The "Machiavelli of ancient India," author of the Arthashastra
A counselor and political thinker of India’s Maurya Empire, said to have helped Chandragupta overthrow the old dynasty and found India’s first great empire. The Arthashastra he left is an intensely cold and realistic manual of statecraft and stratagem: detailing how to organize a bureaucracy, tax and manage finances, place spies, wage espionage and diplomacy, and even preserve royal power by any means — written nearly eighteen hundred years before Machiavelli’s The Prince, yet dissecting politics just as nakedly as a technology of power. He is called the "Machiavelli of India."
In the Arthashastra, Kautilya coolly discusses how a ruler should build a spy network, use deception and assassination when necessary, and weigh war against alliance — all with the interests of the state as the highest rule, untroubled by moral ideals. This treatment of power as pure technique is strikingly like Machiavelli’s nearly two thousand years later. Two "masters of stratagem," East and West, gave astonishingly similar answers across time.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.