Analysing Kautilya from a wider perspective

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, May 6

The Covid-impacted months of March and April have been cruel for Indology as they snatched away two masters of this field—Michael Leibig and Dietmar Rothermund, both from Germany.

Michael Leibig was a German scholar of Kautilya, who passed away on April 15 after a long illness, borne with fortitude. He was 69. A month earlier, Dietmar Rothermund, one of the world’s top scholars on Indology and senior to Leibig by nearly two decades, also passed away in Germany.

Fittingly, Leibig, a fan of Kautilya’s Arthashastra, was Fellow and Lecturer at the world’s oldest university in Heidelburg where Rothermund was Professor Emeritus at its prestigious South Asia Institute (SAI). This was where after abandoning a career in journalism that Liebig was awarded a PhD for a thesis offering new insights often overlooked by shallow analysis by British and other scholars who misread Kautilya as a precursor of Machiavelli. 

It was after a visit to India that he decided to study Kautilya and approached the Arthashastra as a political scientist, comparing the English and German translations and developing new insights that connected with the observations that Max Weber offered in his 1916-17 essays on Hinduism.

Thereafter, Liebig worked closely with IDSA’s major ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ project, its leading scholars, and others. His would blend domain expertise into these translations, teasing out the concepts embedded in Kautilya’s 6,000 aphorisms of prose (sutras). This included acknowledging Kautilya as the first proponent of a raison d’état doctrine, entirely original in his analysis of warfare (including humane treatment of the people of a defeated opponent kingdom), paralleling the much sparser text in Sun Tzu’s Art of Warfare. Kautilya was also credited with a pioneering the science of intelligence gathering. 

Liebig’s works include “Kautilya’s Arthashastra: An Intellectual Portrait” (co-authored with Subrata K Mitra) and “Comparing Kautilya with Sun-Tzu, Nizam al-Mulk, Barani and Machiavelli”.

While Leibig remained active on the seminar circuit, diversifying onto other topics, including internal security, his seminal contribution continued to be advancing the view of Max Weber on Arthashastra. During his lectures, recalled a former student, Leibig veered away from the Hindutva view that Kautilya’s thesis on public administration was junked by the Mughals and the British. Rather, he emphasised that many of its elements were incorporated.

Rothermund was of an earlier era and a personal acquaintance of former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. A classicist academic unlike Leibig who drifted in from journalism, Rothermund is especially remembered for co-authoring “A history of India” that examined the major political, economic, social and cultural forces shaping the history of the subcontinent with the fourth volume also taking into account the recent developments such as in Kashmir.