Kautilya
Indian statesman, philosopher and scholar (also known as Chanakya or Vishnugupta, c. fourth century BCE), a semi-legendary figure to whom tradition attributes a decisive role in Chandragupta Maurya's rise to the throne of Magadha and the founding of the Maurya Empire, the first great pan-Indian empire in history, which would come to rule most of the subcontinent. According to legend, Kautilya was a Brahmin from Taxila, the great university city of the northwest, publicly humiliated by the Nanda court, who swore revenge and conspired meticulously, over years and with relentless patience, to overthrow the reigning dynasty and place his young protégé Chandragupta in power, subsequently becoming his chief minister and most trusted adviser. He is credited with the Arthashastra ('the science of material gain' or 'of statecraft'), a monumental treatise on statecraft, economics and military strategy, rediscovered by chance only in 1905 after centuries of being lost, which addresses with overwhelming pragmatism and no moralistic concessions almost every aspect of state administration: taxation, civil and criminal law, diplomacy, espionage networks, foreign policy, crisis and succession management, and especially the calculated use of power, force and even deceit and assassination as legitimate instruments of government when the higher reason of state demands it to preserve the realm —which has earned the work constant and inevitable comparisons with Machiavelli's The Prince, written almost two thousand years later in a quite different European context. The dating and unity of authorship of the text are much debated among modern scholars, who see in it probably a stratified compilation of several generations of accumulated political wisdom attributed to a single name; be that as it may, the Arthashastra remains the most important, detailed and systematic primary source for understanding the administrative organisation, economy and realist political thought of ancient India.