Kautilya’s Arthashastra disappeared from Indian intellectual life for 900 years — and was rediscovered by a farmer ploughing a field near Mysore in 1920. Prof. B. Mahadevan, in this accessible introduction to one of the world’s most significant texts on statecraft and public administration, opens with that remarkable story: a manuscript stuck in a ploughshare, handed to the Oriental Research Institute, and eventually identified as a 2,200-year-old masterwork that had been unknown since the 11th century.
Arthashastra is Rajadharma — not a personal wealth management guide but a comprehensive system for governing states, managing citizens, and ensuring what Kautilya calls Yoga-Kshema: the citizen’s ability to acquire what they want (Yoga) and retain what they have earned (Kshema). The entire legal system, in Kautilya’s framework, exists to protect both dimensions. His taxation principle is precise: tax only when the fruit is ripe — not prematurely, not excessively, or the people will finish you.
Prof. Mahadevan maps Arthashastra’s three books of public administration onto modern management and corporate governance: protecting citizens from ministerial corruption, building counter-checks against abuse of power, criminal investigation methodology, and economic policy. His appeal to educators is direct — Indian institutions should take Arthashastra as seriously as they take modern management canon.
About the Speaker:
Professor B. Mahadevan is a highly respected professor of Operations Management at the IIM – Bangalore, where he has been teaching since 1992. Over his career of more than 27 years, he has gained extensive experience in teaching, research, consulting, and academic administration at prestigious institutions such as IIM Bangalore, IIT Delhi, and XLRI Jamshedpur. He has also held roles as a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College’s Amos Tuck School of Business and as a consultant with Deloitte Consulting LLP in the USA. Professor Mahadevan’s research interests are quite diverse. He explores the application of ancient Indian wisdom to address contemporary issues, investigates spirituality in the workplace, and studies management principles drawn from the Bhagavad Gita. In the field of traditional management, his research focuses on designing service systems that facilitate customer co-creation of value and addressing order allocation challenges in electronic markets. In addition to his academic pursuits, Professor Mahadevan played a pivotal role as the founding Vice-chancellor of Chinmaya Vishwavidyapeeth, a university dedicated to applied Sanskrit and Indian Wisdom, from 2016 to 2018.
