Chanakya

Chanakya, also known as Kautilya and Vishnugupta, is credited with founding the Mauryan Empire and with writing the Arthashastra, the most systematic treatise on statecraft to survive from the ancient world. He probably lived in the fourth and third centuries BC, and the details of his life come from later traditions that disagree with one another. The common account holds that he was a Brahmin scholar teaching at Takshashila, that he was publicly humiliated by Dhana Nanda, the king of Magadha, and that he vowed to destroy the Nanda dynasty. He found and educated a young man of obscure origin, Chandragupta Maurya, and with him overthrew the Nandas around 321 BC, establishing an empire that eventually covered most of the subcontinent. He served as chief minister to Chandragupta and possibly to his son Bindusara. The Arthashastra was lost for centuries and rediscovered in 1905, when a manuscript was handed to the librarian R. Shamasastry in Mysore. Its authorship and date are disputed; it may be a compilation revised over generations around an original core. It is a manual for the acquisition and maintenance of power, and it is entirely unsentimental. It covers taxation, coinage, agriculture, mining, law and the management of famine, alongside detailed instruction on espionage, the use of informers and assassins, and the circumstances in which treaties should be broken. Its theory of foreign policy — the mandala doctrine, in which one's neighbour is an enemy and one's neighbour's neighbour an ally — anticipates later balance-of-power reasoning. He is often compared to Machiavelli, though he wrote roughly eighteen centuries earlier and covers far more administrative ground.

• Lived: 375 BCE – 283 BCE
• Nationality: Indian
• Roles: statesman, philosopher, economist