Which one of the following activities was not a part of the daily time-table for a King as prescribed in Arthashastra?

Correct — B, Visit the town incognito. The Arthashastra sets out the king's day in Book I, chapter nineteen, and it is unusually literal — the daylight hours are cut into eight parts and each is assigned. The first goes to the arrangements for defence and to the accounts of receipts and expenditure, which covers option (a). The second is given to the affairs of citizens and country people, the third to bathing, dining and study. The fourth is when he receives revenue in gold and appoints his superintendents, which is option (c). The fifth is spent corresponding in writs with the assembly of ministers and taking in what the spies have gathered, which is option (d). The sixth is for amusement or private deliberation, the seventh for inspecting elephants, horses, chariots and infantry, the eighth for war planning with the commander-in-chief. The night is divided the same way, from secret emissaries in the first watch to the priests and the high priest in the last. Nowhere in either list does the king walk his capital in disguise. Kautilya sends spies out in disguise by the hundred; the king himself stays where petitioners can reach him.

• (a)Receive reports on defense — This is the very first item of the king's day. Kautilya opens the schedule with the protection of the fort and the account of what has come in and gone out, so the pair of defence and money is where the working day begins.
• (c)Receive revenue in cash — The fourth part of the day is set aside for exactly this — the text says he receives revenue in gold, hiranya, and attends to the appointment of superintendents in the same sitting.
• (d)Consult his Council of Ministers — The fifth part of the day is given to correspondence in writs with the assembly of ministers, together with the secret reports of spies. Consultation is scheduled, not occasional.

The Arthashastra, attributed to Kautilya and surviving as a manuscript recovered in Mysore in 1905, is a manual of statecraft rather than a law book or a chronicle. Its picture of kingship is administrative: the ruler is the working head of a bureaucracy of superintendents, and his own time is a resource to be budgeted. The eightfold division of day and night in Book I is that budget written out. Kautilya's own justification is blunt — a king who is energetic makes his servants energetic, and the treasury and the army follow.

The trap here is that (b) sounds like something a good king in a story would do, and there are famous rulers who are said to have done it. Wandering the city at night in disguise belongs to the literary tradition of the just ruler, not to Kautilya's timetable. The Arthashastra achieves the same end by a different route: the king does not go looking for the truth about his city, he pays a standing service of spies — householders, ascetics, traders, poisoners — to bring it to him, and the schedule reserves a slot each day and each night for receiving what they bring. Reading the option that way turns a memory question into a reasoning one, because a state with a professional intelligence apparatus has no need to send the head of state out in a false beard.

• The day and the night are each divided into eight parts, and every part has an assigned duty.
• Defence arrangements plus the account of income and expenditure open the day; war planning with the commander-in-chief closes it.
• Revenue is received in the fourth part of the day, along with the appointment of superintendents.
• The ministers are consulted by written communication, and spies report in both the fifth part of the day and the first part of the night.
• The king sleeps only through the fourth and fifth parts of the night and is woken by trumpets.

• Reading the Arthashastra as a record of what the Mauryas actually did rather than as a manual of what a king should do.
• Importing the disguised-ruler motif from story literature into a text that instead builds a spy service.
• Dating the text to Chandragupta Maurya's reign without noticing that scholars place its final form considerably later.

Asked as an odd-one-out on a primary text, where three options are lifted almost verbatim from the chapter and the fourth is a plausible invention.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In Kautilya's Arthashastra, the first part of the king's day is set aside for

  • (a)hearing the complaints of the citizens
  • (b)arrangements for defence and the accounts of income and expenditure
  • (c)the inspection of elephants and horses
  • (d)receiving reports from secret agents

  Answer(b) arrangements for defence and the accounts of income and expenditure — the schedule opens with protection and money, and the army review comes only in the seventh part.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is NOT among the seven limbs of the state in Kautilya's saptanga theory?

  • (a)Amatya
  • (b)Janapada
  • (c)Durga
  • (d)Dhamma

  Answer(d) Dhamma — the seven limbs are swami, amatya, janapada, durga, kosha, danda and mitra; dhamma is Ashoka's moral vocabulary, not Kautilya's structural one.