The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c16.14

c16.14

There is still a persistent notion of the local headmen, who are fondly fabled to form the real and unchanging backbone of the old regime polity, safely cantoned in their "little republics" and turning their back to the wider polity beyond the limits of their jurisdictions. However, the people who really count clearly are not strictly local men, but those who accumulate widely dispersed fractional rights—(part-)headmanships, tax-free or taxed fields, tax shares, tolls—in a variety of localities. In fact, their power can be measured as much by the aggregate of rights as by the geographical extent of their dispersion. The corollary of this is that the rights and holdings of the powerful tend to intermingle to the point where these men are practically at each other's doorsteps in the localities, thus making the notion of the closed village community even more illusory (but giving the locals more room for maneuvering in and out of the village context). The local headman, by contrast, is small fry indeed, distinctly vulnerable and in danger of having sooner or later to sell part or whole of his headmanship to a more powerful man.