Kautilya’s Arthashastra, after its rediscovery in 1905, became an important reference point for the nationalist discourse in India. The treatise, with its foundational roots in the third-century BCE, helped the nationalists discover selfesteem and confidence. It was instrumental in breaking the mental barriers forged by the colonialist discourse that instilled an intellectual and political inferiority among Indians. Arthashastra, though set in different time and socio-political context, became a proof of India’s glorious but forgotten tradition of political and economic thought. After the rediscovery of Arthashastra, two waves of Kautilyan studies can be identified. The first that focused on translating and producing an authentic version of the text can be traced to the sixth or seventh decade of the 20th century. The second is the recent trend accompanied by India’s rising status as an economic, political and military power in the comity of nations. Going beyond translations and established Western concepts, this wave explores the philosophical meaning and value of the text. Though there were intermittent studies between the first and the second wave as well, they, barring few, suffered from the counter-rhetoric of cultural and intellectual superiority. Deepshikha Shahi’s Kautilya and Non-Western IR Theory may be seen as part of a second wave of the study of Kautilya’s Arthashastra. The book addresses two fundamental issues with regard to the popular imagination of the Arthashastra: a) the theoretical location of the text in the realpolitik vs moralpolitik debate; and b) the possibility of the practice of Kautilyan approach in politics, governance and IR. The book uses Kautilyan Anvikshiki (science of enquiry), hitherto ignored, as the philosophical key to unravel the mystery on the two issues. The Arthashastra earned notoriety due to its perceived realist approach and frequent comparison with Machiavelli, as deciphered and popularized by early Kautilyan scholars. The reading and understanding of the text relied heavily on contemporary Western theoretical frames. Scholars focused on either translating the text or analysing it using Western ‘quasi-religious’, egoistic and compartmental perspectives. They termed the text as brutally realist with no moral and normative system. The liberal, normative and moral aspects of the text were ignored either intentionally, or because of the inability of dominant Western conceptual thought to reconcile two opposing theoretical strands to understand political reality. Scholars Strategic Analysis, 2020 Vol. 44, No. 1, 59–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/09700161.2020.1699998

中文翻译：

---

Kautilya 和非西方 IR 理论

Kautilya 的 Arthashastra 在 1905 年重新发现后，成为印度民族主义话语的重要参考点。这篇论文的基础起源于公元前三世纪，帮助民族主义者发现了自尊和自信。它有助于打破殖民主义话语在印度人中灌输知识和政治自卑感所形成的精神障碍。Arthashastra 尽管处于不同的时代和社会政治背景，但成为印度光荣但被遗忘的政治和经济思想传统的证明。在重新发现 Arthashastra 之后，可以确定两波 Kautilyan 研究浪潮。第一个专注于翻译和制作真实版本的文本可以追溯到 20 世纪的第六个或第七个十年。第二个是最近的趋势，伴随着印度作为经济、政治和军事大国在国际社会中的地位不断上升。这波超越了翻译和建立的西方概念，探索了文本的哲学意义和价值。尽管第一波和第二波之间也有断断续续的研究，但除少数之外，他们遭受了文化和知识优势的反驳。Deepshikha Shahi 的 Kautilya 和非西方 IR 理论可能被视为第二波 Kautilya 的 Arthashastra 研究的一部分。这本书解决了关于《艺术论》的大众想象的两个基本问题：a）文本在现实政治与道德政治辩论中的理论位置；b) Kautilyan 方法在政治、治理和 IR 中实践的可能性。这本书使用了迄今为止被忽视的 Kautilyan Anvikshiki（探究科学）作为解开这两个问题之谜的哲学钥匙。Arthashastra 因其感知到的现实主义方法和与马基雅维利的频繁比较而臭名昭著，正如早期的考蒂利安学者所破译和推广的那样。文本的阅读和理解在很大程度上依赖于当代西方理论框架。学者们专注于翻译文本或使用西方“准宗教”、利己主义和区隔视角来分析它。他们称该文本为没有道德和规范体系的残酷现实主义。文本的自由、规范和道德方面被有意忽略，或者因为西方占主导地位的概念思想无法调和两种对立的理论分支来理解政治现实。学者战略分析，2020年卷。44, No. 1, 59–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/09700161.2020.1699998