The Need for Enemies

Amid the escalating hostilities of today's world, F. G. Bailey returns to the state of Orissa in the eastern India of the 1950s to consider what held a diverse collection of people together and what drove them apart. The last of Bailey's books about Orissa, The Need for Enemies, offers a ground-level view of regional politics in South Asia in the years following independence. In doing so, the book analyzes political problems that are of universal concern: incivility in public life, the inescapable dilemma of duty always in tension with interests, public consensus on what is right and good giving way to a babel of inconsistent moralities, and, not least, true believers contesting realists who see virtue in compromise.

A portrait of Orissa and its leaders in 1959, the book is also a treatise on political morale. As Bailey tells the story of political and social turmoil in postcolonial India, a tale rich in ethnographic detail, he follows Orissa's politicians through a maze of inconsistencies, and makes clear the dangers that beset political cultures in a complex world of multiple competing alternatives. There is a need to simplify, Bailey suggests, and an ever present risk of making the image too simple.