The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c10.126

c10.126

Finally, how and why can these cultural zones defy political history? No easy solution exists and it calls for greater investigation. The most fundamental reason seems to be the peculiar relation between the State and the Society in Ancient India. They were independent of each other. Inspite of the existence of institutions like *Chakravarti* and *Samrat*, the nature of political authority in ancient India may be compared to an inverted pyramid. State and society were independent of each other, and hence the political changes and tumblings of kings did not vitally affect the society. Otherwise, it is difficult to account for the survival of ancient corporate institutions (particularly at the village level) until the modern concept of State (people running it directly or indirectly) killed them. This relation can be expressed in terms of authority. In ancient India, the political authority was decentralized. The state impinged on the society, and as it may be put, at the apex of the inverted pyramid. At the village level, a harmonious blending of political hierarchy representing the State and the social hierarchy representing the basic unit of society, was achieved by the institution of hereditary officers. They combined the political authority of the State with the traditional authority flowing from their social status in the village. This traditional relation has now been broken up by the western type of democracy with the power vesting in the smallest constituent voters. Thus curiously, it releases new social forces competing for political and economic power and hence the entire concept of State-society relation has been altered by the introduction of the western Parliamentary Democracy. The recent strengthening of the centrifugal forces, by the political recognition of this regionalism, at the same time, calls for a proper balancing of both the centripetal and centrifugal forces.