The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4.s7: 7
The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4.s7
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- English
7
c4.s7.1
It appears that the argument outlined above can be carried forward to the scene of the Mughal Empire.¹⁹ Notwithstanding its strongly marked Muslim character, it was no less an Indian phenomenon, underwritten—to mention only the most obvious feature—by the Mughal-Rajput alliance. One may be inclined to think here of India's well-known "inclusivism,"²⁰ but we can perhaps be more precise. Rather than an integrativeness that accommodates alien elements that otherwise might disrupt the coherent fabric of Indian civilization, we see here the inner conflict of tradition at work. The open rift between the king's order of conflict and the brahmin's, or the renouncer's, absolute order of transcendence called for and actually welcomed new ways to deal with disruption. It is not so much India's integrativeness per se as it is the inner conflict that allowed the "inclusion" of the Islamic conception of transcendent order. The empire that was ostensibly intended to realize this order does not seem to have been seriously challenged as such.
c4.s7.2
The Mughal rulers, however, although asserting their claim to universal dominion, were well aware of their limitations. They recognized implicitly an "inner frontier" raggedly and shiftingly dividing taxpaying regulation areas from those held by tributary or rebellious—the two qualifications easily shade over into one another—chiefs or rājās. In many ways, this arrangement recalls the ancient complementary opposition of "village" and "wilderness," of the settled sphere and the sphere of the war band. In this context, an institution like the mulkgīrī circuit easily falls into place.
c4.s7.3
Like previous regimes, the Mughal Empire was fully and at all levels involved in conflict, even to the point of submergence, referring at the same time to a universal transcendent order. However, this was to change fundamentally with the introduction of the modern concept of the state by the British regime at the end of the eighteenth century. The essential difference was not its alien origin. The Mughals had also been aliens; nor did the British regime lack Indian allies. The difference was rather that the modern state denies internal conflict and does not know an inner frontier. Instead it is based on the notion of an unbroken and universalist internal order. There are no more cosharers in the realm whose shifting networks of conflict and alliance make up the substance of the state, but only monadic subjects, equal before the law and interchangeable. The modern state, in other words, wants to bring the ideal of universal order from its ultramundane haven down to earth. The inner conflict then becomes explosively schismatic, as eventually became clear in the drama of the Partition.