xviii PREFACE
must be so, although it seems patently absurd that the minister of an Emperor should confine his work to a moderate-sized kingdom, and should not once by word or allusion betray the name of the country for which and in which he was writing. Nevertheless there is nothing too fantastic to find defenders, though it is difficult not to feel that it is a very misplaced patriotism which asks us to admire the Arthacaslra as repre- senting the fine flower of Indian political thought. It would, indeed, be melancholy if this were the best that India could show as against the Republic of Plato or the Politics of Aristotle, or even the common-sense and worldly wisdom of the author ot the tract on the constitution of Athens, formerly ascribed falsely to Xenophon. Certainly fantastic is the elaborate theory worked out by J. J. Meyer in his translation, and in his treatise Uber das Weseu der indischen Rechtsschriften und ihr Verhaltnis zn einander zmd zu Kautilya (1927). These works, prodifced in great difficulties, contain, amid much that is unsound and despite disconcerting changes of view, valuable contribution / to our under- standing of Kautilya, and throw light on many of the obscure sides of Indian life. But the main thesis of the author, who seeks to distinguish two sharply severed streams of literature, the one Brahmanical, essentially concerned with magic, the other of the people, practical and legal, is clearly based on a false foundation. The effort to regard the Brahmins as something apart in Indian life is one of those delusions which may find sympathy in the non-Brahmanical classes in India and in Europe, but which run counter to all that we know of Indian thought, which owes its life and strength to the Brahmins, not to warriors or rulers, still less to the commonalty. The efforts of the author 1 £0 establish that the Arthacaslra was used by Yajiiavalkya are certainly without weight ; the evidence tends far more to show that the borrowing was the other way. Not a single passage referred to really favours the priority of the ArtUctfastra, but in several passages the obscurities of the
W. Ruben's defence of Jacobi's date {Festgabejacobi, pp. 346 ff.) is ineffective. For Kalidasa's relation to the Artha(d!tra, cf. K. Balasubrahmanya Ayyar, POCM. 1924, pp. 2-16.
1 PP- 6 5> 6 9> 7°. 7«> 77. 'J t. I S°, t33. I5 8 ~79. l 19r9°, "3. 216, 284, 290, 294, 299, 300.
