The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c14.s1.1

c14.s1.1

In order to place the problem in its context, we should look more closely at the conceptual framework of the ancient Indian state. I think we should dismiss the deceptive appearances of a centralized unity held together by a bureaucracy reaching down from the king to the people at large. This certainly seems to be the ideal presented by the *Arthaśāstra*, but its reticence on chains of command and reporting suggests otherwise. Indeed, we find an almost pathetic stress on the necessity of officials' trustworthiness and a concomitant all-pervading spy system, which can only block administrative action and in the end reduce it to chaos. Moreover, it is clear that the realization of a centralized bureaucratic set-up requires objective conditions, such as a high degree of monetization, which would make it possible to separate the functions of government from rights in the soil. As it was, the ruler was mostly forced, like his feudal Western counterpart, to parcel out clusters of his own superior rights. Thus, for instance, Gupta inscriptions seem to suggest that many nominal officials were rather like feudal lords, whose official charges depended less on the ruler's orders than on their own landed power. After all, even France's ancien régime was hardly capable of the centralized bureaucratic control it attempted to achieve.