The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c16.7

c16.7

Thus it would seem that the dual focus of caste and village does not derive its predominance from the realities of Indian society, but primarily from the modus operandi of the modern state, which had to view these realities through a bureaucratic prism. This may also explain the hold of village and caste over our view of Indian society, for it was the modern state that everybody—colonial administrator, reformer, or nationalist politician—wanted. Whether one favored autocratic or democratic forms was hardly relevant. Once state and society were conceptually distanced from each other, the prismatic official view, dissolving reality into neatly defined entities, imposed itself. Even the social anthropologists, detached but naturally on the look-out for primary units and categories, had to follow suit, their main concern being how to unite the two foci.