Kautilya

Kautilya, also known as Chanakya and Vishnugupta, is a figure of ancient Indian tradition credited across narratives dating from the fourth to eleventh century CE with serving as chief adviser and prime minister to Chandragupta Maurya, the first Mauryan emperor, and to his son Bindusara, helping establish the Maurya Empire in the fourth century BCE. He is conventionally identified as the author of the Arthashastra, an ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, economic policy and law covering matters from taxation and public administration to criminal procedure and military strategy. Modern scholarship treats this attribution with considerable caution: the Arthashastra is now thought, with high probability, to have been compiled by multiple authors over several centuries following the Mauryan period, and its identification with Chanakya is regarded by many historians as a later attempt to lend the work greater prestige. Tradition places his birth in either the Golla region of South India or the city of Takshashila, and his death at Pataliputra, the Mauryan capital. Whatever the true authorship of the Arthashastra, the Kautilya-Chanakya tradition occupies a foundational place in the history of Indian legal and political thought, pairing statecraft with detailed prescriptions for law, taxation and governance.