Century of forgetting

Like all iconic texts the Arthashastra,or more accurately its putative author Kautilya,had a long mythology woven around him,particularly in literary productions. At one level he became the personification of the etymology of his name: kutila. But he also became a kind of Great Legislator,the saviour of India from internal dissension and external attack. While his teaching came to signify ruthlessness in a political cause,the opposite cautionary message could also be drawn. If politics requires you to be ruthless you better be sure that it is for the welfare of the subjects,and it is done with supreme detachment from personal ambition. The text itself is not an easy read. It is like the planning commission,national security council,administrative reforms commission all thrown into one,peppered with insights from moral psychology and encased by a layer of precise theoretical vocabulary that we can barely reconstruct. Its strength is the lapidary insight,not the extended argument. Its Machiavellianism is directed more against holders of power. It gives an unnerving sense of what it is like to snatch snippets of order from a deeply chaotic world always threatening to go out of kilter; the legitimacy and possibility of dharma,paradoxically,rests on a contingent foundation of power. And power is a mercurial thing indeed.

Like all iconic texts the Arthashastra was fated to be known more than read,to be quoted more than understood. The latest Penguin translation thought it fit to unconscionably rearrange all the passages according to their topicality,as if the text was a random series of quotes to be mined. But the publication of the Shamashastry edition in 1909 had energised not just the history of political thought,but the study of history as well. In retrospect,the output occasioned by the text till the ’40s is staggering in its scope and intensity. There were of course dangers in appropriating the texts. As early as 1916,K.V. Ramaswami Aiyangar had warned in this connection that issues pertaining to history were “being obscured and findings vitiated by the tendency to treat history as an ally of dogma and to look into the armoury of our ancient polity for weapons to be used in the arena of modern political controversies.”

But what,in retrospect,stands out about the intellectual milieu in which the text appeared in 1909 is this. First,the centrality of what we now broadly call the liberal arts,where a broad learned and for the most part liberal sensibility led to a new kind of interest in history and culture. Second,the gap between Sanskritists and a broader humanities culture was not as wide. We are now in a university system where even historians of ancient India struggle with Sanskrit,and Sanskritists cannot think beyond their ossified paradigms. There was an astonishing attempt in Indian universities to weave a rich set of traditional resources into a broad and deep debate without either being uncritical or apologetic; Sanskritists could in a certain sense perform the role of public intellectuals and ally that heritage to broad humanistic concerns. One can think randomly of Gopinath Kaviraj,Narendra Dev,Radhakamal Mukherjee,Hazari Prasad Dwivedi,Laxman Shastri Joshi or even Radhakrishnan. And certainly an astonishing burst of creativity in Hindi,Bengali and other literatures was as much a product of a cri-

tical engagement with a long tradition as it was of European influences.

There were undoubtedly nationalist motives at the base of the revival. But what is astonishing is that that intellectual ethos firmly resisted reductionism in its treatment of complicated arguments. It acknowledged that these were texts to think with; they interrogated us as much as we interrogated them. But in Indian universities that culture was soon replaced by the most deadening reductionism. The minute you pronounced a text feudal or bourgeois you no longer had to read it,in any serious sense of the term reading. More than anything,the liberal arts were killed by reductionist votaries who had no space for the central aspiration of liberal arts: to produce more sophisticated and enlightened forms of self knowledge. Genuine knowledge of this kind that can be had only in a broad conversation,that includes not just the living,but the dead and imaginatively,perhaps,the yet to be born. The more serious threat to a broad humanities culture does not come from the market. It comes internally,when scholars no longer believe that the purpose of education is to distinguish the truly valuable from the merely fashionable,the purely instrumental from the genuinely elevating thought. Classicism was not about glorifying the past or scholastic pedantry,it was a fundamental resource to be deployed,reworked,deconstructed,and sometimes even lampooned in the process of a deeper understanding of the Self.

The astonishing diminution of the humanities and liberal arts has many sources. Reductionist leftists who dismissed genuine thought; narrow minded nationalists whose zeal for using tradition to beat others was matched only by their ignorance; Sanskrit Pundits who are the worst obstacles to understanding the richness of the resources on which they sit; a broad university culture that,at the undergraduate level,discouraged any serious engagement with genuinely deep and enduring questions; and pedagogical protocols that forgot how to connect a rich body of texts with emerging needs of social self-knowledge. Whether we can create a university culture that can reverse this trend is an open question. But the least we can do is acknowledge Shamashastry and his generation that gave us both a tradition and the means to transcend it.

The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi

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