Nitisara, an early book of politics, was written by

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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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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 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' 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2023 Q77 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q77 — History PYQ with Answer