Excerpt from Considerations on Some Aspects of Ancient Indian Polity: Sir Subrahmanaya Aiyar Lecture, 1914 A second accidental circumstance restricting inter polation must have been furnished by the growing unintelligibility of the meaning of the Arthasutra. This may perhaps be due to the circumstance that, as pointed out by Professor Rhys Davids, in a similar case, in the pre face to his translation of the Dialogues of the Buddha, page xxi, asutra book was not intended to be read. It was intended to help the students to follow their Master's lectures and to memorize what had been taught. The sutras of Kautilya are often, and naturally, fuller than the other sutras. But for such fulness, they would have rapidly become completely unintelligible, especially as from their nature, the meaning of the Arthasutras must have been kept within a close circle. While no one is interested in keeping an aphoristic work on grammar, or philosophy, or religion or even law as a mystery, powerful interests become desirous of maintaining the inviolable secrecy of the interpretation of such important - one may almost say dangerous - works as the Arthasutras. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Between the 1910s and the 1970s, an eclectic group of Indian thinkers, constitutional reformers, and political activists articulated a theory of robustly democratic, participatory popular sovereignty. Taking parliamentary government and the modern nation-state to be prone to corruption, these thinkers advocated for ambitious federalist projects of popular government as alternatives to liberal, representative democracy. Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought is the first study of this counter-tradition of democratic politics in South Asia. Examining well-known historical figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji, M. K. Gandhi, and M. N. Roy alongside long-neglected thinkers from the Indian socialist movement, Tejas Parasher illuminates the diversity of political futures imagined at the end of the British Empire in South Asia. This book reframes the history of twentieth-century anti-colonialism in novel terms – as a contest over the nature of modern political representation – and pushes readers to rethink accepted understandings of democracy today.