BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 77 of 144

Correct — B, Kamandaka. The Nitisara — properly the Kamandakiya Nitisara, 'the essence of polity' — is a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft written in verse and attributed to Kamandaka. It is conventionally placed in the Gupta age, roughly the fourth to sixth centuries CE; the dating comes from its language and from its evident dependence on the Arthashastra rather than from any colophon, so it is given as a range and not a year. The strongest proof is that the text identifies its own lineage in its first few verses. In the nineteenth-century Bibliotheca Indica English translation, after invoking Ganesha and saluting the 'lords of the earth' for whose guidance the maxims are laid down, the poem turns to a named human teacher: 'Salutation unto the highly intelligent Vishnugupta' — praised as foremost among those conversant with arthashastra, and as the one through whose contrivance 'the wide-spread, renowned, powerful and mountain-like dynasty of Nanda' was destroyed. The translator's footnote to that verse spells the identification out: Vishnugupta was another name of Chanakya, who also went by Kautilya. Later in the work the same translator refers to Chanakya as 'the author's preceptor'. That single fact does two jobs at once. It proves Kamandaka is a distinct and later author, because no writer salutes himself as his own teacher; and it explains exactly why Kautilya is the natural wrong answer, because the Nitisara belongs to Kautilya's school and says so on its first page. What Kamandaka produced is a compression rather than a copy. Where the Arthashastra is a bulky prose manual of administration, the Nitisara is a compact poem of maxims — arranged under nineteen heads in that English edition — moving from the education and self-control of the prince, through the division of learning and the duties of the varnas, the king's duty of impartial justice, the essential constituents of good government and the duties of ministers and servants, to the protection of the king's own person. The doctrinal apparatus is Kautilyan throughout: saptanga, the seven limbs of the state; mandala, the ring of natural friends and enemies; shadgunya, the six-fold policy; and the four upayas.

• (a)Kautilya — Kautilya — also Vishnugupta, also Chanakya — wrote the Arthashastra, not the Nitisara. This is the strongest distractor on the page precisely because the two works belong to one tradition: Kamandaka versifies and condenses Kautilya, and opens by saluting him. The discriminator is title and form. Arthashastra is Kautilya's encyclopaedic prose manual of the Mauryan tradition; Nitisara is Kamandaka's verse digest of it, centuries later.
• (c)Charaka — Charaka is the compiler of the Charaka Samhita, the foundational Sanskrit text of Ayurvedic internal medicine — kayachikitsa — and has no work on polity attached to his name at all. UPSC set exactly this pairing, Charaka to Medicine, in a 1996 match-list. He is on this page as a generic 'famous ancient author' name, and the only route to picking him is remembering the name while having lost the field it belongs to.
• (d)None of them — 'None of them' can only be right if all three named options fail, and option (b) does not fail. It attracts the candidate who half-remembers a different niti text with an overlapping name — usually the Sukra Nitisara ascribed to Shukracharya, which UPSC once listed on a page alongside the Arthashastra, or Bhartrihari's Nitishataka. The existence of another book with 'niti' in its title does not unseat Kamandaka's authorship of this one.

Ancient India produced a distinct secular literature on government, usually called nitishastra or rajaniti, separate from the dharmashastras that dealt with law and religious duty. Its founding text is Kautilya's Arthashastra, a prose manual covering revenue, espionage, war, courts, mining, irrigation and the management of officials. Around that core grew a family of derivative and rival works: Kamandaka's Nitisara, the Gupta-age verse digest; the Shukraniti or Sukra Nitisara ascribed to Shukracharya; the Nitivakyamrita of the tenth-century Jain scholar Somadeva Suri; and, at the didactic edge, Bhartrihari's Nitishataka and the fable books Panchatantra and Hitopadesha, which teach the same statecraft through animal stories. All of them share a technical vocabulary that exams love to test: saptanga (the seven constituents of a state — king, minister, territory, fort, treasury, army, ally), the mandala theory of concentric circles of friends and enemies, shadgunya (the six measures of foreign policy — sandhi, vigraha, yana, asana, samsraya, dvaidhibhava), the four upayas (sama, dana, bheda, danda) and the vyasanas, the vices that destroy kings.

Two habits get this right quickly. The first is to read the title rather than the reputation. A '-sara' is by definition a distillation of an existing tradition, so a book called Nitisara is almost certainly not the founding work of its field; the founding work of Indian polity is the Arthashastra, and its author is precisely the man Kamandaka bows to in his opening verses. The stem's phrase 'an early book of politics' is what tempts candidates towards Kautilya, but 'early' here means old, not first — and Kautilya's early book of politics has a different name. The second habit is to learn works, not just authors. Every option on this page is a real and famous name; what separates them is which text hangs off each name. Kautilya → Arthashastra. Kamandaka → Nitisara. Charaka → Charaka Samhita. Once the pairs are held as pairs, a question of this shape takes five seconds and the 'None of them' escape hatch stops looking attractive. That escape option, incidentally, is worth a note: on BPSC papers of this kind it is offered constantly and is right very rarely, and reaching for it is usually a sign that the candidate knows the names but not the titles. One honest caveat on Kamandaka himself: nothing biographical survives. We have the text, its self-description as standing in Vishnugupta's line, and a dating inferred from style — no dates, no patron, no place.

• Nitisara = Kamandakiya Nitisara, 'the essence of polity', a Sanskrit verse treatise on statecraft attributed to Kamandaka and conventionally placed in the Gupta age (about the 4th–6th centuries CE)
• Its opening salutation, in the Bibliotheca Indica English translation: 'Salutation unto the highly intelligent Vishnugupta', praised as foremost among those conversant with arthashastra and as the destroyer of 'the wide-spread, renowned, powerful and mountain-like dynasty of Nanda'; the translator's footnote records Vishnugupta, Chanakya and Kautilya as names of the same man
• The maxims are arranged under nineteen heads in that edition — the prince's study and control of his passions, the division of learning and the duties of the varnas, the king's duty of impartial justice, the constituents of good government, the duties of masters and servants, punishment of the wicked, and the guarding of the king's and crown prince's person
• Arthashastra versus Nitisara: Kautilya's is prose and encyclopaedic, of the Mauryan tradition; Kamandaka's is verse and a digest, carrying the same apparatus — saptanga, mandala, shadgunya, the four upayas — in memorisable shlokas
• Charaka's work is the Charaka Samhita on Ayurvedic internal medicine; UPSC matched Charaka to 'Medicine' in a 1996 match-list alongside Visakhadatta to Drama, Varahamihira to Astronomy and Brahmagupta to Mathematics
• Neighbouring titles in the same genre: Shukraniti (Sukra Nitisara) ascribed to Shukracharya, Nitivakyamrita of Somadeva Suri (10th century, Jain), Bhartrihari's Nitishataka, and the niti fable-books Panchatantra and Hitopadesha

• Answering Kautilya because the Nitisara is Kautilyan in doctrine and opens by saluting him — belonging to a school is not authorship
• Confusing the Nitisara with the Sukra Nitisara (Shukraniti) or with Bhartrihari's Nitishataka, and then reaching for 'None of them'
• Treating Charaka as a general ancient authority rather than a medical one — his single work is the Charaka Samhita

BPSC asks this as a flat title-to-author recall with a 'None of them' escape hatch bolted on — no statements, no codes, nothing to reason from, so the pairs must simply be known; and on this paper that fourth option is offered repeatedly and is almost never the answer. UPSC will not ask it so bluntly. It dresses the same knowledge as a match-list of authors against fields, as in 1996 with Visakhadatta, Varahamihira, Charaka and Brahmagupta, or it goes one level deeper and asks what a named text actually provides — as in 2022, when it asked what Kautilya's Arthashastra lays down about slavery.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In its opening verses the Nitisara of Kamandaka salutes, as the destroyer of the Nanda dynasty, a teacher it names as

  • (a)Chandragupta Maurya
  • (b)Vishnugupta
  • (c)Bhartrihari
  • (d)Somadeva Suri

  Answer(b) Vishnugupta — another name for Chanakya or Kautilya, author of the Arthashastra, whom Kamandaka treats as his preceptor.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Nitivakyamrita, a Sanskrit treatise on polity, was composed by

  • (a)Somadeva Suri
  • (b)Kamandaka
  • (c)Shukracharya
  • (d)Vishnu Sharma

  Answer(a) Somadeva Suri — the tenth-century Jain scholar; Kamandaka wrote the Nitisara, the Shukraniti is ascribed to Shukracharya, and Vishnu Sharma is credited with the Panchatantra.