The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.17

c5.17

The indubitable fact of the alienness of modernity introduced by a colonial government seems to be greatly overrated as a source of difficulties, for such a view is ultimately based on the romantic belief in the closed and monolithic character of a civilization as an autonomous organism. That this is not only a belief, and as such is beyond proof or disproof, but rank superstition is sufficiently clear—even the most superficial reading on Indian civilization can demonstrate this—and should not detain us here.