INTRODUCTION

The present study, of factions and the violence associated with it,

attempts to analyse the nature of politics in the specific context of a region in Andhra

Pradesh, one of the four southern states oflndia. 1 The intended objective of this thesis

is to understand, sociologically, the twin problematic of 'faction' and violence within

a region. A particular aspect of the politics of the region, namely violent factionalism,

is taken as the starting point for analyzing the political practices that inform local and

'macro'politics and their interrelationship. The study is diachronic in nature, and

covers roughly a period of 40 years, starting from the year of formation of the state of

Andhra Pradesh, 1956 to the year 2000. It is primarily a study of a region or a sub-

region (if we take Andhra Pradesh itself as a region in South India) within the state.

Rayalaseema, etymologically 'the land of kings', consisting of four

districts--Anantapur, Kurnool, Cuddapah and Chittoor- is the southernmost part of

the state having boundaries with Tamil Nadu in the south and Karnataka in the West.

A few preliminary remarks are necessary in order to situate this study in relation to

the extant literature on factions and violence, both in the social sciences generally and

studies on India particularly.

1 The state of Andhra Pradesh, fonned on 1 '1 November 1956 comprises of three geographical regions known as the Circars or coastal Andhra, Rayalaseema and Telengana. The first two regions were fonnerly a part of the Madras Presidency until I 51 October 1953 when they were detached from it to fonn a separate Andhra state. The Andhra state, at that point, included the eleven Telugu districts of the Circars and Rayalaseema of the undivided Madras state and the three Telugu taluks- A doni, Alur and Rayadurg- of Bellary district (now a part of the present state of Karnataka). Subsequently, on the basis of the linguistic reorganization of the states, nine Telugu speaking districts of the old Hyderabad state, known as Telengana, was merged with Andhra state to carve out the bigger state of Andhra Pradesh in 1956, with Hyderabad city as the state capital. The present state of Andhra Pradesh comprises of 22 districts- 10 districts of Telengana, 8 districts of the Circars and the 4 Rayalaseema districts of Anantapur, Cuddapah, Kurnool and Chittoor.

1

A perusal of the newspaper archives reveal that 'factional' killings

are characteristic of an entire regional space, no longer confined to a and/or some

villages or districts. Thus, questions regarding the interlinkages between factions

within a region had to be asked, coupled with understanding structurally as well as

phenomenologically, the meaning of the term 'faction'. The former entailed mapping

the solidarities at the village, district and the regional level to determine what has

been termed as the "social network" in anthropological studies of local politics.

However, my task was compounded by the fact that I was not confining myself to

studying merely 'village politics' but was instead trying to see the interrelationship

between local and 'macro politics'. My purpose in doing so was to trace the

transformations that local politics underwent vis-a-vis changes in state politics for an

understanding of politics in both a specific context as well as generally. Questions

about the meaning of the term 'faction' posed problems as different scholars have

characterized it differently depending on the specific contexts of their study. David

Hardiman, in fact, had warned against an essentialization of the phenomena as

characteristic of traditional political systems and had argued that problematizing the

notion of 'faction' would not only lead to the rejection of the "occidental belief' that

India is an essentially factious society but also to a rethinking of the nature of the

political groups called 'factions' and their contextualization within a village, a

district, at the provincial and the all-India level.

To locate the conflicts and the conflicting groups in this region was

only part of the problem. A more significant aspect was to understand the

pervasiveness of the violence that usually accompanies such conflicts. My concern in

looking at 'factional' violence is to stretch the "political imagination" about violence

2

from an exclusive pre-occupation with violence among 'nation-states'; among

different 'ethnic' communities; or racial violence, to that of violence among

'culturally similar' peoples, violence generated by the political process itself. Any

study of violence necessarily means a conceptual selection from an array of violent

activities witnessed within a society. This means that while trying to explain one set

of violent events, other kinds of violence in the same society is lost sight of. This

study is no exception to that predicament.

Anthropological and political studies of violence have often reified

the phenomena, treating violence as a characteristic or category that is either present

or absent, destructive or constructive in any society. This has made it difficult to

examine the role it plays in social relations or to examine it as an alternative cultural

and social practice people use to deal with human predicaments. Here, then, lies the

greatest difficulty in explaining violence, making it imperative that one makes a

moral judgment. This study is an attempt to show, albeit without overt moral

insinuations, that without condemning violence per se, it is essential that we look for

the reasons and rules that inform violent events. As Eric Hobsbawm had argued, any

systematic understanding of violence hinges on unearthing the social uses of violence

(not in a functional sense but a social-historical sense) and believing that "all violence

is bad in principle can make no systematic distinction between different kinds of

violence in practice, or recognize their effects both on those who suffer and on those

who inflict it" (Hobsbawm, 1973, p.214). Hence, I realized at the beginning of the

study that what I should be looking and arguing for are the material and the historical

context in which 'factions' in the particular region being studied, Rayalaseema, have

emerged and the contexts in which factional conflicts have led to violence.

3

I_

Faction: Theoretical and Conceptual Debates

Faction has been defined and understood in various ways, and yet

there are considerable ambiguities in explaining the term: conceptually, empirically,

and in our case, as a social problem too.2 By now, most studies on traditional,

predominantly rural societies have reported the predominance of factions in village

social life. Studies of village political structure have explained the phenomena of

factions in either of two ways. One set of studies guided by a structural-functional

orientation has tended to ignore historical and cultural change in the society, their

primary concern being the synchronic study of political structures. In this approach,

with its emphasis on classificatory systems, factions are quasi-groups, as against

groups and sub-groups like caste, kinship, or neighbourhood groups. Adrian

C.Mayer, in his essay on 'The Significance of Quasi-Groups in the Study of Complex

societies', has concluded that, "it may well be that, as social anthropologists become

more interested in complex societies and as the simpler societies themselves become

more complex, an increasing amount of work will be based on ego-centred entities

such as action-sets and quasi-groups, rather than on groups and sub-groups" (cited in

Gluckman and Eggan, 1966 p.xxviii). In the same tradition of studying political

structures, F.G. Bailey and Ralph Nicholas have found that, "theories based on

concepts of groups, groupings and associations, and dyadic relationships, are

inadequate for their problems: the network, and other forms of quasi-groups, which

are ego-centred, are becoming more significant in bridging the gap between structural

2 A 17 member House-Committee was constituted in 2001 by the Andhra Pradesh Assembly to investigate the genesis and present spheres of action of factions in the Rayalaseema region and adjacent districts of Prakasam and Guntur. Although the report of the Committee is long overdue, it has still not been tabled in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly.

4

framework and individual action" (ibid, p.xxxv). These studies do not say much on

the changes in political structures due to historical and cultural contingencies, the

claim being that, " beyond the contextual variations and cultural differences, political

behaviour reveals structural regularities" (Bailey, 1969, p.ix). Another set of studies

adopted the processual approach, the political process being conceived as consisting

of a limited number of choices for humans to decide upon that is similar in all cultural

contexts. These studies of political behaviour, which stresses the importance of

strategies and spoils, are oddly devoid of the material and historical context defining

those contested resources. Such studies, notably that of Frederick Barth (1959) of the

Swat Pathans of northwest frontier of Pakistan, dealt with patterns of competitive

interaction where individuals and their followers employ tactics to obtain resources

and defeat others.

Another approach to the study of faction and factionalism is that of

understanding it as social conflict. Here again, a structural-functional explanation of

social conflict, propagated by anthropologists such as Max Gluckman and Victor

Turner, has posited that, " ... conflicts within and between small social units promote

the solidarity of larger social units" (LeVine, 1961 p.3). In contrast to Gluckman and

Turner whose studies were based on African societies, Bernard J. Siegel and Alan R.

Beals "view social conflict as a maladaptive outcome, produced by the interaction of

strains----.sensitive points of potential disruption within the social system--and

stresses-alteration in pressures external to the system" (ibid). Although their

emphasis is on identifying the causes that lead to different forms and intensities of

factionalist dispute, the explanation still hinges on structural factors as causes of

5

disruptions. Siegel and Beals have identified the kinds of conflict that spread to

several structural levels and depending on the structural level, it is determined

whether or not a conflict is pervasive. In their four-fold classification of structural

levels (intrafamily, intracommunity, intercommunity, and intercultural), conflict

between factions is placed at the intracommunity level. Factions, in their schema, are

based on neighbourhood, descent, class, or caste and are essentially intergroup

conflict within local communities.

Besides explaining the formation of factions as a result of social

conflict, analysis of factions as a form of political organization has been put forward

by anthropologists such as Oscar Lewis and Ralph Nicholas. The former has studied

factions in select villages in Northern India. His study of "small cohesive groups

within castes", what he terms as factions, "does not denote only opposition or hostile

relations between groups, nor is discord or dissension necessarily the predominant

quality in interfaction relations. The small groups which we (sic) have delineated are

held together primarily by co-operative economic, social and ceremonial relations"

(Lewis, 1970, p.321). Factions, in Lewis's understanding, are "primarily kinship

groupings which carry on important social, economic, and ceremonial functions in

addition to their factional struggles against one another" and this "kinship basis of

village social organization" is therefore considered as an impediment "in building a

modem secular democratic system based upon voting and the delegation of authority

to selected individuals to represent large masses of people" (ibid, p354). His idea of a

democratic system based on voting is underpinned by the theoretical assumption that

"the individual is an independent, thinking being capable of making his own

decisions and ready to do so" which, in a kinship based social organization is, "at

6

best, ... an extended family process which violates the spirit of individuality inherent

in the Western electoral system" (ibid; emphasis added).

Ralph Nicholas in his study of Indian peasant villages has defined

'factions' as "one kind of political process" and also as "a special form of political

organization" (Nicholas, 1965, p.21-22). He has characterized factions by five criteria

after comparing data from similar studies and his own study in Govindapur in West

Bengal. Acco.rding to him, factions are (i) conflict groups; (ii) political groups; (iii)

not corporate groups; (iv) faction members are recruited by a leader; and (v) faction

members are recruited on diverse principles. In Nicholas's conceptualization of the

term too, faction is a structural feature of village social organizations, with little or no

significance given to historical or cultural conditions.

In the Indian context, studies of factions have typically followed the

trend in other parts of the world and have been mostly confined to the context of the

village, especially when studied by social anthropologists. Pioneers of village studies

in India, such as M.N .Srinivas, have found factions to be "an integral part of rural

life"(Srinivas, 1976, p.24). In one of the pioneering studies of the village in Karimpur

in North India, missionaries who have made notable contributions to anthropology

William and Charlotte Wiser found that "concerted action for village improvement is

still apt to be thwarted by factionalism; if one side is for something, the other is likely

to be against it" (Wiser, 1963, p.vii). While scholars are unanimous that factions are

at the core of village political structures3, they differ considerably on the nature and

causes of factional formations. We noticed that, for Oscar Lewis, factions are

3 Political structures could be defined as the sets of patterns and rules by which men in particular societies organize the competition for power, and in that sense constitute one domain within a larger domain ofthe social structure. See for instance Bailey (1969).

7

primarily kinship groupmgs whereas for Ralph Nicholas, factions are political

groupings, which cut across lines of caste and kinship, and it is the neighbourhood

rather than kinship group or lineage, which forms the basis of factional allegiances. In

both these studies, factions are seen as a part of the village political structure and

most of the conflicts in Indian villages are between factions. Village politics, in

studies such as Lewis's seem to be determined solely by the conflicts within a village,

thus positing the 'village' as the hallowed object that it became in anthropological

practices. It is noteworthy to point out here that Jan Breman, in his study of changing

agrarian relations in South Gujarat, has argued that "village patrons often were

themselves clients of regional 'overlords', for whom they performed various services

and to whom they owed loyalty and support" (Breman, 1974, p.l9). Similarly,

R.E.Frykenberg, in his study of the Guntur district between 1788 and 1848, has

shown that regional elites acted as an important link between the "societal supra-

structure and the village community" (Frykenberg, 1965).

Village studies by social anthropologists have also found that

factions within a village present a picture of solidarity and rarely extend their support

as a faction to district or regional level political groups. Lewis had noted that villages

appear united to the outside world, which makes it hard for the outsider to discern

factions within a village. Other anthropologists have corroborated this finding. Adrian

Mayer, in his study of a village in Malwa, reports that it was considered not only

unlikely, but also impossible, for a party within a village to extend its conflicts to

levels above that of the village (Mayer, 1973, p.253). F.G. Bailey, in his studies of

several villages in Orissa, has likewise reported on this tendency for villagers to stick

together in their dealings with outsiders (1957, p.l93-4). These studies seem to argue

8

that there is very little structural connection between village-level factions and district

and regional level factions. For these scholars, villages in India are 'little republics'

quite untouched by the wider political currents and factions are the only mode of

competition for resources within a village.

In the analyses of political scientists, which are mostly in the form

of election studies factional struggles are located within political parties. In such

studies, the focus has shifted from a single village to that of a district, an

administrative unit encompassing several villages and a huge population. The most

influential study of district level faction has been that of Paul Brass of the Congress

Party in Uttar Pradesh (1965). A pioneer in the study of "regional politics" in the UP,

Brass's study of five UP districts sought to establish that "the faction is 'the basic unit

of the Congress party in Uttar Pradesh"' (Menon, 2003, p.24). Brass concentrates his

attention on the district level political party boss and the factional struggles between

several such bosses within the Congress Party in U.P. Brass too considers factions as

a traditional form of political organization, wherein "factions and factional conflicts

are organized completely around personalities and around personal enmities among

party leaders" (Brass, 1965, p.54). Brass also makes a distinction between conflicts

within a political party as factional in contrast to conflicts between parties, which is

not. Here, Brass's contention is to show that "factions and factional conflict in India

are part of the indigenous social and political order" (ibid, p.234) and that such an

order is traditional and transitional in nature. A "traditional" factional politics, in his

schema is therefore opposed to "modern" party politics, a situation characterizing

politics in India, where it is unlikely "that party sentiment or ideology will play much

of a role in local politics in India for some time to come, if ever" (ibid, p.l64 ).

9

Factionalism in Uttar Pradesh Congress, according to Brass was a function of the

"absence of an external threat, presence of an internal consensus upon ideological

issues and the absence of authoritative leadership"(1964, p.l037). In Brass's

analyses, factional politics has been characterized as a personal struggle within the

party for positions of power and status in Congress controlled institutions of state and

local government. His analysis thus essentially centers on factions within a political

party, namely the Congress, and factional politics is viewed as the "adaptation of the

organization to the traditional society", factions being a phenomenon of a traditional

political order.

Anthony Carter's work Elite Politics in Rural India: Political

Stratification and Political Alliances in Western Maharashtra (1974), talks of

alliances between elite politicians rather than factional conflicts to describe Indian

politics. For him, Indian politics is typified by the conflict within an oligarchy rather

than between vertical political groups, which are mobilized only at the time of

elections. His analyses admits of the stability of an 'elite' political class which,

whether in the villages or in the district, are the ultimate brokers in a political game.

His study, therefore, shows how patronage networks in villages extend to the district

level during elections, with "each politician within a political alliance [using] his

personal powers of patronage to win votes" (ibid, p.l 08). Carter's work is significant

because it is an analysis of institutionalized politics in India sans a priori

characterization of the polity as either traditional or modem, and is therefore sensitive

to the great complexity of rural politics in India.

10

Most of the studies by political scientists have delved on the

factional struggles within a political party at the time of elections from the local to the

national level. These stUdies have mostly shown the processes by which factional

relationship rather than simply caste or class conflict influence the outcome of

elections in India. Scholars such as Myron Weiner, B.S. Baviskar, Mary C.Carras,

B.K.Nagla and others have suggested that factions serve as alternative to caste and

class mobilization insofar as they cut across caste and class solidarities. Mary

C.Carras had set herself the task of finding out the bases of political alignments in

India: whether these were based on loyalty to caste and community, or to a

charismatic leader, or whether they were based on 'rational' grounds. In her study of

District Council or Zilla Parishad elections in Maharashtra in 1962, she concluded

that, "the 'factional behaviour of political actors corresponds, on the whole, with

rational (or calculable) economic interests; that it is not determined by 'irrational'

(i.e. emotional) and often unpredictable personal loyalties which may be based almost

exclusively on feelings of awe, respect or devotion to a leader because of his

charismati~ qualities, or on feelings of loyalty evoked by caste or community ties or

by family links" (Carras, 1972, p.184 ). David Hardiman has pointed out that such

behaviorist analysis of factions which tries to generalize Indian political behaviour on

the basis of a study of District Council elections do not produce significant

conclusions on the subject (Hardiman, 1982, p.225).

Thus, a majority of anthropologists and political scientists have

characterized faction as an alternative to caste and class mobilization. Factions are

elite political formations, with dominant castes in a particular region leading the

major factions, while recruitment to factions is from all caste and class categories.

11

Hardiman has argued that the term 'faction' should be restricted "to mean those

political cliques which struggle amongst themselves for power and whose members

hold broadly similar class interests" (ibid, p.230). Carolyn M. Elliott, in her study,

'Caste and Faction Among the Dominant Caste: The Reddis and Kammas of

Andhra', has argued that it is always the dominant Reddis or Kammas who have been

traditional leaders of village factions, the lower castes lacking "both the skill of

leadership and the authority to claim leadership" (Elliot, 1973, p.164). In her view,

caste acquires a "new secular meaning" in the politics of factionalism, as "factions

are usually very careful to include members of all the important castes in. the group.

Caste is important less as a symbol of cohesion and more as a network of groups

which the party's or party faction's representatives try to activate by contacting

village caste groups and awarding benefits to prominent members" (ibid, p.162;

emphasis added). She further argues that " the existence of caste ties across regions

provided channels for political integration" when the state of Andhra Pradesh came

into being in 1956, with the "Reddis of Telengana and Rayalaseema" extending the

"commonality of caste" to that of kinship ties (ibid).

Thus, we find that, studies on factions in the Indian context have

either concerned themselves with village level solidarities which come into being as a

result of conflict between dominant caste members, which then divides a village into

factions; or with internal squabbles in a political party which, during a particular

event- an election- produces the type of vertical mobilization often described as

factional. In the former case, factional organizations are viewed as intrinsic to the

social structure with a relative degree of permanence. They are vertical mobilizations

of different castes with leadership being in the hands of dominant caste members.

12

Such vertical ties are harnessed and mobilized during elections and "this intensity at

election time gives factional alignments a modem face" (ibid, p.l3 5). In the latter

studies, political conflict described as 'factional' comes across as elite political

struggles for power among members holding broadly similar class interests. The

notion of faction, which offers itself in this perspective, is that of issue or interest

based alliances, which therefore tend to be temporary and ceases to exist once the

issue is resolved.

Factionalism may be either integrative or disintegrative but what is

not disputed is the factious nature of Indian polity. As David Hardiman has argued

persuasively, the influence of structural- functionalist theory has led scholars such as

Lewis and Brass to argue that "factions play a constructive as well as destructive role

in Indian society" (Hardiman, op.cit., p.223). This tendency in the scholarship to

depict factions as an inalienable part of the Indian polity, argues Hardiman, "bears the

stigma of being used as a tool of analysis by those who have sought to exercise

control over India and limit the freedom of the Indian people" (ibid, p.230). His point

is to argue that "the relationship between the subaltern classes and the elites should

not be" traced to "so-called 'factional networks', but to ask why class collaboration

has predominated at particular historical junctures" (ibid, p.231 ). The debate, then,

would focus upon the conditions in which vertically integrated structures, such as

factions would give way to horizontal caste or class mobilizations. However, as

Elliott has argued in the case of Andhra Pradesh, "the viability of multi-caste factions

that have continued from the past" have made the "transition to modern politics take

place without great dislocation in society", although it remains to be seen "whether

the vertically integrated structure of politics, the multi-caste factions, will be

13

maintained" ( 1973, p.166). Hence, it is significant that we understand why and how

certain categories, be they caste or class or faction, characterize the nature of politics

in a specific time and place. Such an analysis would have to take into account the

historical transformations within a society and polity, so that a reality is objectively

understood without the baggage of dichotomous thinking about 'tradition' and

'modernity'.

One of the objectives of this study is thus to problematize the notion

of 'faction' so that it not only leads to the rejection of the "occidental belief' that

India is an essentially factious society but also to a rethinking of the nature of the

political groups called 'factions' and their contextualization within a village, a

district, at the provincial and the all-India level (Hardiman, op.cit., p.230). One of the

caveats, also pointed out by Hardiman, was to stress, that " ... there is no direct linear

connection or structural identity between such political cliques at the all-India and

provincial levels and the conflict groups at village level" (ibid), because to classify a

total society as corresponding to a type of political behaviour could only lead to an

ossification of political analysis. Thus, we orient our study in terms of social process

and diachronic analysis.

The phenomena of factions in the Rayalaseema region of Andhra

Pradesh has been located as a particular kind of interpersonal relationship defined as

patronage relationship, a concept that has increasingly been employed in the study of

political life in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. The anthropological use of

the notion of 'patronage' to understand the structure and dynamics of factions is

found to be significant as we are dealing with a phenomenon, which does not

14

correspond, to class conflict or communal conflict. Terms that are related to patron-

client structures in the anthropological literature include 'clientelism', 'dyadic

contract', 'personal network', 'action-set', and 'factions', with each term describing a

particular political system based on patron-client ties. Derived initially from forms of

social organization in Mediterranean peasant societies, patron-client ties were

distinguished by certain characteristic features: asymmetry, reciprocity, and

informality. Although these features broadly define patron-client bonds, these

relationships themselves vary considerably in their scope, duration and intensity, and

in the types of resources involved. 'Clientelism' in Southern Italy, for instance, could

be a case in point, which has been described "as an asymmetrical, quasi-moral

relation between a person (the patron) who directly provides protection and assistance

(patronage) and/ or influences persons who can provide these services (brokerage), to

persons (clients) who depend on him for such assistance" (Walston, 1988, p.3). James

Walston's definition of clientelism in Italy may therefore serve to highlight the salient

features of polities based on personal loyalties in which resource allocation, both

public and private, take the form of patronage.

However, "although patron-client analysis provides a solid basis for

comprehending the structure and dynamics of nonprimordial cleavages at the local

level, its value is not limited to village studies" (Scott, 1972, p.92). Patronage

relationships could then equally characterize networks of patron-client bonds within a

village and that in a political party where the essential conditions for such an

exchange- asymmetry, reciprocity, and informality- obtain, although the nature of

such bonds vary in different contexts. Alex Weingrod has pointed out that patronage

15

has been understood differently in anthropology and political science, something that

is determined by the categories of analysis used in these disciplines. Anthropologists

writing about patronage have stressed the inequality aspect of patronage relations,

landowners being the classic instance of the "patron" while the peasants are the

typical anthropological "client" (Weingrod, 1968, p.378). On the other hand, political

scientists understand patronage as the ways in which "party politicians distribute

public jobs or special favours in exchange for electoral support" (ibid, p.379). From

this it follows that for anthropologists, patron-client ties are enduring for it is a social

relationship whereas in the political science sense patronage is most clearly

enunciated during election campaigns and is hence transitory. Anthropologists

therefore tend to understand patron-client ties as a historical phenomenon, studying

the transformations in patronage relationships over a period, while patronage as

understood by political scientists become more relevant to immediate issues.

One other way in which patron-client relationships are

characterized is by the mediating role that patrons play between different regions or

levels. In the classic landlord-peasant relationship, the landlord as patron has a wide

range of contacts outside the village, more broadly polit~cal linkages, which he may

use on behalf of his peasant-client. These spheres of influence, however, come about

through historical causalities such as colonialism in the Indian case, as has been

documented in the case of the erstwhile Madras Presidency by David Wash brook. He

has analyzed how, over time, British administrative practices in the Madras

Presidency transformed the nature of political linkages from the village to the district

and then to the Presidency level. Washbrook argues that during the 19th century, th7

rural elites (patrons)- whom he calls the rural-local bosses-- had localized power.

16

Each rural-local boss controlled a network of clients, such as tenants, employees and

debtors, who were dependent on him in one-way or another. The most important form

of political activity at the local level was the factional conflict between networks of

such kinds. From the 1910s, however, when greater institutional and administrative

powers were granted to Indians on district local boards, the rural-local bosses were

forced to compete for power at the district level. Thus, " quite suddenly, rural-local

bosses found themselves provided with a machine of tremendous power, which they

could use to develop their support and crush their enemies: through control of

taxation, contracts and services in the district, they were given the means of

extending their empires" (Washbrook, 1976, p.l69). Though institutional and

administrative changes during British rule enlarged the field of conflict from the local

to the district and later to the Presidency level, the patterns of conflict were "purely

factional. They consisted of endless interest-swapping, horse-trading and parlour

diplomacy as rural politicians strove to capture points of executive power" (ibid,

p.173 ). This not only led to the expansion of the networks of political contact but also

expanded the structure of social contact by extending "their marriage networks in

order to make alliances"; appreciating the "benefits of education"; residing "together

at headquarter towns" (ibid). This not only led to the development of "distinct

regional patterns of integration" but also changed the character of "the rural-local

bosses of the same peasant families who had dominated rural society in separate

localities just sixty years before" (ibid, p.173 & p.334 ).

Within the historical context of postcolonialism then, the questions

to be asked concern the shifts in the nature of patron-client bonds over a period. This

involves asking who the patrons and clients are in the present context; in what ways

17

do various types of differential control over resources correspond to the conditions of

the colonial and postcolonial situation; and how compatible are the "status positions",

"normative orientations" and "transactional roles" between the patron and the client?

This essentially means that the concept of patronage is extended and patron-client ties

are not necessarily seen as "dyadic and unidirectional", but as involving "networks of

reciprocities which in turn produces reversible relationships among the parties"

(Lemarchand, 1972, p. 75). These questions also lead us to inquire about the

conflicting clientelistic solidarities that may arise during intra-faction rivalries within

the same political party, as well as the conflicts that may arise from the juxtaposition

of vertical and horizontal solidarities.

Empirically, the present study attempts to understand, within a

historical background, how, over a period the nature of village factions have been

transformed; how during a particular event, e.g. an election, factions within or

between a party 'mobilize' caste, village and family/ kinship factions. The focus here

is on understanding both the structure of 'factions' within a village, a district and a

region, and the political and social processes by which factions in their different

manifestations have come to shape the political structure of Rayalaseema.4 The

4 A partiCular genre of political anthropology, termed action theory, following Abner Cohen's terminology, has influenced several studies of the interstitial, supplementary, and parallel structures in complex societies. These studies have displaced synchronic studies of political structures in a state of assumed equilibrium to develop a theory "which could deal with faction, party, and political maneuver'' (1968, p.I9-0). Moreover, within this latest venture, there were "those who considered the multistranded political relations of the locality to form a viable closed system for analysis and those who considered the analysis of a wider political economy necessary even to begin to understand the forms that local level politics took" (Vincent, 1978, p.l77). Several related concepts developed within this theoretical framework- one concerned the political forms generated out of the coalescence of individual actors: among these were quasi-group, action-set, clique, gang, faction, coalition, interest group, and party; others related to the modes of political behaviour: choosing, strategizing, manipulating, competing, dominating, decision-making; still others related to the context (both spatial and temporal) of political action: the event, situation, political system , power structure. Beginning with the analyses of "social change" in the Third World (studies on Africa, India, Latin America),

18

emphasis here would be to integrate local politics and local history with regional

politics and regional history, towards charting out the social, economic and political

relations that have come to shape the political structure of the region of Rayalaseema.

More significantly, it would focus on the networks between villages and districts

within a region to locate the types of solidarities that obtain intra-village and intra-

district; hence, what constitutes a faction structurally- within a village, district and a

regton.

The choice to study the phenomena of factionalism within a region

was, then, determined by both an empirical consideration, factionalism characterizing

politics in the entire region of Rayalaseema and also by a methodological impetus to

understand the interrelations between the local society and what has been termed as

"party-directed patronage" (Weingrod, op.cit., p.381). The regional political history

became significant to assess how transformations within a region shaped the political

practices of that region over a period. As Washbrook's analysis of the Madras

Presidency from the late 19th century to the early 20th century indicates, British rule

initially failed to "extend the activity of the state into society but, for ideological

reasons, they also weakened many of the institutions of connection which the

warriors had already built for them and which they had simply to maintain .... The

action theory in social anthropology moved towards a more explicit concern with structural principles characterizing systems, conflict, groups etc. to processual and historical analysis. In the late 1950s, it was F.G.Bailey's work on competitive political action, and Victor Turner's "model interrelating the manipulation of symbols and the struggle for power" (ibid, p. 182), which marked the application of the action approach in political anthropology. Later, in the sixties, analysis progressed on the lines of understanding the manipulative strategies in politics, taking into consideration the interdependence between power relations and symbolic action. Abner Cohen's work is representative of this kind of study. Three major themes that have been examined by action theorists are political leadership, factionalism, and power brokerage, mainly delineating how primary political groups are formed within a larger political system.

Criticisms to action theory have pointed out that it fosters a consensual model of political society, with an overemphasis on notions of"rational" man; it fails to take into consideration levels in the political society, which in tum limits analyses to the local level; and its neglect of history.

19

British were much less present in the society which they governed than had been their

warrior predecessors: in many ways, they were 'absentee' rulers" (Washbrook,

op.cit., p.331-2). It is in such a scenario that patron-client relations flourished. Elected

officials, political party leaders and party-linked administrators have gradually started

influencing the traditional patron-client relationships and consequently transformed

the political conditions of villages. Changes in patronage relationships have in turn

meant a consideration of the political organization of the state, and the relationship

between the society and the different segments that compose the state. Thus, "patron-

client ties can be seen to arise within a state structure in which authority is dispersed

and state activity limited in scope, and in which considerable separation exists

'between the levels of village, city and state. Party-directed patronage, on the other

hand, is associated with the expanding scope and general proliferation of state

activities, and also with the growing integration of village, city and state" (Weingrod,

op.cit., p.381). The study of the region became significant from this aspect too, where

the interlinkages between different village and district factions and political party

factions throughout the region sustain and reinforce a region- wide p~tronage

network.5

To talk about a region wide patronage network, does not mean

however, that there is an organic connection between all the factions in the region.

The very nature of patron-client ties mean that patrons are in an economically and

politically advantageous position than their clients. Thus, it is the case that,

5 David Washbrook's arguments for undertaking a regional study of Madras in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might hold for our study too. He writes: "By selecting a region, an author does not have to pretend that he has chosen an entity which exists in complete isolation from everything outside it.. .. The regional study facilitates our understanding of the points of contact between greater and lesser institutions and hence our understanding of the processes of politics and of political change" (Washbrook, 1976, p.6).

20

--l .

:r: r-

depending upon their position in the society, one man's patron may act as another

man's client. This is the way that patronage networks within a region are understood,

where "patron-client networks are not ego-focused but refer to the overall pattern of

patron-client linkages (plus horizontal patron alliances) joining the actors in a given

area or community" (Scott, 1972, p.97). In this context, Scott has distinguished the

role of patron from such terms with which it is often confounded: 'broker',

'middleman', or 'boss'. "A patron", for Scott," is part of a two-person exchange and

operates with resources he himself owns or directly controls", thus creating "afeeling

of personal debt and obligation among recipients" of gifts (ibid, p.95). This highlights

both the personal nature of such ties and the conflicts that they may generate when

two patron-client networks compete for similar interest~. The politics of office, for fi!f--fl:~~:~:;' instance, "leads to a high degree of factionalism and fragmentation, and to the~( ~ division of an area between competing clientelist networks each of which seeks to ((~~.';ii~;j~-,~~ secure the available posts for its members at the expense of the rival network; ... the

politics of communal benefits leads to local coherence in opposition to other

localities, and hence to the articulation of a local identity in ethnic or regional terms"

(Clapham, 1982, p.ll-12).

Patron-client bonds are essentially based on a personal or private

morality of obligations between individuals, which is at variance with a public

morality based on certain universalistic criteria such as merit. It is because of this

lack of fit between a private and a public morality that patron-client relations often

acquire its characteristic aura of illegitimacy or corruption. Because in the context of

our study, factionalism has come to be seen as a social problem, with its related

21 . Thesis

303.6095484 03401 Fa

1111111111111111111111111111111 "'"'LAA,..A-

...... ~:.::.:::....-::..;._·_......·

association with criminality, it was necessary to look into the dynamics of electoral

competition vis-a-vis traditional patron-client relations.

Therefore, the concern here is to understand the occurrence of

"clientelism" or "factionalism" (in the Indian case) in societies that are characterized

by a democratic, bureaucratic and a well-defined legal system. How much is the

concept of "patronage" modified to understand the continuance of a system that is

seemingiy a characteristic of "simple, rural societies", in modem, democratic polities,

like India? Conversely, how has the nature of the earlier patron-client networks been

transformed, over a period, in the same society? An understanding of factional

politics was, in the __ flnal analysis, concerned with such general questions as

legitimacy and the practical details such as the organization of electoral support-

questions that could be best illustrated by the concept of patronage.

Violence and State-Society Relations

The other concern of this study is to understand the phenomenon of

violence that most often marks the factional tussles between groups in this region.

Sociological and anthropological studies of violence in the South Asian context have

been characterized by an emphasis on communal, separatist or ethnic violence. Such

studies are necessarily an outcome of specific or generic events that triggered

violence. Thus, we have an array of studies that deal with the Partition violence,

communal riots, ethnic conflicts, and insurgencies in various parts of the region. This

study of 'factional violence in Rayalaseema' purports to shift attention from violence

in the arena of the nation-state to the interstices of society. By this, what is given

22

primacy is the idea that it is the state, in the final analysis, which is significant in the

analysis of violence, and not the nation-state, because it is the integrative needs of the

modem state that produced nationalist ideology, which created the nation,

"sometimes taking pre-existing cultures and turning them into nations, sometimes

inventing them, and often obliterating pre-existing cultures" (Gellner, 1983, quoted in

Nagengast, 1994, p.118). To begin with, the attempt is to understand what

participants in these 'economies of violence' seek to achieve, in terms of means and

ends. Secondly, it also tries to understand what this kind of violence 'says'or

expresses,. both in terms of the political structure of the society and the experience of

violence. What is given prominence here is that "how people conceive of violence

and the meaning it has for them is contingent with time and place, varies with

historical circumstances, and depends on the perspective of those involved- offenders

and victims, spectators and bystanders, witnesses and authorities"(Blok, 2001, p.1 06).

Violence thus understood is a "form of practice mediating between the historical

boundedness of action in response to specific structural conditions" (Schroder &

Schmidt, 2001, p.18). Clearly then, an explanation of violence in the context of

factional strife hinges on three interrelated perspectives- acts of violence cannot be

understood as sudden outbursts of aggressiveness devoid of historicity, meaning and

reflexivity; violent imaginaries neither spring from individual subjectivities, nor are

they the products of reified concepts such as 'cultural models' or 'traditions'; and,

violence is an outcome of specific historical conditions having concrete reasons for

the participants of violence.

23

Power and violence, in a strictly political sense, has been usually

related to control and conflict over resources, whether material or symbolic.

Anthropologists and sociologists have regarded the use of violence as the specific

characteristic that distinguishes political structures from other kinds of social

organization. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown states in his Preface to African Political Systems,

"the political organization of a society is that aspect of the total organization which is

concerned with the control and regulation of the use of physical force" (Fortes &

Evans-Pritchard, 1970, p. xv). Max Weber names violence as the specific form of

coercion used by political groups exclusively. He insists, however, that although

other methods of physical coercion are widely used by political groups, including the

state, the threat or use of violence is a special characteristic that identifies

associations as "political". Weber describes the relation between the state and

violence in socio-historical terms. For him " ... the relation between the state and

violence is especially intimate. In the past, all kinds of different associations-

beginning with the sib- have known physical violence as an altogether normal means.

On the contrary, today we have to say that a state is that human community which,

within a given territory- 'territory' is one of its characteristics-- claims for itself

(successfully) the legitimate monopoly of physical violence. Specifically, at present

the right of physical violence is assigned to all other associations or individuals only

to the extent permitted by the state; it is supposed to be the exclusive source of the

'right' to use violence" (Walter, 1969, p.49).

All societies have a hierarchized mechanism of control over the

vital resources of the society, the state claiming the supreme authority of control and

24

distribution of resources in a modem polity. While there is general agreement on the

notion of authority as power based on consent, there is less agreement on the precise

meaning of power and its relation with violence. Among the several ideas of political

power and its relation to violence, there are two prominent positions, which appear to

contradict each other. One, considering violence as the failure of power, excludes it

from the definition; the other, considering violence as the specific property of

political associations, makes it central to the definition of political power.

Consequently, in the first position, authority is considered the authentic form of

power and violence as the breakdown of authority; the contrary idea would be, as

stated by C. Wright Mills, "all politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of

power is violence" (Mills, 2000, p.171 ). Violence may thus be seen as deriving "from

the particular, historically specific organizing principles of the state or socioeconomic

system"(Keane, 1996, p.ll 0), be it monarchy, or despotism, or capitalism, or states

structured by pre-capitalist values or totalitarian dictatorship.

The uses of violence and the place of law have been differently

organized in political communities starting from the simple to the complex. In

"simple" societies studied by anthropologists, who lacked the degree of centralization

and the public coercive apparatus associated with the modem state, the "chief' was

usually the "owner" of the land or the "father" of his people, and a chiefs success

depended on how he exercised power (Walter, 1969, p.61-69). Thus, as Lucy Mair

suggests, the rudimentary essential of state power is "a leader who can keep

permanently associated with him a body of retainers whom he can call on to enforce

his wishes, and who identify themselves more closely with him than any of the

divisions of the population" (quoted in Walter, op.cit., p.73). It is the social

25

distinctions of status and rank, and the distribution of wealth in so-called primitive

societies that determine the chiefs power and his legitimacy of using force. Such

societies possess institutions of social control, which however do not approximate to

what we know as the "state" in modem society, and violence often functions as a

means of control in such societies. Thus, "the political can be conceived apart from

violence; the social cannot be conceived without the political. In other words, there

are no societies without power" (Clastres, 1987, p.23). Therefore, violence and its

uses in different political communities, including the state, could be understood as a

way to deploy power within differential social and political relations.

The modem State, in the sense in which anthropology employs it is

posited as "a stage, implicitly the final one, in the evolution of political and cultural

organization" (Nagengast, op.cit., p.l16), law and monopoly on the uses of force

being its defining characteristics. Just as the state's monopoly on the uses of force is a

historically contingent process, state's law-making function is contingent upon a

dichotomy between "customary law" and law as an inseparable aspect of the modem

state (Diamond, 1971). In his discussion of protostates in sub-Saharan Africa,

Diamond has documented how, law arose "in opposition to the customary order of

the antecedent kin or kin-equivalent groups"; and represented "a new set of social

goals pursued by a new and unanticipated power in society" (ibid, p.399). The legal

order was synonymous with the power of the state insofar as its existence was A

founded "on the preservation of order in the interior and the protection against the

barbarians outside" (Engels, 1902 quoted in ibid, p.4 13 ). The legal order was thus

synonymous with the power of the state as it was effected by "the breach of a prior

customary order" and increased "in force with the conflicts that divide political

26

societies internally and among themselves" (ibid, p.413-17). Diamond "deployed his

dynamic concept of the state" to "provide a model for pre-state societies based on

consensual authority embodied in custom rather than power relations embodied in

law" (Gledhill, 1994; 2000, p.24).

The nature of the state thus becomes pivotal in any discussion of

violence-- within a nation-state or without. How a state visualizes a particular form

of violence or rather, how a particular kind of violence serves to threaten a state's

legitimacy, determines the way in which 'violence' has been classified in history.

Violence may be a part of resistance against a system of authority, for example, a

state, or may be employed as counter-resistance by the state. Violence and state

formation have thus been involved in a dialectical relationship throughout the history

ofhuman society.

Within the 201h century social sciences, Norbert Elias has made

seminal contributions to the study of violence and state formation. Elias has argued

that, "civilizing processes", "state- formation", and the control of violence are

interrelated. His work documents how "the increasing division of social functions and

state- formation processes" were "crucial for the sociogenesis ofEuropean civilizing

processes" (Fletcher, 1997, p.53). In the process of state-formation, the forms of

violence change as well as the meaning that violence has for individuals. Therefore,

standards of what is considered 'legitimate' violence will vary over time within and

between societies. In Elias's analysis, the waning of private violence has given way

to public violence. Elias shows how face-to-face combat in-the form of dueling, or the

use of violence in the settlement_ of disputes in family feuds as forms of private

27

l

violence, have receded in Western European societies; and how identities bound up

with the nation has become far more important in the perpetration of public forms of

violence, such as wars, revolutions and terrorism, which has increasingly involved

civilian populations in the wielding of state power. However, Elias's approach

neglects the ways in "which a civilizing process may redeploy, sanitize and

camouflage disciplinary and other violence without necessarily diminishing it"

(Keane, 1996, p.24 ).

The discussion of the process of state formation, and its relation to

violence and law is significant for our analysis as it helps to understand what violence

within states say about the nature of the state and its two defining characteristics,

namely, a monopoly on the uses of force and its prerogatives for law-making.

One may thus differentiate between violence of the state and that of

cultures within a state. Walter Benjamin has argued that "there is a lawmaking

character inherent" in all violence (Benjamin, 1996, p.240), and it is here that the

crucial difference between the state's violence and that of its subjects, lies. The state,

through its lawmaking machinery, "assumes the burden of violence", primarily for

two reasons-- efficiency which consists of punishing the victim who took law in his

own hands than the initiator of violence for "avengers are more predictable than

initial attackers"; and practicality and self interest, as pacification and acquiescence

could initially be achieved only with substantial violence which later gave way to

"the violence of order and order creation" (ibid, p.81-87). In contrast to state

violence, in societies based on heroism and honour, such as medieval Iceland, "the

prospect of violence inhered in virtually every social interaction between free men,

28

and free women too" (Miller, 2000, p.85). The logic of such violence is that it is

never divorced from people's affective existence, the "emotional economy" of the

society, and threat, danger, shame, competition became the logical precondition for"

the violence of words and insult" which " preceded the violence of sheer physical

mass invading physical mass"(ibid, p.85-87). In cases where the state has composed

feuds, it has populated " the category of crime with the acts that earlier had

constituted the feud, but to the extent it was successful in eliminating rough justice it

also lost the deterrent to the aggressive acts which this rough justice had provided.

Something may have been lost when actions of vindication and vengefulness-- that

is, when some of the rougher forms of social control- were assimilated to crimes of

pure aggressive and invasive predation" (ibid, p.81 ). Furthermore, a flattening out of

differences based on age, sex, status etc. characterizes the state's notion of justice:

everyone is equal in the eyes of the law. However, "anthropological and historical

evidence shows that we use different weapons and different styles and intensities of

fighting according to the relational distance, age, sex, and status of the people we are

fighting against. A Viking raider may toss babies up in the air and spear them when

raiding abroad, but when feuding at home he may well spare his enemies children.

Among the Nuer, men of the same camp fight with clubs, but if the fight is between

people of different villages it is with the spear" (ibid, p. 71 ).

The foregoing discussion brings into focus a distinction between the

nature of violence and justice that states indulge in and that practiced in other cultures

of violence. However, that is not the only purpose. It is also to show that the logic of

state formation, that is, of conscience and good manners, of liberal democracy and

29

bureaucratic and economic rationality, is a problematic one and " an anthropology of

state formation needs to consider what states are formed against: Neitherthe shape of

the state, nor oppositional cultures, can be properly understood without the context of

the mutually formative (and continuing) struggle between them: in other words,

historically"' (Alonso, 1994, p.380; emphasis added).

Against overt state-sponsored violence, throughout human history,

stories of revenge, vengeance, retribution, humiliation, have necessarily been about

violence. Cultural history is replete with accounts of violence and horror- Robert

Darnton's account of cat massacres (an annual ceremony in Paris of burning cats

alive)(Darnton, 1984); Michel Foucault's account of the gruesome execution in 1757

of Damiens, a failed regicide who was even harder to kill than Rasputin (Foucault,

1977, p.3-6); Stephen Greenblatt's account of " the torture and murder of a Chinese

goldsmith by English traders in Java in the first decade of the 17tl! century" (Miller,

1993, p.54). These accounts of violence, torture and revenge are remarkable for their

prurience, but it shows how "our perceptions on violence are just as likely to be

generating our moral judgements" in a "particular setting as our moral judgements

our perceptions of violence" (ibid, p. 70).

Thus, it would seem right to conclude that there is a fundamental

difference between how power and violence is organized within societies and that in

a state. This is clearly demonstrated by the nature of power in so-called primitive

societies, which do not have a specialized organ like the state for the monopoly of

violence. In such societies, power is diffuse and the chiefs power is controlled by the

society, not the other way round. In state societies, the nature of power within the

30

society too gets fashioned in terms of state power, that is, a tendency towards

monopoly of power and violence in individual hands, leading to the proliferation of

state-like spaces within the society. 6 That understanding power relations in society

involves more than an understanding of the formal institutions of the state is a point

some theorists outside the anthropological tradition, notably Antonio Gramsci, argued

long ago. In recent times, studies of 'local-level politics' and its articulation with

formal state structures has made it possible to move beyond a focus on the state to an

analysis of how power is acquired and transmitted in society as a whole. An

appreciation of the 'multilayered complexity of political reality' would then include

"political action in everyday life and the symbols and rituals associated with these

everyday political actions, the concretiiation of 'political culture' at the point where

power is affirmed and contested in social practice" (Gledhill, op.cit, p.20).

Debates on the modem Indian state and state-formation in India, has

in most cases, acknowledged that the Indian state is an amalgamation of the pre-

colonial kingly political culture and the impact of colonial rule on the Indian

subcontinent. An important point to note here is that the colonial rulers had to

confront markedly divergent "political institutions and supporting arrangements ... as

between such polities as the Rajputs, the Mughals and Vijayanagar" (Saberwal, 1997,

p.75). Historical and anthropological studies have viewed state-society relations in

the Indian context and in the rest of South and South-east Asia as determined by the

6 The word 'state' emerged at that historical moment in European society, in the late thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, with the notion that there existed a separate legal and constitutional order that the ruler had a duty to maintain. This also gave rise to the notion of a 'civil society' standing between the autonomous individual and the state, protecting the interests of individuals and enabling them to assert their interests against those of the state. This new type of political organization, the state, then compelled all groups in society "to pursue their interests 'within the domain organized by the state', through political struggles focused on legal categories" (Gledhill, I 994; 2000, p. 18-19).

31

religious power of certain groups in the society, or by a symbolic affirmation of state

power within society. Kingship in traditional India was secularized, and political

power was defined as hierarchically inferior to religious authority of the Brahmans.

Religious authority and the caste system was the source of law and not secular kingly

authority. Historians such as Nicholas Dirks have however argued that even in India

under pre-colonial conditions states did organize and reorganize society in significant

ways, distributing land grants, symbols of power and titles, endowing temples and

organizing warfare. These centre-periphery relations were more than ritual and

symbolic in nature (Dirks, 1989). Colonialism redefined 'society' in fundamental

ways, giving new meanings and practices to old identities, such as caste and ethnicity,

but also producing strong discontinuities and a restructuring of established

institutions. Colonial rule, for instance, in the Madras Presidency, succeeded to draw

a number of indigenous elements into their own design, thereby transforming the

existing power relations in the society. David Washbrook has documented how, in the

early 20th century in South India, traditional power struggles for rural control and pre-

eminence often took violent forms with murders and destruction of property being the

two most common means employed to intimidate rival opponents. Institutional

changes brought about by the British only extended the spaces over which control

had to be secured; the modes of factional struggles remained the same (Washbrook,

1976, p.l63-68). Rural politics was marked by "factionalism rather than by conflict

between castes or classes. Peasant leaders, often of the same ritual rank, fought each

other for land, loot and pre-eminence within a restricted locality. Their followers

32

were socially heterogeneous and drawn together by their dependence on a common

leader" (Washbrook, 1973, p.498).7

More recently, C.J.Fuller and John Harriss have argued that

anthropologists have been mostly engaged in the study of 'traditional' kingly state,

neglecting the modern state as an object of study (Fuller & Harriss, 2000, p.l ). They

further argue, following Philip Abrams, that the modern state as a sovereign authority

can only be fruitfully studied by anthropologists, as the "state-system" and the "state-

idea" (ibid, p.4). The state-system, according to Abrams, is "a palpable nexus of

practice and institutional structure centred in government and more or less extensive,

unified and dominant in any given society", while the state-idea is a "message of

domination"- an ideological artifact attributing unity, morality and independence to

the disunited, amoral and dependent workings of the practice of government" (cited

in Alonso, 1994, p.380). However, Abrams' compartmentalization of the state into a

system and an idea has an underlying assumption about the dichotomy between the

state and society, which then fails to recognize the dynamics between the state and

society in both manipulating and reinforcing the state. However, old state-ideas could

survive in the new state-system, reproduced through local leaders' control of the

endlessly multiplying local 'community' associations, which the government as well

as non-governmental organizations, encourage as channels for their development

expenditure (Mosse, 2000, p.l62-193).

7 In the case of Italy, Anton Blok's study of violent peasant entrepreneurs of Sicily has shown how the Mafia in Sicily emerged out of the State's efforts to check landlordism and emancipate the peasantry. Mafia combined with landowners and local notables to hold others in check- by violence (Biok, 1988).

33

It is often held that categories taken from canonical social science

discourse are Euro-centric to analyze pre-colonial processes of state-formation in

South India. Bureaucratic and legal centralization, marked territorial boundaries, and

a monopoly of violence characterized the 17th and 18th century European states.

Scholars studying south Indian states and cultures, such as Arjun Appadurai, Burton

Stein, Nicholas Dirks, and others, have achieved persuasive results by applying a

model in which decentralization rather than centralization is the predominant feature

in the organization of the state. Stein's appellation of 'segmentary' states for the

south Indian region denotes relatively decentralized systems of social and political

organization in which authority is dispersed in discrete domains, known as

'mandalas'. In such segments, which constituted the late pre-colonial state in south

India, participation in palace and temple ritual performances constituted ideological

systems, which supported the legitimacy of a head of a domain. The boundaries of the

segmentary states were fluid and shifting, local chiefs organized their own armies,

and local communities settled disputes according to locally established codes. Each

segment was in turn, domains of power sharing, in which the "highest ranking human

ruler had the right to transact with highest honours with the highest ranking gods"

characterized by ritual transaction of substances (food, cloth, jewels, etc) (Price,

1996,p.15). Ritual transactions with gods bestowed a divine nature on the human

ruler himself. "Ritual transactions, combined with success in warfare, resulted in their

acquiring special status and honour compared to others .... Such transactions in ritual

ranking signified moral and political differences in the identity of persons, the

varying extent to which they shared authority with gods and other men in the

kingdom .... Statuses and, thus, substantial aspects of the identification of the person

34

could alter with the performance of service to a domain lord" (ibid,p.16-17). Thus,

personal relationships of governance were competitive in nature, with rulers of

constituent domains competing against each other for honour and status. Violence

was often employed in the continual defense and maintenance of variable honour and

status in the absence of absolute valuation (ibid). As Burton Stein has argued in the

context of the Vijayanagara Empire, the kings of Vijayanagara had a tight hold on

neither the revenues nor the ambitious lordships of constituent domains (Stein, 1990,

p.l40-46).

South Indian state systems have been characterized as 'segmentary'

or 'pyramidal' (ibid). In contrast to the unitary, centralized state, " the pyramidally

segmented type of state, so-called because the smallest unit of political ·

organization-- for example, a section of a peasant village-- was linked to ever more

comprehensive units of political organization of an ascending order (for example,

village, locality, supralocality, and kingdom) for various purposes, but that each unit

stood in opposition to other, similar units (for example, one section of a village as

against another) for other purposes" (Stein, 1990, p.264-65). According to Stein and

later historians of the south Indian region, such as Nicholas Dirks, Pamela Price,

Arjun Appadurai, etc., what characterized medieval south Indian state systems was

the 'ritual' sovereignty of the king over the various segments of the political system

encompassed by the state who nonetheless exercised political control in their

respective segments. Thus, as Stein has argued, this kind of separation of authority

and power made the system "extremely difficult to bring under unitary rule from

above or to alter from below because political authority is inextricably tied to

35

l

opposed, localized segments .... One reason why each of the segmented units remains

autonomous is that each is pyramidal, that is, each consists of balanced and opposed

internal groupings which zealously cling to their independent identities, privileges

and internal governance, and demand that these units be protected by their local

rulers" (ibid, p.274-75). ·It was the British rule, which eventually tried to dismantle

this system of local political power and integrate the locality into a wider political

system. However, "the remains of the older system, embodied in certain attitudes,

deferences and cultural interests, continued to exist throughout the nineteenth century

and beyond" (Washbrook, 1976, p.22).

Before the advent of British rule, during the Vijayanagara Empire,

attempts at centralization had reached its apogee, especially under Krishnadevaraya's

reign (1509-29) (Stein, 1990, p.27). Krishnadevaraya's strategy for attaining a more

centralized state entailed checking the authority of ancient territorial chiefs. He

devised a double-pronged strategy: "chiefs in the core of the. kingdom were

constrained from above by a system of royal fortresses under Brahman commanders

and garrisoned by troops ... From below, the king devised another sort of challenge;

this was the enfranchisement of a new strata of less,er chiefs totally dependent upon

military service under Krishnadevaraya; these were the 'Poligars' as the British called

them" (ibid, p.43). These Poligars later became important actors in south Indian

polity after the disintegration of the Vijayanagara empire. As Nicholas Dirks has

argued in his study of a poligar or palaiyakkarar "little kingdom" in Tamil Nadu,

"their localistic, collegial, and redistributional polities continued to constitute an

important part of the old regime right up until the end of the eighteenth century", and

36

even "to this day it continues to exert its powerful force on modern Indian society in

curious ways" (Dirks, 1989, p.54; emphasis added).

At the same time as the British conceded the "extraordinary vitality

of these local rulers"(ibid), their superior administrative and coercive powers

succeeded in delegitimizing the authority of these local rulers. As Washbrook has

argued for the Madras Presidency (of which present Rayalaseema region was a part),

"with the demilitarization of the warriors, the restrictions on the use of government

troops, the smashing of local-state social connections among administrators and the

combination of powers in the office of headman, coercive force to back up political

power was available only from inside the rural locality"(Washbrook, 1976, p.163).

Struggles for rural control and pre-eminence took violent forms. As has been cited by

Washbrook, a battle between two factions in the Gooty area of Anantapur district

between 1904 and the mid-1920s saw a number of murders taking place as a part of

rivalries between two powerful Reddi families-- Chinnarappa Reddi and Thimma

Reddi (ibid).

Further, the link between village, district and the province was

facilitated by the introduction of institutions such as the rural boards, power struggles

wherein significantly altered the nature of rural polities in general. To cite

Washbrook again, "by 1920, the old rivalry between Chinnarappa and Thimma Reddi

in Gooty was being channeled into the politics of the new order. P.Kesava Pillai (who

worked as a lawyer for Chinnarappa) became district board president and

Chinnarappa joined the district board; they used their combined power in the district

to have Thimma removed from all local self-government offices" (ibid, p.171 ).

37

Washbrook attests to the fact that factionalism was a 'local-level' culture until the

British institutional machinery incorporated it into a wider 'state-level' culture.

However, the factions at the village level have survived.

In the light of the above theoretical and empirical framework, the

question we are asking is: what becomes of violence as a way of being in the world in

a modem state system with a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence? Can we

talk legitimately of a culture of violence rather than-- as Valentine Daniel has

argued- violence as a "counterpoint to culture"(Daniel, 1997, p.202)? This logic

once again takes us to a consideration of the place of violence in societies without a

state. Anthropologists who studied "primitive" societies have argued that violence in

such societies is regulated by customary constraints. Gilbert Herdt has argued that

"war was the ultimate reality for ... the Sambia, because it was a pervasive fact of

daily life" (Gledhill, op.cit., p.32). Although Herdt maintains that "warfare is a

complex phenomenon that can have many causes, including the ambition of leaders

and competition for resources", his own analysis focuses on violence among the

Sambia as driven by a "warrior ethos" and their "commitment to violence" (ibid,

p.33). To imagine a culture of violence would therefore mean looking at the content

and cultural meaning of the relationship of power and dominance in societies which

are a part of the state system but peripherally. Here, one may ask what violence says

and does when it is not used by the state and its law-making machinery and what such

violence consists of when it is not supported by the fully politically organized state.

Thus, the two seemingly disparate yet connected themes of this

study, namely, faction and violence led us, in the final analysis, to the questions of

38

state-society interaction, where factions within Rayalaseema society articulated with

wider state structures and thus delineated a precarious balance between the society

and the state. The relationship between factions at the village or the mandai or the

district, and formal state authorities were often ambivalent. The bases of factional

alignments in patronage networks meant that power could be wielded in both the

spheres of the society and the state. On the one hand, factions disregard formal law

and withstand legal and governmental apparatus, thus projecting themselves as

constituting State-like power domains within the society; on the other, factions

through patronage networks, depend on the State since their local and regional power

domains exist only by virtue of their access to the larger domains of the State. This

very articulation of factional alliances with public authorities and national politicians

also render any State-based action or reform against them abortive and farcical. The

pervasive use of "private" violence by rival factions is also seen as a strategy. for

control of resources, which gives the state's monopoly on the uses of violence a lie.

We now turn to the setting in which this study is based. The reason

for selecting an entire region for this study has already been stated in the arguments

above.

The Setting

Rayalaseema, the name of the region in which this study is located,

1s one of the three geographical regions of the southern Indian state of Andhra

Pradesh. This was the name given to what was formerly known as the Ceded Districts

(comprising of Kumool, Anantapur, Bellary and Cuddapah), and now comprises of

39

the districts of Anantapur, Cuddapah, Kurnool and Chittoor, while Bellary is a part of

present Karnataka state. The Ceded districts got their name because they were ceded

to the British by the then Nizam in 1800 A.D. in lieu of getting military aid from the

British according to the Treaty of Srirangapatnam.

With regard to the three districts of Anantapur, Cuddapah and

Kurnool, the District Gazetteer of South India notes that "up to the conquest and

occupation of the District by the Vijayanagar kings, nothing definite is known of its

history; but it seems probable that it was successively in the hands of the Chalukyas,

the Cholas, and the Ganapatis of Warangal (1988, 1989, p.370-428; p.470-496).

Between the 14th to the 16th centuries, the region came under the kingship of the

Vijayanagar kings until their decline in late 16th century. Thereafter, the region fell

~der the "unchecked authority" of semi-independent chieftains, known as 'poligars',

none of who were particularly famous, and "all of them were weakened by mutual

animosities and by the arbitrary manner in which they were treated by the succession

of suzerains to whom they had to submit" (ibid, p.473). There were about 80 military

chieftains or 'poligars' in Rayalaseema region at the time it was ceded to the British.

The Hande family of Anantapur and Narasimha Reddy of Kurnool were two noted

'poligars' who rose in revolt against the British but were brought to submission by

the first Collector of the Ceded districts, Sir Thomas Munro (ibid, p.375 & p.473).

This region, under the Madras Presidency, was organized for 'dry'

cultivation. 8 Most land in this region was under the Ryotwari tenure, growing dry

8 The description of the agricultural patterns, landholding patterns, and the general economic conditions of this region draws, primarily from the seminal study of David Washbrook's ' Country Politics: Madras 1880 to 1930', Modem Asian Studies, 7, 3 (1973), p.475-531. Other sources drawn

40

grain crops- cholum, ragi and combu- which were of very little value. The

Ryotwari system of land assessment was introduced throughout this region around

the year 180 1, whereby each ryot held his land immediately from the Government

under a 'patta' or land deed. Later, with the growth of transportation facilities and

demand in the world market, some cash crops such as cotton and oilseeds, chiefly

groundnuts, were also grown. Some parts of the region also grow tobacco, sugarcane

and melons. About 3 decades back, the area also came to grow citrus fruits such as

oranges. The land in these districts was marked by the small size of the holdings and

the extreme poverty of the holders, with the exception of a few large 'pattadars', the

majority of who came from the Reddi or Kapu caste. Washbrook notes, "in the Ceded

districts, the bulk of the grain trade was in the hands of the richer Reddis who built

their houses on top of enormous grain pits" (Washbrook, 1973, p.484). Consequently,

the most common form of credit relationship was that between a petty cultivator and

a single creditor who regularly met most of his wants, thereby tying him in a bond

spanning several generations. Combined with the recurrent famines, a pervasive ·

feature of this region, agricultural patterns were highly skewed with the rich peasants

getting richer over a period, thus dominating the villages in this region both

economically and politically.

Historically, the region has been noted for the presence of village

factions, with the exception of Chittoor district, where they have been relatively less

noticed. Imperial gazetteers for the districts of Anantapur, Cuddapah and Kumool

note that these districts have been 'notorious' for their factions (Anantapur Gazetteer,

upon are the District Gazetteers of Anantapur, Cuddapah and Kurnool, and Census data from 190 I to 2001. :

41

1905). " In many villages" of these districts, " there are rival parties, one faction

being led by the village headman and the other by some· other influential person",

which " frequently gives rise to rioting, murder, and other offences" (District

Gazetteer of South India, op.cit. p.383). With institutional changes introduced by the

British, these village factions started vying for positions in the local administration

and subsequently in the arena of formal democratic politics with their entry into the

Legislative Council. Today, once powerful village landlords are members of district

level factions and political parties, building networks from the village to the district

and the regional level. Moreover, factionalism in the Rayalaseema districts of

Anantapur, Kurnool, and Cuddapah has started being seen as a social problem with

analogies being drawn between Mafia gangs similar to that operating in Mumbai.9

The Rayalaseema region presents us with a case where, over a

period, village level factions have been interlinked with the society beyond the

village due to changes of a socio-economic nature and political changes in terms of

regime change in the state. This has made it possible to map the regional political

alliances within the region over a period when trans-village alliances first began to

affect the political trajectory of the region. The study is hence poised on the

understanding that villages have, in the changed