The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.22

c5.22

This situation of dispersed power is, of course, not a static one. Out of the flux of shifting rivalry and cooperation, new centers steadily arise and new power concentrations are attempted. When such centers are successful, they break out of the concatenation of overlapping units. But by the same token, their area of influence will be limited, for the wide-ranging horizontal ties on which the concatenation is based have to be broken. Now, even if such a center or segment manages to reduce the surrounding ones and to replace them with an administrative apparatus, the allegiance of the people who man the apparatus must be secured. In other words, the carefully extracted resources that should be concentrated in the hands of the ruler have to be redistributed. As we saw already in the case of the Mughal Empire, expansion offers no solution, for it only heightens the need for distribution. Since, moreover, resources are for the greatest part tied up with the soil and its agricultural produce, the simplest if not the only way of distribution is to parcel out the rights in the soil itself and the power that goes with them. So the dispersion of power is restored once again, if it has indeed ever stopped being dispersed.