C.H. Alexandrowicz's India and the Kautilyan Moment

Abstract

This article addresses the international legal historian C.H. Alexandrowicz's engagement with Kautilya's Arthashastra as part of his revision of the place of India and Southeast Asia in the development of international law. The article locates Alexandrowicz's writing on the Arthashastra against the backdrop of the debates about the Arthashastra that ensued upon its discovery in 1905, including controversies about its date, authorship, and place in the tradition of Indian political thought. The article reviews the Indian nationalist reading of Kautilya, the various attempts to compare Kautilya to Hobbes and Machiavelli, and the values that were particularly important for Alexandrowicz in telling the narrative of the place of Kautilya's Arthashastra, its rationalism, secularism, and the divisibility of sovereignty.