WHEN GURCHARAN DAS invited me to compose a book on the Arthashastra for his series I was delighted, for it took me back to a favorite text on which I had written a book and a PhD dissertation a few year ago (Trautmann 1971). The Greek philosopher Heracleitus has said that one can never step in the same river twice. He might have said one can never read the same book twice, not because a book keeps changing like a river, but because the reader changes from one reading to the next. A new reading of a loved book is a deeper reading, and Kautilya’s Arthashastra has surprised me with many things that were new to me this time around. Partly it is a question of focus. I was to concentrate on its economic aspect, which gave my reading direction and a set of new questions to ask; and it was to be short and accessible, which sharpened the field of vision and kept me from straying into lesser issues. What was commissioned as a work for general readers became, unexpectedly and to my pleasure, a field of new discoveries in scholarship. I thank Gurcharan Das for bringing me this appealing opportunity, and for his support and comments along the way.
The first reader of the manuscript was Robbins Burling, a friend who does an author the kindness of giving comments that are intelligent, blunt and uninhibited. My colleague at the University of Michigan, Tom Weisskopf, who encouraged me to write this book, commented on the first draft, giving me the benefit of his lifelong study of the economy of India. I also got invaluable comments from Mark McClish, whose dissertation on the composition and structure of the Arthashastra gives him deep knowledge of the text; from Nadia Sultana Hasan, who gave me the perspective of an economics student; and from fellow author in this series Lakshmi Subramaniam, who gave me helpful comments on the big-picture aspects of the argument. Gurcharan Das fed me thematic suggestions, writings of himself and others useful for this project, and words of encouragement along the way. I thank them all, warmly, for their very great help. I have no doubt the book is better for their criticisms. Readers are not to blame them, however, for the remaining shortcomings of the book, which belong to me alone.