King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India:
Kautilya's Arthasastra
A New Annotated Translation by Patrick Olivelle
Oxford
University Press, New York. 2013.
ISBN13: 9780199891825ISBN10: 0199891826 Hardback, 784 pages
"For years unreadable and inaccurate translations have discouraged general readers and Sanskrit-less scholars of India from reading the Arthasastra, though this work is central to anyone's understanding of Indian history, law, politics, economics, society, religion, and much more. At last we have a translation of extraordinary erudition and clarity that makes this fascinating and crucially important text truly accessible. The prose is transparent, clean, devoid of jargon or highly technical language; the meticulously detailed notes clarify the more abstruse points. All of Patrick Olivelle's translations are first-rate, but this is his great masterpiece."--Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago Divinity School
"Patrick Olivelle's fluent and illuminatingly annotated translation will be a revelation to all those interested in ancient India and in the organization of ancient states more generally. By offering a powerful counter to the popular notion of an ancient India focused only on transcendent religious speculation, it significantly complicates and deepens our picture of that place and time."--Stephanie W. Jamison, Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures and of Indo-European Studies, the University of California, Los Angeles
"Patrick Olivelle crowns a distinguished career by translating one of the most difficult, and by many measures the most valuable, of Sanskrit texts, Kautilya's Arthasastra. A lifetime of scholarly translations from Sanskrit has prepared him to scale these daunting heights, and the result is magnificent. The work is informed by a strongly-argued theory about the composition of the Arthasastra, and the translation is richly annotated. All scholars of ancient India will benefit from this splendid new translation."--Thomas R. Trautmann, Professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology, University of Michigan
"Patrick Olivelle, better qualified for the job than any other
Indologist by decades of experience in translating ancient and medieval
Indian texts, as well as by his long and highly productive engagement
with Indian legal literature, has presented a new translation of the
famous and in many regards unique Arthasastra
of Kautilya, the only extant witness of the once much larger genre of
texts dealing with the science of law and statecraft. By a rare
combination of philological acumen, insightful recognition of textual
and exegetical problems, an enviably vast erudition, and a developed
feel for the language, Olivelle has succeeded in preparing a richly
annotated translation that is both readable and utterly reliable. It not
only outdoes all its predecessors but will also stand unchallenged the
test of time."--Albrecht Wezler, Emeritus Professor of Sanskrit,
University of Hamburg, Germany