Author Sriram Balasubramanian on ‘Kautilyanomics’ and how readers are embracing complex content

Why ‘Kautilyanomics for Modern Times’ was a labour of love for author-economist Sriram Balasubramanian

Everything in life happens for a reason. Author-economist Sriram Balasubramanian can vouch for that.

A few years ago, when he was working a data set of renowned economist Angus Maddison as part of his research, he found some fascinating numbers with respect to India and China's GDP over the centuries.

It was around the same time that he chanced upon the Arthasastra.

"Unfortunately, much of the modern literature I keep hearing about Kautilya's Arthasastra was either on its strategic element or the self-help books or fiction material it lent itself to," he says, seated at a cafe in Chennai during a recent trip. What was the 'artha' in Arthasastra, was a question that mystified him. It was also around the same time that he was undergoing a part-time course learning Sanskrit from the Madras Sanskrit College.

These three rekindled the writer inside him. The author started work on combining these subjects. Today, he sports a broad smile, thanks to the praise that that book, Kautilyanomics For Modern Times (Bloomsbury Publishing), is garnering.

"The years of prosperity in India that Maddison alluded to had to have some kind of a framework before it. If Raja Raja Chozhan could build an amazing engineering marvel in the Brihadishvara Temple in Thanjavur, he had to have some kind of understanding of economics and value of money.

These thoughts led to Kautilyanomics..., a work that took him more than five years to complete. "It was a labour of love," he says. Kautilyanomics... tries to create an economic framework to Kautilya’s thinking and contextualises it in today's times.