Machiavelli, European avatar of Kautilya
It is interesting to note the modern appropriations of Machiavelli and India’s Kautilya, says TEOTÓNIO R DE SOUZA
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A quick search in the internet throws up a spate of references to Kautilya as ‘Machiavelli of India’ despite 19 centuries of distance between them! It is just one more illustration of the eurocentrism of the colonial education that taught the world to seek models in Europe, even for persons and events that anticipated Europe and Europeans by centuries and millennia. In his The Idea of Justice (Penguin Books, 2009) the Indian Nobel Amartya Sen points to this aberration and laments the one-sidedness in Western approach to knowledge.
Here we have an instance where India could rightfully boast of an Indian precursor of Machiavelli. Kauitilya was a contemporary of Aristotle, and helped putting into power the Mauryan dynasty. He served as counselor and produced Arthasashtra as a treatise on strategy and political economy. The proof of its success can be calculated from the expansion and power that a native Indian empire in the subcontinent ever achieved in the pre-colonial times.
By the fact that Arthasashtra remained unknown till 20th century, it failed to contribute to the world thought, while it contained for instance, all the modern principles of political economy, including whatever concerns internal revenues, international trade and value of labour and just price, which Hume, Smith, Ricardo and JS Mill sought to define around mid-18th century.
Arthashastra refers to its author as Kautilya, and once as Vishnugupta. But there is an outside contemporary reference to Arthasashtra of Kautilya, and that is in Panchatantra. This classic Indian contribution to world literature has a long saga of transmission through oral and regional translations, much before the sanskrit version was published for the first time in Bombay by MR Kale in 1912. The original version is presumed to belong to an unknown jain scribe of 9th or 10th century. That was translated into French in 1871 by E Lancereau, and reedited by L Renou in 1965. An earlier version of L’Abbé Dubois in 1826 was based upon south Indian versions in Telegu, Kannada and Tamil. The Fables of La Fontaine have their deep source in India, having travelled through Kashmir, Persia and the Middle East, along the silk route.
It is not very different from the Indian contribution to mathematics, which through the mediation of Arabs permitted Europe to move into modernity and continues to be known erroneously as Arabic numbers. More significant and crucial for the Europeans to leap into modernity and its modern forms of capitalism was the pre-existence of the rich markets of China and India, as Andre Gunder Frank insisted in recent times to much annoyance of the Western sociologists and politicians defending the Iberian Discoveries as the beginning of the world modernity.
For Andre Gunder Frank, the Europeans of the Age of Discoveries bought the ticket to the Asian train by plundering African gold and Latin American silver, but very soon revealed their true genius by high-jacking the train with the brute force gained from the Industrial Revolution. What had been a trade among partners, following the Industrial Revolution it became an unequal trade, in favour of Imperial Europe. Without such loot the European modernity was hardly likely, or at least at the pace it happened.
Andre Gunder Frank was a distinguished western economist, a rare Chicago-boy who did not hold candle to the Chicago school of neoliberals and paid dearly for his advice to the Chilean president. His dire predictions about the ephemeral nature of European modernity and the need to ‘re-orient’ the global economy are coming true.
We wish to emphasise in this brief essay that not unlike its contemporary Panchatantra, also Arthasashtra may have entered the world thought and lost its original moorings. I praise this feature as a true hallmark of any thought, namely its universal reception. It then ceases to belong to any individual or group patent. The contemporary Chinese legalist school that sought a centralised Qin empire of the Han dynasty could also belong to the same trend of thought as promoted by Arthasashtra in Mauryan India. The Roman law was a western equivalent, and Machiavelli sought to recover it during the European Renaissance.
I wish there would be more interest among European scholars to trace the linkage of the Arthasashtra teachings in the western thought, through the mediation of the satrapies that Alexander the Great left behind in north-western India. Seleucus and Menander were prominent among them and had close dealings with the Indian empire of Chandragupta Maurya, and presumably with his Indian minister Vishnugupta, author of Arthasashtra, through diplomatic agents like Meghastenes (302 a.C-288 a.C.), who could have taken home the Indian manual of strategic thought. It is known that his chronicle “Indica” served Flavius Lucius Arrianus as a source of documentation for his classic history of the campaigns of Alexander of Macedonia. Could there be more than just a Roman inspiration for Machiavelli’s Prince?
It is interesting to note the modern appropriations of Machiavelli in the west and of Kautilya in India for training in management, and promotion of executive’s guides, on the basis of their teachings in psychology and politics of power. Kautilya (name derived from katu, meaning astute) had no doubts that beneath all sanctimonious rhetoric and pretense lay the basic struggle of life and instinct of man for survival at all cost.
Our reflections could have some interest in the context of the project entitled ‘Machiavellism and Machiavellisms in the Western Political Tradition (16th-20th Centuries)’ [www.hypermachiavellism.net] under the direction of Professor Enzo Baldini (Università di Torino). A connected exercise is proposed to be held in Lisbon in the form of a seminar on ‘Maquiavel Dissimulado: Religião, império e herança romana no mundo português’, analyzing the linkage of religion, empire and roman heritage in the context of the Portuguese imperial experiences.
The organisers of the Portuguese seminar have announced their interest in discussing the issues raised by the Florentine author, and the reception and reinvention of his ideas in the Portuguese context. The privileged point of discussion will be the theories and political praxis of acquisition and conservation of territories in the Portuguese empire as related to Machiavelli’s suggestions, paying special attention to the articulation between religion and politics, and how far the Roman inspiration influenced the process. I think that the discussion could be widened to understand how the Indian precursor of Machiavelli could have influenced the same experiences, and also a cultural (and subsequently political and military) resistance to the Machiavellic/Roman inspired Portuguese imperial politics and praxis.
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Egoistic attitude and missed blessings
By Arlette Azavedo
This is a very beautiful story that will surely touch your heart, it did touch my heart. It is, indeed, an incredible story and goes like this: A young man was getting ready to graduate in college. For many months, he had admired a beautiful sports car in a dealer’s showroom, and knowing his father could well afford it, he told him that was all he wanted.
As graduation day approached, the young man awaited the signs that his father had purchased the car. Finally, on the morning of his graduation, his father called him into his private study. His father told him how proud he was to have such a fine son, and told him how much he loved him. He handed his son a beautiful wrapped gift box. Curious, but somewhat disappointed, the young man opened the box and found a lovely, leather-bound Bible. Angrily, he raised his voice at his father and said, “With all your money you give me a Bible?” and stormed out of the house, leaving the holy book.
Many years passed and the young man was very successful in his business. He had a beautiful home and wonderful family, but realised his father was very old, and thought of visiting him. He had not met him since graduation day. Before he could make arrangements, he received a telegram telling him his father had passed away, and willed all of his possessions to his son. He needed to come home immediately and take care of the things. When he arrived at his father’s house, sudden sadness and regret filled his heart. He began to search his father’s important papers and saw the still new Bible, just as he had left it years ago. With tears, he opened the Bible and began to turn the pages. As he read those words, a car key dropped from an envelope taped behind the Bible. It had a tag with the dealer’s name, the same dealer who had the sports car he had desired. On the tag was the date of his graduation, and the words…PAID IN FULL.
Can we imagine the sorrow and regret that we went through at that particular time when he opened the Bible and got the envelope with the car key? It must have been an extremely poignant and a touching feeling as though he was hit hard by sharp weapon. How many times do we miss God’s blessings because they are not packaged as we expected? We take things or others for granted. A lot of times we do miss the blessing the Lord wants to give us, because of our egos. Also, to remember that we are more than conquerors through Jesus Christ and nothing is impossible with Him. How often we forget to see the beauty of every little thing happening in our lives, bad or good, then? Everything happens for a reason.
In my experience, I have learned not to expect miracles to happen right away, but to wait for God’s answers with patience and humility. We are sometimes so busy fulfilling our earthly dreams in life that we forgot and ignore many things and often hurting others very much. However, we got to understand that all of these are temporary and sometimes we tend to jump in an impatient manner that we forgot that things happen for a reason and it might be way better than what we just anticipate. Since we expect too much we don’t recognize the little miracles, because we focus on what we don’t have and ignore what we already have. The fact that I woke up this morning is already a blessing and everything else today is a bonus. Not all that glitters is gold, isn’t? We can get caught up in the materialistic things of the world and the hustle and bustle of life. Finally, it is a lesson learnt by the above story to try to notice more and accept certain things.
Let me end with an apt quote by Maltbie D. Babcock – “Better to lose count while naming your blessings than to lose your blessings to counting your troubles.”
