REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS Economic & Political Weekly EPW Published on Saturday, JUNE 25, 2016 vol lI nos 26 & 27 25 F G Bailey’s Bisipara Revisited Tina Otten, Edward Simpson The authors are grateful to Sunny Suna, Mahendra and Deepa Bisoi and all the people of Bisipada who shared their time and views. Tina Otten ( tina.otten@gmx.net ) teaches Social Anthropology at Ruhr-University, Bochum, Germany. Edward Simpson (es7@soas.ac.uk) teaches Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He is author of The Political Biography of an Earthquake: Aftermath and Amnesia in Gujarat, India. 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 organisation 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. A new fieldwork conducted in 2013 in the same location presents an update of the continuing drama surrounding the Shiva temple, against a backdrop of the changing polity and economy of the village, and as a manifestation of contested postcolonial identity politics. In the village the hierarchy of caste-groups is no longer a complete reflection of economic realities, nor an adequate means of ordering political relations. Under the pressure of economic change, the poli- tical functions of caste are beginning to be taken over, as one might expect, by the ultimate political authority, the Government of India (Bailey 1957: 275). F G Bailey, the renowned British social anthropologist, began 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 struc- tured 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. Nearly 60 years later (2012–14), a fieldwork conducted in the same location revealed some of the characters Bailey had known to be alive and well, and that some of the incidents he had recorded continued to be the sources of conflict and dis- pute, often along the lines he had foreseen. Bisipara is now Bisipada; Kondmals is now Kandhamal; Orissa is now Odisha; the distinctions are used in this text to denote the village, region and state in Bailey’s time, and now. Of the three villages in this greater project, Bisipara–Bisipada has changed the least. The morphology, ethos and orientation of the place are recognisable from both Bailey’s writings and photography. The boulder-strewn Solanki River cuts a course through the hills close to the village which still looks remarka- bly similar to the fading images in Bailey’s archive. It was also relatively straightforward to locate buildings and other features in the landscape from his photographs. The core shapes of many streets, houses and temples are likewise discernible. The village has not become a part of international migration routes; there has been a clear intensification of inter-exchange with the district town of Phulbani along an all-weather road and with the cities of the plains, but, in many ways, this seems to be just more of what Bailey described rather than something different. This paper explores how some of the schemes and laws of modern India have altered life in Bisipada. The focus is on how