Many eons back, when my age was in single digits I was at a wedding in my small town. From what I can recall the most actual work was not the wedding itself, which is to say not the fire or the “phere” or the priests who knew the mantras by heart. It was the corner where about fifteen older men sat in plastic chairs that did not match, drinking tea out of steel tumblers, talking quietly for forty minutes, and then one of them stood up and announced to the room how the bride’s family would pay and the groom’s family would pay and the gold would be divided, and the room accepted it without a vote and without a ceremony because everyone in the room had been raised inside the same moral order and to stand up and object would have been to step outside the order for the rest of one’s life, which nobody in the room was willing to do for any amount of gold.

I have been turning that sabha over for years because what those men were doing sat somewhere outside both the state and the family, somewhere the political theory I grew up with did not have a word for, and it is something India has known for a very long time, which is the moral and political society that decides things by being there and being known, and which has been doing this in towns and villages across the country since long before anyone thought to call it democracy and since long before anyone thought to export democracy to us as though it were a thing we did not already have in abundance.

The Sanskrit word is sabha, which simply means assembly, and the word goes back to the earliest Vedic literature in a way that matters because the sabha is described in the Rigveda and the Atharvaveda as a body that sits with the king and not under the king, and the parallel body is the samiti, which is the larger gathering of the people, and the two together were the political organs of Vedic society in a way that has no clean equivalent in Western political theory because the Western tradition has tended to think about politics as something the state does and the Indian memory has tended to remember, at least when it is honest with itself, that politics is something the people do and the state sometimes shows up to.

You can see this in the gana-sanghas, the republics of ancient India, which existed at the same time as the great monarchies of the Gangetic plain and were not small or marginal, because among them were the Licchavis of Vaishali and the Vajjians and the Mallakas and the Sakyas, and these were substantial polities with sophisticated systems of decision-making that did not pass through a king. The Buddha was a Sakya and the Sakyas were a gana, and the Licchavis were the clan the Buddha spent his last years with, and when the Buddha was asked whether the Vajjian confederacy would survive the threat of Magadhan expansion, the Buddha’s answer was seven conditions, all of them moral and political — meet regularly, meet in concord, do not deviate from the ancient ordinances, honor the elders, protect the women and children, honor the shrines of the past, provide righteous protection to the holy men. There was nothing in the seven conditions about a king or a tax or a law, and the Buddha knew that if the Vajjians held the moral and political fabric intact they would not fall, and if they let the fabric fray they would fall even with the largest army in the world.

That is a different theory of freedom from the ones that have dominated political thought in the last few centuries, and the theory it is closest to lives in a tradition the West has mostly forgotten about, in the Indian memory, where it has had many names since the Vedas, and one of the cleanest names for it is lokasangraha, which is Krishna’s word in the Bhagavad Gita for the act of holding the world together, which is what a free society has to do because the world is always falling apart and the people have to keep stitching it back together, and the stitching is the work of moral and political society, and the stitching is done by people who are known to each other and who show up.

The opposite of lokasangraha is kshatra, which is the warrior-political principle of power and rule, and the tension between the two is the central drama of Indian political history. The kshatra writes laws and builds empires and collects taxes and paves roads and raises armies, and the kshatra has been extraordinarily good at all of this for a very long time, and the Kautilyan tradition that lives on in the Arthashastra is the most sophisticated manual of statecraft ever written anywhere, and the modern Indian state still runs on a lightly edited version of it because the Indian Administrative Service is essentially the kshatra in a coat and tie, and we have not really reckoned with what that means for the moral and political society that is supposed to live alongside the kshatra rather than underneath it.

The moral and political society is the primary fact, and the state is one of the forms that rises out of it, and one of the forms that tries to substitute itself for it, and when the state substitutes itself for it the substitution always involves law replacing morality and bureaucracy replacing politics, and the substitution always produces a society that is more orderly and less free, and the substitution is the thing every civilization does in cycles, and the cycles have been running for at least five thousand years, and the cycles are not finished.

What is interesting about India is that the moral and political society has not gone away. It has been pushed around and subordinated and written out of history by colonial administrators who could not see it and by postcolonial nationalists who inherited the administrative gaze, and it has been eroded by economic growth and migration and the market and the mobile phone and the gradual disappearance of the village, and yet it is still there. You can find it in the way a Tamil family decides who gets which piece of ancestral property without going to court, because going to court would be to step outside the moral order of the family, and the moral order is older than the court and softer than the law and more durable than any of the institutions that have been set up to do the work it was already doing for free. You can find it in a small town in Punjab that pulls together when one of its own falls into a trouble no institution has a clean answer for. These are not state decisions and not market decisions and not legal decisions, and the making of them is the thing India has always been very good at and the thing the official history has not been very good at recording.

The risk is that the official history is winning, and the moral and political society is being slowly replaced by the formal institutions that were meant to support it, and the institutions are doing more and the sabha is doing less, and the doing less is happening because the modern state has very deliberately built itself to take over the functions of the sabha, because the modern state sees those functions as its functions, because the modern state cannot tolerate the existence of a parallel source of legitimacy that does not derive from the constitution.

What I want to leave with is the thought that the Indian democratic civilization is not a recent export from the West that arrived with Nehru and the constitution, because it is the oldest continuous democratic tradition on the planet and it predates Athens by centuries and it does not need to be defended against the West because it is older than the West. What it needs is to be defended against the modern state, including the Indian modern state, which has been slowly and quite efficiently colonizing the moral and political society that the sabha represents, and the colonization is rarely malicious in intent, and it is just what states do, and they have been doing it for five thousand years, and they will keep doing it until they are reminded, by the people who are still there, that the society is the primary fact and the state is one of the forms that rises out of it and one of the forms that needs to be reminded of its place.

Find me on Twitter if any of this lands somewhere in your own memory of a sabha. I am @troysk704.