Merchant spies pretending to be his disciples may worship him as one possessed of preternatural powers. Such a spy surrounded by a host of disciples with shaved head or braided hair may take his abode in the suburbs of a city, and pretend as a person barely living on a handful of vegetables or meadow grass taken once in the interval of a month or two, but he may take in secret his favorite foodstuffs. He even cynically proposes using fake holy men for this purpose.Ī man with shaved head or braided hair and desirous to earn livelihood is a spy under the guise of an ascetic practicing austerities. Kautilya sometimes goes to amusingly absurd lengths to imagine various sorts of spies. One of the most notorious features of the Arthashastra is its obsession with spying on the king’s subjects. He reveals the imagination of a romancer in imagining all manner of scenarios which can hardly have been commonplace in real life. He mixes the harsh pragmatism for which he is famed with compassion for the poor, for slaves, and for women. Although often compared to Machiavelli’s Prince because of its sometimes ruthless approach to practical politics, Kautilya’s work is far more varied–and entertaining–than usual accounts of it indicate. This treatise on government is said to have been written by the prime minister of India’s first great emperor, Chandragupta Maurya.
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