The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.36

c5.36

Obviously this was no simple matter. The problem before the colonial government was how to strike a balance, from situation to situation and from crisis to crisis, between the need for withdrawal and the pressures for involvement. But the pattern was set. The distributive demands that kept being made on the center in various ways from various quarters were no longer met on their own terms but by the formulation and application of objective rules that bored ever deeper down toward the grass roots level. Though in this way the contacts between the modern and traditional orders grew immensely, there could be no integration, far less an overall impact of modernity on the traditional dispensation. The very modus operandi of modernity precluded such a comprehensive impact. It was devised to deal with specific cases in specific ways according to specific rules, so as not to have to deal with total situations and comprehensive relations. In this perspective, a local magnate was not a comprehensive leader of his men but exclusively a legal landowner. Only as such could he have his interests looked after by the government.³³ But this meant also that the specific impingements of modernity—though often dramatic for the persons involved—were met by the comprehensiveness of the traditional order that diffused the effect, closed the ranks, and ultimately, after the reshuffle, remained the same.