Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi
The Department of History and Culture at Jamia Millia Islamia hosted the 44th Dr M. A. Ansari Memorial Lecture on 20 August 2026, featuring Professor Rajan Gurukkal, the incumbent General President of the Indian History Congress, as the distinguished speaker. The lecture, delivered in the Seminar Room, was, at least for me, an intellectually provocative intervention in one of the oldest and most persistent controversies of ancient Indian historiography. Entitled “Writing the Mauryan State from the South: Rethinking the Arthaśāstra,” Professor Gurukkal’s address returned to a text that has exercised an extraordinary influence upon modern reconstructions of the Mauryan state, subjecting its status and authority to a searching and rigorous re-examination.
At the outset, however, a qualification is necessary. The assessment offered here of Professor Gurukkal’s argument must remain provisional, for what he presented on this occasion was essentially a summary of a much more detailed paper, necessarily compressed to fit the limits of a memorial lecture. The full argument, the evidence on which it rests and the precise relationship Gurukkal establishes between manuscript transmission, textual composition and the historical reconstruction of the Mauryan state can properly be evaluated only after his paper becomes available and has been read in its entirety. What follows, therefore, is less a definitive critique of his thesis than (a) a response to the important historical and methodological questions raised by the lecture as it was heard, and (b) my understanding of the lecture as I heard him giving.
Even in its necessarily abbreviated form, however, the argument was fascinating in its ambition. Professor Gurukkal’s purpose was not to offer yet another description of Kautilyan administration, a task that has occupied generations of scholars and produced a vast and often repetitive literature. He raised instead the more fundamental question of what exactly the Arthaśāstra is, when and through what stages it assumed its surviving form, and whether the conventional association between the text, Kautilya or Chanakya, Chandragupta Maurya and the Mauryan Empire can any longer be accepted without qualification. This was not, as he made clear, a merely antiquarian exercise. The stakes were epistemological: how do historians know what they claim to know about the ancient state?
What made the lecture particularly stimulating was Professor Gurukkal’s decision to approach this familiar problem from an unfamiliar direction. Histories of the Mauryan Empire are naturally centred upon northern India: Pataliputra, Magadha, Chandragupta, Bindusara and Ashoka. The Arthaśāstra, when treated as the work of Chandragupta’s minister Kautilya, consequently becomes almost automatically a northern text and, more specifically, a document of the Mauryan state. Professor Gurukkal unsettled this apparently self-evident geography by turning attention to something historians have too often treated merely as a preliminary technical matter: the manuscript history of the text itself.
The core of his argument concerned the manuscript tradition of the Arthaśāstra, particularly the southern recensions that have survived in Kerala and Travancore. He started with the, yet satisfactorily answered question as to who was the actual author of this text? Kautilya? Chanakya? Or someone else. He went on to show that the root meaning of the term kautilye means ‘corrupt’. And the text time and again refers to “written by Kautilya”. Definitely no author would self proclaim himself as such. Definitely it is an attribution by some later editor. He also similarly dissected the term Chanakya. He asked his audience to consider why the text survived in the form it did, and what the geographical distribution of its manuscript traditions might tell us about its composition and transmission. The implication was provocative: if the Arthaśāstra is indeed a Mauryan text composed in the fourth century BCE by a minister at Chandragupta’s court in Pataliputra, why did its most important manuscript traditions emerge from the far south? And what does the textual history of the work suggest about its relationship to the Mauryan state?
Professor Gurukkal did not claim to have discovered an alternative author or a southern origin for the entire text. His argument was more subtle and, in many ways, more consequential. He suggested that the Arthaśāstra, as it has come down to us, is not a single work composed at a single moment but rather a text that underwent significant revision and redaction over a considerable period. The association with Kautilya, he proposed, may belong to a later stage of this textual history rather than to the work’s original composition. What historians have treated as the administrative manual of Chandragupta’s empire might instead be the product of a much longer intellectual tradition concerned with statecraft, political economy and the exercise of power.
This argument placed Professor Gurukkal’s lecture within a broader and increasingly influential current of scholarship on the Arthaśāstra. He acknowledged the work of earlier scholars who had raised doubts about the traditional attribution. The statistical analysis of Thomas Trautmann, which demonstrated that the internal structure of the text raises serious problems for the hypothesis of single authorship, was cited with approval. Patrick Olivelle’s editorial work and Mark McClish’s textual criticism were also invoked, particularly McClish’s demonstration that features seemingly fundamental to the work, including aspects of its attribution to Kautilya, belong to its redactional history rather than to the original composition.
What Professor Gurukkal contributed to this conversation was a new emphasis upon the material and geographical history of the manuscripts themselves. He argued that the southern manuscript tradition, far from being merely a peripheral curiosity, might offer crucial evidence for understanding how the text was received, transmitted and ultimately transformed. The Kerala and Travancore manuscripts, in his reading, are not simply copies of a lost northern original. They represent a distinct textual community with its own intellectual concerns and its own relationship to the traditions of statecraft that the Arthaśāstra embodies.
The convergence of different scholarly approaches was one of the most striking features of the lecture. Philology, textual criticism, manuscript history and the archaeology of state formation all pointed in the same direction: towards caution in treating the Arthaśāstra as a transparent window onto Chandragupta Maurya’s government. None of this diminished the importance of the text. On the contrary, it made the Arthaśāstra historically more interesting. Instead of being simply the administrative manual of one emperor written by one famous minister at the end of the fourth century BCE, it emerges as the product of a much longer intellectual engagement with power, kingship, political economy, law, warfare and the techniques of governance. The text becomes, in this reading, not a single document but a tradition, not a moment but a process.
Professor Rajan Gurukkal’s lecture was consequently an impressive exercise in historical criticism. Beginning with the Mauryan state, it led his audience eventually to a more fundamental problem: how historians know what they think they know about the ancient state. The title captured the method particularly well. To write the Mauryan state “from the South” is not simply to relocate Kautilya from Pataliputra to Kerala, nor is it to propose a southern origin for the text. It is to change one’s standpoint sufficiently to see that assumptions which appear self-evident from one historiographical location become questions when viewed from another. What from the north appears as a seamless administrative manual from the south reveals itself as a layered and composite text, the product of multiple hands and extended transmission.
And that, perhaps, was the most valuable achievement of the lecture. Professor Gurukkal did not merely ask his audience to rethink the authorship of the Arthaśāstra. He asked them to reconsider the historical procedures through which the Arthaśāstra became, in modern scholarship, the textbook of the Mauryan state in the first place. The lecture was thus a contribution not only to the history of ancient India but also to the history of historiography. It reminded historians that their sources are never transparent, that texts have histories of their own, and that the most familiar documents may conceal the most complex stories.
The discussion did not, however, end with the Arthaśāstra. The lecture was presided over by Professor Iqtidar Mohammad Khan, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Languages at Jamia Millia Islamia, whose concluding observations brought the occasion back to Dr M. A. Ansari and to the history of Jamia Millia Islamia itself. Professor Khan recalled Ansari as one of the founders of Jamia, but made an interesting distinction within the institution’s founding generation. Alongside those who had participated in its original establishment, he drew attention to what he described as a “second group” of founders: the men and women whose contribution lay in sustaining Jamia through its difficult formative years and thereby ensuring that an experiment begun in the political and intellectual ferment of the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat movements actually survived as an institution. Founding an institution, his remarks suggested, is not necessarily a single historical moment. Those who preserve a fragile institution and give it permanence may have as legitimate a claim upon its foundational history as those who formally establish it. This observation invited a more expansive understanding of institutional origins, one that recognises continuity, preservation and consolidation as acts of founding in their own right.
Professor Khan’s second observation was equally interesting, particularly for anyone familiar with the histories of both Jamia and Aligarh. He questioned the familiar description of Jamia Millia Islamia as essentially a “rebel” institution that broke away from the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College and the Aligarh movement. Such a formulation, he suggested, simplifies a considerably more complicated intellectual genealogy. In his interpretation, Jamia could instead be understood as carrying forward important elements of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s original educational vision: the creation of a modern institution founded upon scientific and rational education and intended to serve society without being confined within narrow communal boundaries. The later political circumstances surrounding Jamia’s establishment undoubtedly produced a rupture with Aligarh, but that institutional separation did not necessarily amount to a complete rejection of the intellectual principles with which Sir Syed had begun his educational enterprise.
It was a provocative observation because it complicates the conventional opposition between Aligarh and Jamia. Their institutional histories diverged sharply, particularly during the politics of the early twentieth century, yet Professor Khan’s remarks invited his audience to look beneath that divergence for an older shared commitment to modern education, scientific enquiry and intellectual emancipation. The genealogical relationship, in this reading, was not one of simple rupture but of selective continuity and reinterpretation.
There was, in fact, an unexpected coherence between these concluding remarks and Professor Gurukkal’s lecture. Professor Gurukkal had asked his audience not to accept an inherited account of the authorship and provenance of a canonical text merely because long repetition had made it appear self-evident. Professor Khan, speaking about Jamia, similarly invited his audience to reconsider an inherited institutional narrative: who counts as a founder, what constitutes an act of founding, and whether Jamia’s relationship with Aligarh should be understood solely through the language of rebellion and rupture. Both discussions, in rather different ways, reminded those present that history advances when familiar narratives cease to be treated as conclusions and are restored to their proper status as questions.
The Dr M. A. Ansari Memorial Lecture has over the years established a distinguished tradition of intellectual rigour and scholarly innovation. It is worth recalling that the very first lecture in this series was delivered by Professor Irfan Habib, whose own contributions to the historiography of ancient and medieval India have been foundational. Since that inaugural address, the series has played host to a remarkable array of historians, including Professor Shireen Ratnagar and Professor Shireen Moosvi, whose work on ancient economies and Mughal history respectively has enriched the discipline in profound ways. These names, alongside a host of other eminent scholars, attest to the enduring significance of this memorial occasion as a forum for critical historical engagement. It was fitting, therefore, that Professor Gurukkal’s lecture on 20 August 2026 should continue this legacy, challenging inherited assumptions and opening new perspectives on a text as consequential as the Arthaśāstra.
Professor Khan’s concluding remarks, meanwhile, situated the occasion within Jamia’s own institutional history, inviting reflection upon the nature of founding, continuity and intellectual inheritance. The juxtaposition was particularly apt: just as the Ansari lecture series has maintained a continuous tradition of scholarly excellence since its inception, so too does Jamia’s own history reward careful reconsideration of what it means to build and sustain an institution over time. The lecture was thus an event of considerable significance, not only for specialists in ancient Indian history but for anyone interested in the methods and assumptions of historical scholarship more broadly. It demonstrated that the most fundamental questions about the past are often raised by the most meticulous attention to the sources, and that intellectual renewal comes not from discarding tradition but from subjecting it to critical scrutiny. In the conversation between Gurukkal’s critique of the Arthaśāstra and Khan’s reflections on Jamia’s founding, the audience was offered a rich and rewarding meditation on history, text and institution.
ASHA: Blast From The Past 