BAILEY: PARAPOLITICAL SYSTEMS

F G Bailey, the renowned British social anthropologist, conducted fieldwork in Bisipara in the highlands
of Orissa in the 1950s to examine the ways in which the state, democracy and new forms of economy
were changing the traditional organization and apprehension of power and status. At the time, and
following the Temple Entry Act, the former untouchables of the village attempted to gain entry to the
Shiva temple. On that occasion, and as Bailey recounts, they were unsuccessful.

F G Bailey, his fieldwork in Bisipara, a village in Orissa when India’s democracy was only a few years old.
The new administration was beginning to find its feet and confidence. Novel ideas, responsibilities and
forces were entering village life for the first time. Bailey stayed in the village between 1952 and 1954 for
the most part with his wife Mary and their children. He set out to study what he saw as the beginning of
a great transformation. He was particularly interested in the relationship between an older village
hierarchy and the new state. The relations between castes, untouchables and tribes animated many of
his initial research questions and structured his subsequent analysis. To be clear however, Bailey did not
think the changes he witnessed marked the start of history or the end of naivety, because he placed his
own narrative of the village within an historical account of shifting patterns of governance, revenue
collection, and migration.

What are Para-political systems?

David Easton gave the term “Para political systems”. Parapolitical systems refer to situations or
institutions which are partly regulated and partly independent of larger encapsulating political
structures, and which fight battles with these larger structures in a way which seldom results in either
victory or in dramatic defeat but rather results in a long-drawn stalemate and defeat by attrition
(struggle) for e.g. Universities, Villages, Professional Associations, etc

Or

What goes on in lesser arenas which are not directly under the authorities such as places like the
villages, universities or professional associations are known as parapolitical systems. These are spaces
which are partly regulated and partly independent of larger encapsulating political structures.

Bailey intends to analyze these parapolitical systems. Bailey’s purpose in this essay is to outline a model
for the analyses of different parapolitical situations. He applied to three different kinds of conflict in
Bisipara – factions, caste climbing, conflict between castes. The objective is to arrive at a model for kinds
of politics in village India and beyond that for politics in all parapolitical situations.

Situation-I: FACTIONS-DOLADOLI

The Oriya word for factions is ‘dolo’, which means a flock or a herd or a political party. Conflict between
factions is called Doladoli. ‘Dolo’ is formed around two prominent men in the warrior caste. Most
warriors belonged to one agnatic lineage and the factions largely matched descent divisions within that
lineage. Each faction also included some lower caste members. Each faction also had its own Jatipuo
(caste son), a warrior living in the village but not of the dominant lineage, who cooked during the short
period of most intense pollution following a death.

Confrontation took place almost always in the panchayat in the form of passionate verbal attacks and
defenses of honor.

The dolo are conflict groups made up of two relationships or three roles: leader, follower and
dependent. ‘follower’ and ‘dependent’ differ in that the follower does not and the dependent can,
change sides. I shall refer to the collectivity of followers as a ‘core’ and the collectivity of dependent as
‘support’. In this way the structure of a conflict group can be expressed as a variable derived from the
core/support ratio.

The process of conflict consists of confrontation and encounters. Confrontations are messages about
one’s own strength, assertions or claims to be entitled to occupy some valued role, threats or challenges
to deter one’s opponent from claiming that role.

Confrontation is a process of communication between competitors; communication implies that both

sides are using the same language. They agree not only about the meaning of symbolic actions but also
about permissible tactics. In other words when confrontation is the principal modes of interaction
between opponents, they are playing a game and both are interested in keeping the structure of that
game intact.

Thus, political activity is the pursuit of certain valued ends which cannot be attained by everyone. The
ends are culturally defined as being in short supply. Honour is gained only by demonstrating that
another man has less honour, by shaming him. The very notion entails competitions. The set of rules
which regulate the competition and keep it orderly constitute the political structure.

Political actors have other roles: they make a living, they worship, and they have families and so on. At a
further remove their behaviour is also regulated by nonsocial systems: demography, the physical
environment and so on. All these systems constitute the environment of a political structure and there is
a continuous process of mutual adjustment between structure and environment. For a political
structure, its environment provides both resources and restraints. Thus in Doladoli in Bisipara, agnatic
kinship allegiances can with propriety be used in political competition, so also can the roles of caste
dependency. But it would be improper to make use of the courts, to bribe the police or to use visiting
politicians.

Situation II: CASTE CLIMBING  

Between 1870-1910 because the government prohibited home distilling, the Bisipara caste of distillers
became very rich. In 1910, when prohibition was introduced – and possibly before – they began to
invest this wealth in prestige. They sanskrtized their customs: they bought land, they abstained from
liquor, they put their women into long saris, they forbade women from working in the fields and so
forth. They also made direct claims to high status through interaction. Distillers, from being just above
the line of pollution, are now in the upper levels of bisipara’s caste ladder.  
The description does not say enough about the tactics by which an ambitious man of low caste might
raise his status. I shall now speculate about the way in which a distiller could have advanced himself by
constructing a model for a game of caste climbing. The objective of the game is
to maximize prestige, honour, purity rating at the expense of someone else; that is, the objective is
to maximize political credit in the way that we have defined it.  

Honour is symbolized in 2 ways: First, by the differential services of village specialists like washer man,
barber, etc for these services are given in either cash or by a jajmani arrangement. Secondly, through
complicated rules about the acceptance of water and cooked food.

For a distiller to invest his wealth in honour, He must break into a monopoly of village-specialist
deference. He does not attempt to destroy the ring; he merely wishes to cut himself in on the profits. He
can do this in four stages-  
1. He makes a specialist materially beholden to him, through debts, threats of deprivation or
violence and so on  
2. He then extracts the specialist’s  services in return for cash  
3. He turns this service into a jajmani arrangements  
4. He establishes with the specialist the same commensal relationship that the Brahman or the
dominant caste warriors enjoys. 

The first two are non political while the last two of conversion of cash services into jajmani services and
extracting the forms of commensal respect are ways of laying claim to honor and purity.   

Now how can distillers climb up the caste the ladder?  

Assume that the distillers have a leader, we can call him leader one. If leader one wins then the rest of
the distillers in Bisipara will benefit because one of the rules of caste climbing is that a team is a caste-
group and not an individual. Leader one’s support element is the village specialist, whose services he is
trying to gain. This man, of course, must be placed in the support category because his allegiance can be
subverted.  
In opposition there is a leader two, who resent distiller ambitions and is fighting for the same specialist’s
loyalty. In caste climbing as in Doladoli, both sides are interested in keeping the rules of the game intact.
Leader one (the distiller) does not want to destroy the system of monopolistic deference; he merely
wants to break into it. Both sides agree on what the prize is; both agree on the meaning of honor
symbols. Both leader one and two agree in their definition of what the prize is – that is one the meaning
of honor symbols. They also appear to have a tacit agreement about pragmatic rules, regulating that
environmental resources may or may not be used in competition. 
 
The analysis has remained within the broad concepts of a single political structure and its environment.
The core/support ratio and confrontation/encounter process are now augmented by the connected
ideas of subversion and of pragmatic rules, which both concern the use of resources not normatively
defined as political.  

What the framework used to analyze this caste-climbing process could be a general way of analyzing
what goes on inside any political group in which there is a race for status and positions of honor, power
or prestige.  
 

SITUATION III: CASTE-CONFLICT  

The conflict was manifested in a number of dramatic incidents. The Pans, hearing of Gandhi’s campaign
against untouchability and knowing of Orissa’s temple entry act attempted to enter one of the village
temples as if they were a clean caste. When the clean caste men blocked the way, the pans sent for the
police and asked that their right under law be enforced. Later they built a temple to the same  deity in
their own street. They abandoned their traditional and degrading task of scavenging, proclaimed that
they were teetotal, changed their name from ‘pan’ to the Gandhian ‘harijan’ and in various other ways
claimed clean caste status. The clean castes countered by dismissing the pans as village musicians and
employing a different group of untouchables. Every time their complaint was dismissed, they appealed
to a higher official and eventually interested a minister in the Orissa government.  

The Pans were able to manipulate sources of power in the world outside with relative skill, first because
the harijan campaign and the official support of the congress party smoothes the way for them over the
rather unwelcoming paths of the administration and second because they now have among their ranks
wealthy landowners, schoolmasters, an agent for the congress party and ex-policeman.  

What environmental role did the Pans attempt to convert into a political resource? They brought in the
police, they made use of the administration, and they had the support of the government and the
congress party. These are political roles, but they are not part of the village political structure.   While
wealth is a resource which can be converted into caste status (distillers), good relations with
government or the Congress Party cannot be so converted.  

In caste conflict, while there is normative agreement about the prizes, there is no agreement about
permissible tactics, either at the normative or at the pragmatic level and we can only conceptualize this
situation as two political structures. If we stand inside the village political structure  
A. Then its environment includes a rival political structure  
B. The relevant parts of the two political structures can be codified as follows, in regard to prizes:  
a. Honor is defined by village criteria e.g. entry to scared places, use of wells, etc.
b. Honor is defined by election to office. 
The basic rule regulating personnel also differs:  
a. Caste is a qualification for entry into the competition: clean castes may enter ; polluting
castes may not 
b. All citizens, irrespective of caste, are eligible for honor.
 
Crucial difference in permitted tactics:  
a. There is an explicit normative rule that external political roles may not be used in village
politics.  
(Refer to page 292 to add points to these points mentioned above)  
Conclusion:  
1. A political structure at one level consists of rules about:  
a. Prizes  -- i.e. definition of which roles carry honor  
b. Personnel—i.e. definition of roles which qualify a man to seek honor and other rules about the
composition of teams which we tried to see as a variable through the ratio of core/support  
c. Tactics of procedure, which were classified into subversion, confrontation and encounter.  

2. The rules of a political structure can be either normative or pragmatic. The normative are values
which can be publicly stated as a justification for conduct. The pragmatic rules either are technical
directives and ethically neutral, filling in the gaps, so to speak, left by the generalities of normative
statements or else they are technical rules about how to break the normative rules without being
punished.  
3. It concerns the patterns of episodes and sequences and offers three possibilities.  
4. A set of statements arises from the distinction between a political structure and its
environment 
a. Politics are ordered competition for certain kinds of valued ends  
b. So defined political structures can be analytically separated from their environments
which consist of nonpolitical social structures, some non-social structures and sometimes
rival political structures.  
c. The relation between a political structure and its environment is seen in terms of a
positive as well as negative feedback. In other words, not only do structures contain or seal
off disturbances from their environment but also structures may give way
to environmental pressure and be changed.  
d. Finally these regularities are statements connecting variables in a political structure with
environmental variables.