0.1 INTRODUCTION

Empires that were too big to fall – he toppled them.

Sciences that were too vast to comprehend – he fathered them.

A continent that was too great to rule – he conquered it.

(She looked at the idol that the university’s art students had crafted of him – Spartanesque hair, sharp eyes, and a peacock mount.)

It is the 4th century BCE.

A centuries-long war has just come to a bloody end.

The dream of the people of Mathura – symbolized by the celebrated tales of the exploits of Balarāma and Kṛṣṇa , known then as Saṃkarṣaṇa and Vāsudeva – has been crushed by Magadha: the Evil Empire, the arch-enemy of Vedic civilization, that barbarous dark realm that rejects the light of Vedic science and industriousness and cuts off the tongues of men who speak the truth.

Punjab – including the ancient University of Takṣaśilā, whose history went as far back as legend – has fallen to Persian rule, leaving only a thin stretch of the continent ruled by various war-like plutocracies and republics.

The people of a once-glorious civilization are resigned to their fates – to live in poverty and servitude, with no chance of recovering what was lost from them.

In a Southern country far-removed from this political scene, a boy, lacking in any wealth and prestige, rejects this reality.

(And four arms – one held his magnus opus, The Science of Wealth; another rained coins; the third held an ornate imperial sceptre; and last held a clay tablet bearing his invented symbols of secret communication.)

Making his way to the University of Takṣaśilā, he becomes an outspoken and opinionated political scholar – defending both the Vedic moral system and the Bārhaspatya school of rational philosophy; unifying them under the science of his own creation, the general study of societies and human interaction: Economics.

And after thus making his name in the sciences and among those with an intrigue for it, he uses his newfound reputation to weave and execute a plot of unprecedented tactical genius.

In only one stroke, he accomplishes multiple such feats, each one of which for any other man, however ambitious, would have been, at least, life’s entire goal:

... the conquest of Magadha itself – winning over not only the country, but its people’s minds and hearts, winning the great civilizational war of eons on behalf of the Vedic people ...

... the expulsion of foreign invaders – the Persians, Greeks and potential future threats from Scythian tribes ...

... the conquest and unification of the Indian subcontinent under the banner of the Peacock ...

... the implementation of rational economic policy, sound institutions and infrastructure throughout the continent, ending the dark ages that Ajātaśatru’s expansionism had wrought, ushering in a subsequent millennium of unprecedented economic, technological and scientific advancement ...

... the creation of extensive global trade networks centered around the Indian subcontinent

… in addition to his already profound academic contributions. He was a true polymath – describing in his writings the first-known cryptographic ciphers, several “static and dynamic devices” and chemical concoctions including the earliest description of gunpowder, and being a sufficiently proficient medical practitioner to employ mithridatism and perform caesarean surgeries on the fly.

(The land that had forgotten Alexander in half a breath, had elevated Cāṇakya to a god – and perhaps even among the gods, he would excel and emerge the best of them.)

His philosophy of social science and political ethics remained the most prominent and politically influential for nearly a millennium after his death – with texts as distant in location as from Takṣaśilā to Pāṭaliputra to Madurai, and in subject matter as from the Panchatantra to the Kāma Sutra declaring “Wealth and wealth alone is important!”, and with his Rājamaṇḍala theory the dominant model of statecraft both in India proper and its subsidiary civilizations along the mainland and maritime routes to the East.

Many of his particularly idiosyncratic innovations are forever immortalized by poetic curiosity, such as: viṣakanyās (women with whom sexual contact was lethal as per legend, realistically this was a compound myth made of the factual weaponization of mithridatism and use of femme fatale assassinations); the all-female imperial guard comprised entirely; the nightly changing royal sleeping chamber.

His reign as Prime Minister of the empire of his creation saw a flurry of innovations, particularly in finance – cheques, private corporations and the double-accounting bookkeeping system (which would eventually lead to the celebrated development of the number zero) – in the sciences – with influential mathematician Piṅgalā and father of linguistics Pāṇini both flourishing during this period – and in religion – with the Bhagavad Gītā, the Hindu synthesis and the canonization of the Ramayana and Mahābhārata – dating to this period.

(From the cities that were rebuilding, after suffering centuries of destruction, with a certain confident optimism that was uniquely Indian – to far-removed villages and all the way to the mountainous peaks – all that could be heard were tales of the fantastical exploits of “Cāṇakya-Candragupta”, who had been placed in history as the intellectual descendants of famed duos from the Vedas like Mitra-Varuṇa, Indra-Agni and Vasiṣṭha-Sudās, or from the tales of bards like Saṃkarṣaṇa-Vāsudeva, Kṛṣṇa-Arjuna and Nara-Nārāyaṇa. Perhaps, then, it was not that Indian civilization was amnesiac – but rather it had a different order of priorities for setting things to memory – in which politics was of far less importance than science, and within politics, foreign figures had the least importance. It was such a unique form of patriotism, one wherein they did not even need to explicitly pronounce or be aware of a national identity – instead, it was simply assumed, as if it were ether, as if it were politeness or the many other oddities she had become aware of among her own people.)

This book tells the tale of Cāṇakya Viṣṇugupta – or as he is popularly known for his cunning, Kautilya.