He also manoeuvred to attack Magadh’s neighbouring kingdoms with the help of the king of Nepal, promising him the kingdom of Kalinga in return.
He got them trained in warfare and made them the backbone of Chandragupta’s army. The greedy Dhanananda had weapons made for Alexander’s army Chanakya predicted the exit of the Greek conqueror and had the arms diverted to a group of forest dwelling tribes. The only one to oppose Chanakya is Magadh’s loyal guru Acharya Rakshas (Ashok Banthia). He encourages Chandragupta to kill Dhanananda, with the help of his disgruntled wife, and then, so as to keep Chandragupta focussed on his goal, has her murdered. He makes a vow not to tie the knot in his Brahmin’s shikha till he has accomplished his goal. Chanakya finds in Chandragupta (Rajeev Bharadwaj) the qualities of a ruler, and starts engineering his rise to power.
Manoj Joshi plays him with an air of authority tinged with cruelty as well as humour.Ĭhankya finds Dhanananda, the king of Magadh, a dissolute drunk who had married Chandragupta’s beloved, and found an excuse to sentence him to death. His information gathering through his network of students and spies is impeccable his instinct and foresight unerring. In the play, Chanakya leaves Takshila and comes to Magadh, at the time when Alexander the Great is on his conquering spree. Vishnugupt or Kautilya was a philosopher, economist (he wrote the Arthashastra) and political strategist, who picked Chandragupta, illegitimate son of the king Mahananda and a lower-caste woman Mora, steered him to the throne and the establishment of the Maurya dynasty.
Joshi, working from Mihir Bhuta’s excellent script, paints Chanakya as a patriot, who dreamt of a united India, and did whatever it took to achieve it, even if his methods seemed devious. Which is quite an achievement, because it is not an easy play to follow, particularly now, when most people’s proficiency in Hindi has dipped alarmingly at a time when most speak a strange hybrid of Hindi-English-regional languages, characters in Chanakya speak a Sanskritised Hindi, that sounds like music to the ear constantly assailed by gibberish.Ĭonsidering his many achievements, Chanakya is not as well-known as he should be - his name is attached to that of Chandragupta Maurya - but the mighty ruler was just one of his creations. Manoj Joshi has been performing Mihir Bhuta’s play Chanakya over 30 years and more than a thousand shows, and still packing ’em in. As a suburban theatre in Mumbai reopens post-lockdown with Chanakya, revisiting the successful play:
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