Obituary (II): A tribute to F. G. Bailey

Professor Frederick George. Bailey passed away on 8 July 2020, leaving behind a rich legacy of fine-grained ethnographies of politics and a slew of theoretical and methodological tools that enable the comparative analyses of politics, presented, programmatically, in his 1969 classic, Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics.

My encounter with Professor Bailey has been exclusively through his writings. His work serves as a model of anthropological craftsmanship. The combination of his keen observation, fidelity to the empirical context, and clear-eyed comprehension of the political calculus at play shines through his works. His monographs are striking for their precise claims, spartan reference lists and frugal acknowledgments.

Bailey cut his anthropological teeth in the highlands of Orissa (now Odisha) in the historical backdrop of a fledgling Indian nation-state. The two sets of Orissa trilogies ¹ , the first published in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the second in the 1990s offer what have been Bailey’s life-long concerns: to understand structure and change through their interrelationships. The substantive concern was to analyse the changes brought about by colonial political and administrative apparatuses in a ‘traditional’ social organisation marked by caste, tribe, religion and the village community. However, the theoretical and methodological innovations of his work went much beyond this avowed empirical concern. One of his objectives was to identify how political action, accounts of ideas, beliefs and arguments from particular situations can be translated into conceptualisations and abstractions and can generate a lexicon for understanding ‘human nature’ and ‘political man’.

Comparative sociology was an article of faith for Bailey, instanced in his imaginative cross-cultural comparisons of caste politics in Orissa villages with American politics and the politics of highland villages in Europe. Finding the general in the unique was anathema for him: a position that found him at intellectual loggerheads with the founding editors of the Contributions to Indian Sociology and resulted in his early career polemic around ‘For a Sociology of India’ debate. It goes to his credit that not only did he point to a Hindu bias in Indian Sociology in its formative years but went on to demonstrate the value and necessity of comparison with great acuity in Gifts and Poison (1971), The Kingdom of Individuals (1993), and in his last book, God-Botherers and Other True-Believers (2008).

Bailey as a political sociologist is almost unclassifiable. His ethnographies of politics attempted to grasp the mundaneness of power in contexts and situations that were least likely to be deemed political. As a prominent member of what may be described as the Manchester School of Political Anthropology, where Max Gluckman and Elizabeth Colson were his mentors, Bailey consistently utilised their trademark extended-case method and situational analysis to generate a tool-kit of enduring significance—manipulation, persuasion, the saving-lie, rhetoric, compromise, expediency, tact, humbuggery and strategy—from this attention to the everyday, well before the everyday was recognised as a legitimate area of political inquiry. In the process he created a flexible yet stable mode to make sense of the seemingly ironic moves that permeate the practice of politics and political actors. His rich and complex theorisations on politics firmly discount the ideological over-determination of individual action. Further, he emphasised the primacy of observed behaviour over any statement of values, consistently demonstrating that no society can be understood only as an internally coherent set of ideas, for it is people who hold ideas and an anthropologist’s job is to ask who holds which ideas and why.

Ultimately, what mattered to Bailey was the dialectic between rhetoric and reason, intellectual puzzle-solving and judgments of morality and what characterised the small voice of politics and grand political machines and structures. He searched for patterns in sets of dialectical relations arriving at a layered truth, and sometimes pondered over his own inability to find what he was looking for. This remains a truly enduring appeal of Bailey’s writings: to show clearly what is hidden and to acknowledge what remains impenetrable. In sensitising us to look for such situations of manipulation, tactics, treasons, and strategies, Bailey’s oeuvre acquires an unprecedented salience for contemporary times. That much of his ethnographic data and its analyses hold good even today ² is a testimony not only of his investment in his craft, but also a timely reminder that detailed and sustained fieldwork has its own rewards. There is no better time than now to revisit what constituted, in his own words ‘the discipline of my mind and the bias of my character’ (God-Botherers and Other True-Believers, 2008: 30). He clearly lived his work, and left a formidable intellectual inheritance for us to reckon with as sociologists and sociologists of India.