The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.48

c15.s1.48

What happened is, briefly and prosaically, this. Instead of obtuse stagnation, or the equally popular notion of a vulnerable arcadia, Indian society showed once again its remarkable resilience. The public domain of the state had been taken out and set apart from society, but this set Indian society free to develop new potentialities. The withdrawal of power and resources which had fed and strengthened the interaction and overlap of society’s innumerable local and regional segments meant at first that Indian society lost much of its diffuse but effective coherence. It became more parochial and fragmented even though the government covered all of the subcontinent. However, the corollary of the government's aloofness was that society was left with more resources than before, which, moreover, increased considerably over the nineteenth century, and these resources stimulated the development of new linkages.⁵¹ The government, by creating channels for its actions and allocations, set certain cadres for these developments. The most conspicuous was the rigid hierarchy of territorial units. Present-day "regionalism" may owe as much to this circumstance as to India's variegated cultural history. But the government could not contain, let alone guide, these developments and was rather prone to panic when confronted with unforeseen results threatening to overflow the neat bureaucratic grid of units, categories, and rules.⁵² The important question was, however, not whether the government could contain the growing impetus of new developments and supralocal linkages, but whether Indian society could devise the means to regulate itself on a wider scale than the local community. Briefly, the main problem was that of supralocal, universalistic authority, for authority on an all-India scale had been reserved by the government and was administered in bureaucratic fashion, impinging on but not guiding society.