The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.5

c15.s1.5

In the meantime, we might consider, albeit tentatively, whether we are asking the right question. Our perception of the Mughal breakdown is, of course, conditioned by our knowledge of what happened afterward, namely, the unforeseen takeover by the British. In other words, was the breakdown as absolute and irreversible as India's subsequent history has made it? Questions about what might have been are notoriously vacuous. We should not, however, forget that there was at least one other Islamic empire, the Ottoman, whose doom was already spelled out in gloomy terms in the beginning of the sixteenth century. All four pillars of the state—religion, justice, the council, and finance—are broken, and one wonders whether matters can continue in this way, a Dutch consul reported in 1626 from Aleppo.¹⁵ Well, as we know with the inexorable certainty of hindsight, matters were to continue for another three hundred years, and it took a global conflagration to put an end to them. When such time spans are involved, we may wonder whether we should not look for the reasons of the remarkable resilience rather than for those of the decline. Both sets of reasons may be largely the same. Most, if not all, is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, what we perceive as a process of decline, relentlessly leading to an unavoidable and definitive fall, may well be, not a process, but a structure—and a remarkably durable one at that, allowing for dramatic ups and downs without an inevitable and irreversible collapse.