The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4.s7.1

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.