The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.45

c15.s1.45

Now bureaucracies may be utterly irritating and deeply disturbing, but they cannot by themselves change society. Although the British Indian government increasingly widened and deepened its dealings with Indian society, it only did so by reducing total situations to abstract models, which were amenable to impersonal rules and regulations. For instance, shifts of rights in land from indebted landlords to their creditors—a disturbing phenomenon to the administration, which feared that it might result in sedition and violence, or rather, more deeply, felt it to be a threat to its static view of society—led to the construction of agricultural castes so that legislation preventing alienation of land from one category to the other could be devised and applied. That such categories were not too well-founded in reality is, of course, clear from what we have already seen of the unavoidable interlocking of landholding, commerce, finance, and, as modern additions, journalism and law practice. Local society could, of course, find its way toward accommodation with the bureaucratic heaven and its less heavenly minions. But the important point is that government action was directed at specific, abstractly defined cases, not at the fluid, multidimensional web of relations that was the substance of society and was for the same reason studiously avoided by the administration. Actual influence networks could sometimes be destroyed by bureaucratic action, but then there were others to take their place without a change in the social system being effected. Thus, for instance, in a study of the social consequences of extensive land transfers in the Benares region, Bernard Cohn, answering the question, What happened to the dispossessed? concluded that “the overall answer may well be that nothing happened”.⁴⁹ On the other hand, the bureaucratic grid and procedures may have added a new but hardly innovative way for fighting the old fights.⁵⁰