The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c12.14

c12.14

Now it may be argued that the unique phenomenon of the brahmin, whose monopoly of the source of authority and legitimation leaves the king with mere power and effectively bars kingship from developing its full potential as the central regulating force, makes the Indian case a very special one. The problematic character of kingship would then be an exclusively Indian phenomenon. It cannot be denied that the Indian case cannot be put on a par with other cases of a division between spiritual authority and temporal power such as the problem of church and state in Western Europe or the one of *sulṭānat* and *'imāmat* in the Muslim world. This is not the place to go into the details of these other situations, nor is the present writer qualified to do so. But the essential difference would seem to be that in the Christian as well as the Islamic world, both spiritual authority and temporal power have to be realized in the single sphere of society. India, on the other hand, recognizes a second, independent human sphere, namely, the renunciatory life that turns its back on the social world. It is in the sphere of world renunciation that the brahmin and the ultimate authority he stands for belong. Society and its king have no claim on him beyond what he is willing to concede and he can—ideally, he even should—withdraw from society. In the Indian case, the two forces do not compete for priority within one single sphere. On the contrary, the spiritual one simply opts out, leaving the other to cope for itself as best it can.³²