THERE ARE THREE translations of the Arthashastra into English (by R. Shamashastry, R.P. Kangle and L.K. Rangarajan), and there is soon to be a fourth (by Patrick Olivelle).
When Shamashastry’s translation first appeared (1905) it caused a sensation in the scholarly world because of the rarity and importance of the text. Much later, Kangle made a critical edition of the Sanskrit text of the Arthashastra, based on all the manuscripts and commentaries that had been found by his time, and also a translation and a scholarly study. His scholarship was comprehensive and his arguments are well supported by evidence. Because of that, Kangle’s views on the Arthashastra have earned an authority that is unsurpassed, and his translation was an improvement upon Shamashastry’s pioneering work. More recently L.K. Rangarajan has brought out a translation that rearranges the text for the modern reader.
This book gives only a sample of the wealth of detail to be found in the Arthashastra, and readers will want go to the book itself for more. They may also like to try the work of Benoy Chandra Sen, a distinguished Sanskritist. He wrote a book called Economics in Kautilya, which is full of interesting insights. It is well worth reading even though it was published as long ago as 1967, if one can get hold of it. Kangle’s commentary on the Arthashastra (1965; Part III of his work on the Arthashastra) has much that is helpful.
Discussion of the age and authorship of the Arthashastra is endless; every scholar who writes on the Arthashastra has something to say on the topic. On the structure of the text, on the other hand, there is an oddity that only a few have remarked about, but that has profound implications. The Arthashastra is divided into fifteen books (adhikarana), but the books are internally divided into 150 chapters or lessons (adhyaya) and 180 topics (prakaranas). The oddity is that the division into chapters and into topics cross cut one another, such that some chapters have several topics, and some topics are spread over more than one chapter. My view (Trautmann 1971) is that the division into chapters is secondary, as Winternitz and Keith had argued earlier, so that the memorial verses and colophons at the ends of chapters would be later additions. McClish (2009) has now offered an extensive proof of this and has developed the implications in great detail, in a doctoral dissertation and an article, soon to be published.
Those who want to know more about the ancient sources on Chanakya may find the material conveniently gathered in chapter two of my book on the Arthashastra (Trautmann 1971).
On republics, J.P. Sharma’s Republics in Ancient India (1968) is excellent.
On the Roman trade there is the classic work of Warmington, The Commerce between the Roman Empire and India (1974) and the recent collection of articles edited by Begley and De Puma, Rome and India: The Ancient Sea Trade (1991). Wheeler’s original site-report on the excavations at Arikamedu (1946) is well worth reading, and contains a catalogue of find-spots of Roman coins in India. Begley (1996) reports on more recent work at this important site. Tomber, in Indo-Roman Trade: From Pots to Pepper (2008), gives an overview, and the articles on specific topics in French and Italian scholarship brought together in De Romanis and Tschernia, eds., Crossings: Early Mediterranean Contacts with India (2005) are first rate.
Readers may like to know of the literature on the workings of economies that differ from modern economies with price-making markets. Here the fundamental work is Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1957; first published in 1940). On ancient economies the main work is Polanyi et al., Trade and Market in the Early Empires (1957). Marshall Sahlins’ book on the economies of small-scale societies, Stone Age Economics (1972), is a classic, in the tradition of Polanyi.