seminar's coverage:

In a footnote, he pointed to an argument regarding “what the world could learn from India's cultural heritage”, to which the British expert on Indian law, J.D.M. Derrett, in agreement with V.K.R.V. Rao, referred, in a post-seminar report to “the Gandhian theory of life and its dharmic aspects”.Footnote ¹⁰³ Alexandrowicz did not directly criticize the expansion beyond Kautilyan principles to incorporate Gandhian gestures and even referred in the same note to Derrett's piece published in his own Indian Year Book of International Affairs.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, Alexandrowicz's act of deflation came when he concluded, “[w]hat the participants of the Seminar failed to consider is the point in time at which Indian traditions of inter-State conduct were still capable of exercising a direct influence on our system of the law of nations”.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Indeed, for Alexandrowicz, “[i]t must be recalled that these traditions came to an end with the collapse of the independent State system in India and Further India at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century”.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ His intervention was a historical one, arguing that “[t]he only point in time at which a direct influence of such traditions on our law of nations was possible was the period of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”, which was a core argument of his writing.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Here, Alexandrowicz took a tack quite different from that Nagendra Singh would take in his India and International Law in 1969.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Singh provided a quick march through various principles of international law such as lex as rex, pacta sunt servanda, the right of asylum, and the role of missions, tying them to the Indian past with references to the Code of Manu, the Mahabharata, and Kautilya's Arthashastra as providing precedents for international law writ large. Singh used Kautilya more as an observer than a generative mind. In a later book, he asserted, “Kautilya was a political grammarian and not a legal luminary.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In India and International Law, Singh sought to steer us away from the “theory of brute force” that, for him, largely characterized Kautilya's Arthashastra and look elsewhere to “the subordination of all State policies to Dharma or law [which] is of the highest importance for a correct appreciation of the legal position in ancient India”.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Singh was moving towards a conclusion that the eradication of war and the promotion of peace were core tenets of Indian thought and practice so that he was able to introduce the Indian concept of peaceful coexistence or Panchsheel advocated by modern India: “In modern times, after India's Independence in 1947, non-alignment and peaceful co-existence have been the watchwords of this country's foreign policy.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Essentially, he transitioned from his Indian heritage to quote at length from a speech by Nehru in 1955.Footnote ¹¹² By comparison, Alexandrowicz had what looked like a decidedly historical point to make. But that point was bound up with his views as to his broader fall-and-rise narrative of the law of nations from medieval and early modern naturalism to nineteenth-century European positivism with its xenophobia and colonial abuses, so it was during the period from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century that the European law of nations was most receptive to the influences of India and Further India, which came from ancient Indian traditions.

The Anarchical Society

As a touchstone for Indian political thought, many writers pointed to the discussion of the “law of the fish”, most notably appearing in the Santiparvan section of the Mahabharata. Thus, for example, in 1923 Ghoshal wrote: “If the king, says Bhisma, in concluding this part of his argument, did not exist in this world as a wielder of punishment, the stronger would devour the weaker in the fashion of fishes living in the water.”Footnote ¹¹³ Similarly, Altekar, in his study of the state and government in ancient India, wrote of a falling from grace in the Santiparvan: “The Śāntiparvan goes on to narrate that society flourished without a king or law court for a long time, but later somehow there was a moral degeneration. People fell from rectitude; greed, selfishness and cupidity began to sway their mind[s] and the earthly paradise which they had been enjoying was soon converted into a veritable hell.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ As a result, “[t]he law of the jungle began to prevail; the strong devoured the weak, as is the order of the day among the fish (mātsyanyāya)”.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Only then did the Gods intervene to bestow kingship. But, having narrated this from the Santiparvan, Altekar offered:

In both cases, narrated by Altekar, the Santiparvan envisioned human society emerging out of anarchy. US scholar, John Spellman in his Political Theory of Ancient India of 1964 wanted to emphasize the anarchy talk of Indian politics: “In ancient India, the fear of anarchy was almost pathological. Underlying every concept of kingship was the doctrine of mātsyanyāya—the analogy of the big fish eating up the little fish.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ For Spellman, this was crucial to comprehending the Indian institution of kingship. “Without understanding this idea”, he argued, “there can be no understanding of kingship in ancient India.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ For him, India was marked by a paranoid style of politics, and he peppered his writing with words like “horror” and “fright”. Referring to several Indian sources, Spellman contended that “[t]he horror with which writers viewed this situation can be traced throughout the period of ancient Indian history”.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Taking quite a different tack from Spellman, Hiralal Chatterjee, in his study of ancient Indian international law in 1958, felt compelled to dismiss any notion that the “logic of the fish” represented an actual historical state or, at any rate, any significant one.Footnote ¹²⁰ After telling us that Benoy Kumar Sarkar, early in the century, compared the European concept of a state of nature to the Hindu concept of mātsyanyāya or “logic of the fish”, Chatterjee explained that it was Sarkar's “view that historical progression from non-statal to statal conditions must have been a slow-going process in between which there existed a state of nature in which mātsyanyāya prevailed”.Footnote ¹²¹ To Chatterjee, the “logic of the fish” was not meant to reflect historical reality. He tells us that it “might have been an occasional phenomenon but could never have possibly governed human relations for any length of time”. Footnote ¹²² Indeed, “[m]ātsya-nyāya was after all a temporary phase, and it occurred at times when government became weak and powerless and failed to enforce its authority effectively in the country, thereby giving rise to a state which might alone was right.”Footnote ¹²³ Spellman, the US-based Orientalist, was offering up a pathology, while Chatterjee was defensively assuring his readers that the “law of the fish” was, at most, a fleeting reality.

Interestingly, Alexandrowicz brought Chatterjee and Spellman together to counter any popularly derived social contract theory of kingship. Alexandrowicz did this in a footnote after citing Cambridge historian F.H. Hinsley on the gradual formation of the idea of sovereignty. Alexandrowicz cited Chatterjee and Spellman for the proposition that “[t]he theory that sovereignty in the Hindu State was vested in the people seems doubtful”.Footnote ¹²⁴ Indeed, “[u]nlike the Buddhist doctrine, which tends to see the foundations of the State in [a] quasi[-]contractual relationship between [the] ruler and [the] people, Kautilya—in truly Brahmanist (or Hobbesian) way—is a pessimist and sees government as a remedy to the universal anarchy, or ‘the law of the fish’ according to which the stronger swallows up the weaker (matsyanyaya)”.Footnote ¹²⁵ For Alexandrowicz's Kautilya, “[t]he answer to anarchy is danda, which may inter alia mean punishment or sanction”.Footnote ¹²⁶ The sovereign must make use of the rod to thwart an anarchical state.Footnote ¹²⁷ We have here a Hobbesian Kautilya (if Hobbes is set between parentheses) without the social contract overlay and married to Brahmanism. In the East Indies book, Alexandrowicz explained that “[a]ccording to Kautilya's Arthasāstra politics were to a great extent divorced from the tenets of Dharma and governed by considerations of expediency”,Footnote ¹²⁸ although he was careful to explain that “in theory, the rules of Dharma prevailed over those of Artha” so that the “Arthasāstra appeared as a modifying factor indicating the rules of expediency”.Footnote ¹²⁹ Alexandrowicz turned to a Hobbesian reference point:

In this context, Alexandrowicz would return to the focus on the anarchical society and explained, “thus Kautilya concerned himself with the formulation of certain rules which could mitigate the catastrophic effects of anarchy”.Footnote ¹³¹ For Alexandrowicz's Kautilya, the solution was not just danda, the sovereign use of force. It also required the efficient operation of the mandala.

US political scientist Roger Boesche, in a book that in its title identifies Kautilya as “the first great political realist”, wrote that in Kautilya's Arthashastra, “[t]he king's first duty, just as it was for Hobbes's sovereign, was to ‘destroy the enemies and protect his own people'”.Footnote ¹³² For Boesche's Kautilya:

Here, Boesche quoted Spellman's account of the ancient Indian “fear of anarchy that was almost pathological”.Footnote ¹³⁴ That was the background for Boesche, as it was for Spellman. But Boesche aimed to further imprint on us the importance of the Hobbes comparison. He first addresses that comparison by maintaining that “[t]he best European comparison is with Hobbes, who also tried to outline timeless laws by means of a science of politics”, and he asserted that both Hobbes and Kautilya “believed the foundation of any science of politics must be clarity of language and crystal clear definitions of words”.Footnote ¹³⁵

Nevertheless, Boesche was more interested in the comparison with Machiavelli, who appeared on the very first page of his introduction. He was interested in the ruthless Machiavelli with Kautilya coming out the worse in the comparison: “In terms of offering frank and often brutal advice to a king, Kautilya makes Machiavelli seem mild.”Footnote ¹³⁶ If we think of the two source components of McClish's Arthashastra, components that led many commentators to refer to Kautilya's vacillation or ambivalence, Boesche came down firmly on the side of an immoderate Kautilya. Many commentators on Kautilya, even those writing sympathetic portrayals, dwelled on Kautilya's significant number of instructions regarding the use of ruthlessness, deception, and entrapment. Ghoshal explained in 1923 that in a section of the Arthashastra

Indeed, spies have been quite prominent in discussions of Kautilya. No one seems to leave them out, but Boesche sees spying as so important to the Arthashastra that he devoted a chapter to “Kautilya's Spy State”.Footnote ¹³⁸

Kautilya and the Machiavellian Moment

If anything, Alexandrowicz's writing on Kautilya is marked by its lack of attention paid to Machiavelli. His “Kautilyan Principles” engaged with a range of Kautilya's values without reference to Machiavelli, and it is only in the penultimate paragraph that he raised Machiavelli's name, although rather obliquely in his discussion of J.H.G. von Justi: “Justi seems perfectly aware of the concept of mandala, whether in its Kautilyan or Machiavellian version.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Nevertheless, the Machiavelli comparison remained a critical part of the reception history of Kautilya's Arthashastra and set out a range of values and valences that were addressed by Alexandrowicz's portrait of Kautilya. Of course, there were many Machiavellis, just as there were many Kautilyas, so it is worth mapping some of the various comparisons – particularly those made by the authors who appear in Alexandrowicz's notes.

Already in 1923, less than a decade after the publication of Kautilya's Arthashastra in English in 1915, Ghoshal addressed “the fashionable comparison between Kautilya and Machiavelli” and offered that “our answer must indicate some remarkable coincidences as well as contrasts”.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This was five years after Weber identified Kautilya's “[g]enuine, radical ‘Machiavellianism’” and held that “Machiavelli's own The Prince is harmless by comparison.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ In essence, this Kautilya was placed in the lineage of the devious “Machiavels” of Elizabethan literature, notably Shakespeare's Richard III. Certain Indian proponents of Kautilya felt the need to rush to his defence. Viswanatha offered that “[i]t is because the Arthaśāstra subordinates considerations of morality to expediency and practical gain that Kautilya has been styled the Indian Machiavelli”.Footnote ¹⁴² After quoting directly from Machiavelli about the use of fraud being “admirable and praiseworthy”, Viswanatha intoned that “[t]his is by no means identical with that of Kautilya and other Indian writers”.Footnote ¹⁴³ Nâg in 1923 referred to “this so-called Hindu Machiavel—ce soi-dissant Machiavel hindou”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ and asserted that Kautilya was not amoral and that war was for him a last resort.

Critiques adopting Kautilya-Machiavellian comparisons would be carried forward, including those by Indian writers. Nagendra Singh, not a great Kautilyan enthusiast, wrote in the late 1960s: “If the theory of brute force based on Machiavellian tactics has been advocated in Arthashastra by writers like Kautilya, its position in strict law has to be examined in relation to the principles of Dharmasastra.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Here he pushed the role of dharma. “In fact”, he assured his readers, “the supremacy of Dharmasastra was so well-established that all important literature on Arthasastra itself recognised Dharma or law as the highest objective.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ He then pivoted to addressing Kautilya: “Even Kautilya's Arthasastra categorically states that ‘in any matter where there is a conflict between Dharmasastra and practice or between the Dharmasastra and any secular transaction, the King should decide the matter by relying on Dharma alone.’”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Singh's “even Kautilya's Arthasastra” is a strong formulation and it recurred on the following page. There he provided a scenario regarding the conflict between expediency and dharma, offering that righteousness prevails “even” in Kautilya:

Singh's attitude can be set in relief against that of Ghoshal whose 1959 book served as an important source for Alexandrowicz. Prompted by the constant Kautilya-Machiavelli comparison, Ghoshal, in 1923, after noting the “fashionable” Machiavelli comparison, advised his readers that Kautilya “had evidently a wider scope than the treatises of Machiavelli who confines his attention to the art of government alone”, although Machiavelli was interested in a wider range of government types rather than focusing on monarchy.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Ghoshal compared their methods, signalling a charge well beyond questions of morality and immorality. He pointed to their shared empiricism and observed that “the empirical method of Machiavelli, supported as it is by frequent references to the history of classical antiquity, has some resemblance to the empiricism of Kautilya which is fortified by occasional references to the Indian traditional history”.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Ghoshal was still compelled to address the immorality issue directly. The stakes were high because of the emphasis he placed on Kautilya. In addressing the issue, Ghoshal began by making a concession to critics of Kautilya: “Finally, as regards the attitude of these authors towards religion and morality, it appears at first sight that Kautilya rivals and even surpasses Machiavelli in his sacrifice of these principles to the end of public welfare.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ But then he countered: “Nevertheless it has to be remembered that Kautilya reserves his immoral statecraft in general for extreme cases, and he advocates, as in his rules relating to the acquisition of territory, the kind and even benign treatment of the subjects.”Footnote ¹⁵² And Ghoshal wanted to identify Kautilya as the superior observer of humanity: “Kautilya's politics, we cannot help thinking, is based upon a deeper knowledge of human nature than that of his European counterpart.”Footnote ¹⁵³

When Ghoshal produced his massive, revised overview of Indian political thought covering the period from circa 1500 BCE to 1300 CE, thirty-five critical years of the study of Indian thought, including Kautilya, had taken place – and, it is important to remember that Ghoshal's first study, his University of Calcutta dissertation, was published in a small window after the manuscript of Kautilya's Arthashastra was first published. For Ghoshal, Kautilya was quite clearly the towering figure of Indian political thought. Before his subsection directly addressing “Kautilya and Machiavelli”, in a subsection on “Attitude Towards Religion and Morality”, he framed the long historical trajectory in which he placed Kautilya: “We may sum up this discussion by saying that if Kautilya upholds in some lines of his policy the high authority of the Brahmanical canon, he allows himself in other directions under the dominant influence of the Arthaśāstra tradition to make religion the instrument of statecraft, or in other words to sacrifice Theology at the altar of Politics.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Essentially, Ghoshal combined McClish's two poles in the portrait of a unitary author. He did not try to eliminate the immoral in Kautilya, although those elements in Kautilya were again limited and were engaged “specially with the policy towards the highly disaffected and dangerous elements of the kingdom as well as the enemy outside”.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Nevertheless, in the last sentence before the Kautilya/Machiavelli comparison, he admitted, “[n]ot without reason did the judgement of posterity fix upon Kautilya the stigma of being the symbol of a thoroughly unscrupulous, if highly successful, statecraft”.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Introducing the word “modern” but not exclusively starting with Kautilya, Ghoshal wrote:

It is worth focusing on a Machiavellian trait in Kautilya's thought for both of Ghoshal's volumes – taking advantage of public emotion and making direct reference to psychology. In 1923, after discussing the role of punishment as a restraining influence in Kautilya, Ghoshal referred comparatively to the Mahabharata and the Manusamhita: “The idea first mentioned, namely, that punishment is the great instrument of social order, receives a psychological setting in a third verse which is found alike in the Mahābhārata and the Manusamhitā.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The use of “psychology” as a term expanded in his 1959 study. After describing Kautilya's “exploitation of popular superstitions for political ends”, he wrote of Kautilya's “application of mob-psychology to Politics”.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Kautilya was here associated with emblematic twentieth-century notions of mass psychology ushered in by French sociologist Gustave Le Bon's famous 1895 study of the crowd. Ghoshal's Kautilya showed a mastery of psychological workings in politics and also called for the manipulation of religious sentiment, thereby flipping the role of religion in politics. This made Kautilya the secular peer of Machiavelli.

Despite the running Machiavelli-Kautilya comparisons, that comparison did not explicitly enter Alexandrowicz's narrative frame. Nevertheless, important values raised in some of those comparisons – namely, rationalism, modernization, and secularization – were clearly central to Alexandrowicz's Kautilya portrait. On the linking of modernization and secularization, Weberian trends contra Weber, this ties to the importance of modernization and secularization for Alexandrowicz's book on the Indian Constitution, where he endorsed B.R. Ambedkar's struggle for secularization and the disciplining of Hindu law on the subject of caste.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Machiavelli may not have been an explicit touchpoint for Alexandrowicz, but the Machiavellian Kautilya of writers like Ghoshal played into Alexandrowicz's Kautilya. One might, in fact, think of Alexandrowicz's Kautilya as involved in an effort not unlike that depicted in J.G.A. Pocock's Machiavellian Moment to address, through a refashioning of virtue, the corruption of society that Machiavelli and others confronted.Footnote ¹⁶¹

The Mandala and Divisible Sovereignty

Alexandrowicz's discussion of the Arthashastra in his Hague lectures largely focused on Kautilya's invocation of the mandala concept. He began a paragraph on the mandala by setting out the stakes for Kautilya: “One of the problems of primary significance before Kautilya was that of unity in diversity in the Indian sub-continent—particularly the reconciliation of the dynastic interests of hundreds of Rulers who had their place on the political map of India.”Footnote ¹⁶² To press the point that this was an issue of contemporary relevance for India, Alexandrowicz advised us in a footnote that “[t]he problem of unity in diversity is solved in present-day India by the adoption of a federal structure in the framework of which various linguistic communities enjoy separate Statehood under the control of the federal Centre”.Footnote ¹⁶³ Alexandrowicz then announced Kautilya's adoption of the mandala: “Kautilya's Arthasastra advocated the policy of the so-called Mandala, i.e. a policy of balance of power within the complicated network of alliances and conflicts conceived in circles of interests.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Intimately linked to this mandala idea was an emphasis on suzerain-vassal relations. “What is characteristic in this suzerain-vassal concept”, Alexandrowicz maintained, “is that it was not conceived as aiming at the absorption of vassals by suzerains which would not have served the idea of unity in diversity.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The rule here was that “[t]he vassal ruler was not to be subject to suppression or debellatio”.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ In a short span, we have some of the main strokes of Alexandrowicz's Kautilya portrait: divisibility of sovereignty, the mandala as a sustaining system, the network of suzerain-vassal relationships, and a prohibition on the obliteration of the defeated enemy.

Ghoshal, in 1959, ascribed the mandala concept to early Arthashastra writers preceding Kautilya, labelling it “an important landmark in the development of our ancient political thought”.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Providing a summary of the mandala scheme of twelve kings in a chessboard-style layout, he explained:

For Ghoshal, the mandala scheme in place before Kautilya “contemplates a system of States bound by hostile, friendly or neutral relations with an ambitious potentate—an Indian Louis XIV or Napoleon—as its central figure”.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ This forefronts the analogy to the European state system and the balance of power theory. We can look to Edward Vose Gulick's classic Europe's Classical Balance of Power of 1955 where he tried to winnow down the various competing theoretical views of the balance of power and identified it in its exclusively European self-image: “[I]n 1800, we may say that a kind of diplomatic fence divided the European state system from the rest of the world.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ On the peace-vs-stability scale, Gulick came down on the side of stability, admitting that with “the unavoidable movement of history”, the system “tends to emphasize the preservation of key members of the system at the expense, if necessary, of smaller or weaker powers”.Footnote ¹⁷¹ In this context, one is reminded of the two partitions of Alexandrowicz's Poland.

In the East Indies book, Alexandrowicz focused primarily on Kautilya as the foremost exponent of Indian political thought and moved into discussing the mandala by stating that “Kautilya concerned himself with the formulation of certain rules which could mitigate the catastrophic effects of anarchy.”Footnote ¹⁷² This was the Hobbesian anarchical note, played out on an “Indian political map [that] was a highly heterogeneous and decentralised one” – and here is the key but – “but there were unifying factors within this diversity, a phenomenon mutatis mutandis relevant in present-day Indian federal politics”.Footnote ¹⁷³ It is in this context that he introduced the mandala. So too, in the “Kautilyan Principles” article, in his list of Kautilyan principles – a very long list – Alexandrowicz stated regarding the mandala:

The mandala was only the starting point. Or rather, essential to its functioning was the prohibition of debellatio. Alexandrowicz in his Hague lectures moved from the mandala to the rule prohibiting the debellatio of the vassal. In the East Indies book, he observed, “[i]n the course of this struggle each Ruler tended to get the upper hand in his circle of States (mandala), but defeated Rulers were in principle not subject to debellatio”.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Rather, the Indian system became a complicated network of suzerain-vassal relationships and “[d]efeat meant vassal status”.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ What the shifting relations of suzerains and vassals meant was that sovereignty was ultimately divisible. And in Alexandrowicz's focus on divisible sovereignty, his Kautilya became Grotian. As Hedley Bull pointed out in his posthumously published essay on Grotius, “the members of international society in the view of Grotius are not merely states or the rulers of states but include groups other than states and, indeed, individual human beings”.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Alexandrowicz separated Kautilya from Grotius when he argued, “[a]s to the nature of inter-Sovereign relations, Kautilya did not conceive it in terms of ideal postulates as it was in the scholastic or Grotian law of nature, but in terms similar to the doctrine of Hobbes, i.e. as the reality of human conflicts and self-preservation”.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Significantly, when Alexandrowicz introduced Kautilya's Arthashastra in the “Kautilyan Principles” article, he turned to Grotius with regard to the “divorce of politics (internal and external) from moral philosophy”:

This tied to Alexandrowicz's contention that “[p]erhaps the strongest influence of the Kautilyan tradition revealed itself in the trend towards the secularization of the law of nations in the Hindu sphere of influence in the East Indies”. Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Secularization was part and parcel of the expansion of trade in the East Indies:

In addition to underscoring the interdependence of commerce and secularization – and Grotius was, for Alexandrowicz, the signature figure here – it was important to underscore the value placed on divisible sovereignty. Alexandrowicz referenced “present-day Indian federal politics”Footnote ¹⁸² in the concluding pages of his East Indies book, articulating the importance of an independent India providing a structure to address minorities, and he wrote an important article for the International and Comparative Law Quarterly criticizing attempts to identify the federalism of the new Indian Constitution as merely “quasi-federal”,Footnote ¹⁸³ which he reprised for a section of his book on the Indian Constitution.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ It is worth viewing Alexandrowicz's discussion of federalism in the context of normative debates about sovereignty, such as Harold Laski's critique of unified sovereignty in The Foundations of Sovereignty of 1921.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Laski's sovereignty arguments were certainly in circulation during Alexandrowicz's London years and, significantly, Laski was an important mentor to Indian political leaders, including Nehru and one of his leading foreign policy practitioners, V.K. Krishna Menon.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

It is enlightening to return to Alexandrowicz's biography here, starting with his birth in Galicia, the Austro-Hungarian administrative region in Poland, as the son of a general in the Austro-Hungarian Polish division.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Just there, we see the backdrop of the earlier Polish partitions and the complicated history and identity of Galicia with its competing populations as told in Larry Wolff's Idea of Galicia.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Alexandrowicz told us that, as a student in 1918, he participated in the independence movement in Cieszyn Silesia. After both practising law and working as an academic in the interwar period, Alexandrowicz, with the outbreak of the Second World War, engaged in the defence of the city of Lviv, and from Russian-occupied Lviv he moved to Bucharest where he was engaged in the work of the Committee for the Protection of State Property. Expanding on the biographical points in the introduction it is worth noting here that Alexandrowicz, having been arrested in 1940 by the Iron Guard in Bucharest and being held for several weeks by them, was able to make his way through the Middle East before arriving in London. In London, Alexandrowicz worked for the Polish Treasury Ministry, the Bank Gosporodarstwa (a development bank), and was chair of the short-lived European Central Inland Organization with its effort to fix the rail system. The India to which Alexandrowicz arrived in 1951 was only a few years removed from the blood-soaked Partition experience.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ When Alexandrowicz wrote his book on Indian Constitutional developments in 1957, a number of the key court cases were “preventive detention” cases involving Communist insurgents; in his discussion, he observed in understated language that “[p]reventive detention is to a great extent connected with the growth of undisciplined movements and parties which are a disturbing factor in Indian political life”.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Alexandrowicz noted that when the subject arose during the constitutional debates:

Significantly, when Selig Harrison came to choose a title in 1960 for his book on the founding period of independent India, he chose India: The Most Dangerous Decades.Footnote ¹⁹²

Alexandrowicz's personal experience in Europe and India in the 1950s provides an important backdrop for his reading of Kautilya and inter-state relations in early India. His Polish experience – with an interwar period full of violence, plebiscites (such as that in Upper Silesia in 1921), national minority tensions, and various coups – is full of sources of popular anxiety.Footnote ¹⁹³ Consequently, when Alexandrowicz described Kautilya's view of the state as an answer to the threat of anarchy, he had seen it. And yet, despite the pessimistic anthropology of Machiavelli and Hobbes – there is a reason why each received a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil Footnote ¹⁹⁴ – both Machiavelli and Hobbes were more prevalent in the analyses of Kautilya by other scholars. His Kautilya portrait placed emphasis on values that the East brought to the West, values based on rationalism, secularism, commerce, and divisible sovereignty that he would identify with Grotius.