The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c12.s4.2

c12.s4.2

As long as settled agricultural communities were limited in number and restricted in their resources, while wide expanses were left open, the alternation of settled life with nomadic raiding and transhuming expeditions to supplement meager resources may have been a reasonably effective proposition. However, with the growth and spread of settled agriculture, a different type of organization and a new conception of authority would have been needed. At any rate, the ritual reform gave a new answer to the problem of authority. The cyclical pattern of alternation between grāma and araṇya did manage to keep up the contact between this and the other world, between settled community and authority transcending it, but at a price of violence and insecurity. Authority and the settled life dependent on it remained all the time contingent on the uncertain outcome of the cycle of violence. We can readily understand the criticism which even the *Mahābhārata*, though still clearly showing the original cyclical pattern and even recommending death while facing the enemy as the "sacrifice of battle",⁹⁴ has Bhīṣma, himself a warrior-sage, level against war. Even victory in battle, Bhīṣma convincingly argues, is simply an evil.⁹⁵ The same idea seems to underlie the ritual reform, which as we have it in the texts, rules out violence and battle, reducing the last remnants of agonistic rites such as the chariot drive to innocuous, strictly ritualized affairs. In order to achieve this, it broke the cycle of violence. And by breaking the cycle, it opened the way to free authority and make it unassailably transcendent.