The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.5

c5.5

comparable, for customary law and its proceedings are not concerned primarily with the objective truth of the matter but with the subjective truth of the persons involved, which will differ from situation to situation.² Obviously, the worst thing that can happen to customary law is codification. And the same goes for the sometimes hair-raising complications of rights in the soil, the division of its produce, and even of weights and measures,³ complications that hardly seem to bother the local participants but only come out when the revenue administration wants to describe and fix them in an objective and systematic fashion.