Description
St Martins Press Caste and the Economic Frontier A Village in Highland Orissa by F G Bailey
This book is an intensive study of a small-scale community, Bisipara, a Hindu village in the Orissa hills. The author seeks to show how the economic and political structure of the village is being changed by wider economic and political developments outside it.The traditional agricultural economy of rural India is being replaced by a new joint economy of agriculture and commerce. The village, formerly more or less self-contained economically and politically, is becoming gradually included within a larger economic system, and at the same time its traditional political isolation is being broken down by the claims of the larger political system represented by the State administration. This process id described as the 'extension of the economic and political frontier'. The structural changes within the village are a consequence of these larger developments. The political readjustment which results from the economic changes, that is, in the relations between the traditional landholders and the newly rich, has, or course, its specific Indian complications, in that it has to take place within the rigid framework of the caste system. That the readjustment has been successful in some cases and has failed in others is brought out by the author in this study.