The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.24

c5.24

This is strikingly illustrated in the ancient Indian text on statecraft, the *Arthaśāstra*, which presents a compelling picture of a centralized bureaucratic state. But on closer inspection, the realities show through the cracks. The numerous government departments are not connected by lines of command, delegation, and communication. They are all separate units on the same level, and any control or coordination, it seems, has to be personally secured by the ruler. Likewise, the officers of state are presented as a corps of ranked functionaries enjoying fixed salaries. At the same time, however, they seem to be cosharers with the king.²³ A similarly ambivalent view is given of the state: on the one hand, one can easily take the text’s description of the state in the sense of a monolithically coherent unit; yet, when considered in the context of the theory of the “circle” of kings—the text’s schematization of the segmentary concatenation of centers—the state comes to look curiously fluid and open-ended. For when in the context of the “circle” the elements or factors of the state are enumerated, they include not only the internal elements but also external ones such as the ally and even the enemy. Segmentation does not stop at the boundaries of the state but permeates it. The state seems to be ready at any moment to dissolve in the “circle.”