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.