A kingdom is a king's paradise, as long as he is spared the trouble of
running it.
It is an old story, an old historical
drama, to be precise. But like most old stories, it leaves you
pondering about many things—temporal and atemporal. As the poet sings:
"Laughing and crying generations have come/ On the beaten sands of time/Our
footprints too have been/Covered with dust/ But now…"
Mudraraksasa (The Minister's Seal), ascribed to Prince
Visakhadatta (6th century), is a taut political
drama that draws on history for its subject matter. The story
concerns Candragupta, the first Maurya emperor, and his Prime Minister, the
legendary personality Canakya, who made him emperor. Canakya, the ascetic,
is paradoxically the powerful man of affairs—the practitioner of his cold
brand of statecraft laid out in his celebrated book Arthasastra. The principal architect of the great Mauryan empire,
his concept of statecraft rests on universal suspicion kept alive by a network
of spies and agents.
Canakya wishes to secure for the king the services of the astute and
loyal Raksasa, minister of a rival prince Malayaketu. Raksasa's loyalty is
his basic strength—but it is also a weakness through which he can be
vanquished. Canakya slowly starts weaving the web that will catch his rival.
As Siddharthaka observes much later in the drama, "Canakya's policy is like
the course of the Ganges in heaven. There is no way of charting it."
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