The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.18

c5.18

The essential point is that the alien and the modern offer new ways to deal with the long-standing, unresolved conflict and thus are more often than not eagerly welcomed. For modernity is, if anything, dedicated to the devaluing or even the breaking up of organic or primordial ties, which it wants to replace with suprapersonal, universalistic groupings. As we saw already, this tendency is at the heart of the traditional conflict between "kingly" interdependence and brahminic independence. Thus, for instance, the "joint family" has been idealized out of recognition as a badge of cultural identity coming straight out of hoary tradition. Obviously "jointness" may serve as an adequate device where other means of securing labor on the one hand and subsistence on the other are lacking. Nevertheless, brahminical theory prefers the division of the father's estate by the surviving sons,¹⁶ as it usually favors the individual over the collectivity.¹⁷ It is therefore not surprising that modernization, even when clearly derived from the West, and "brahminization" (or "Sanskritization") are often seen to tie in easily with each other.¹⁸ In this way modernity—in a sense already "transcendent" by the fact of its alienness—falls in line with the transcendent legitimation that brahminic theory possesses.