The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.2

c15.2

The point is, of course, that all this rhetoric—whether of the old-fashioned colonial, the equally old-fashioned (though hardly out of fashion) nationalist, or the brand-new foreign-aid variety—will not help us to understand what has happened and is still happening. If we want to give substance to the theme of expansion and reaction, we shall have to interpret it in a radically different way. First of all, we shall have to avoid the obtrusive logic of the action-reaction type, which traps us into viewing the story of European involvement exclusively in terms of a clear-cut confrontation. Even when the swelling tide of nationalism produced the noncooperation and civil disobedience movements and the clashes of 1941, the confrontation kept a curious air of tepidity, which led one historian to speak of "a Dasehra duel between two hollow statues, locked in motionless and simulated com-