The jajmani system : an investigation

Abstract

The idea for this thesis developed as a result of work I undertook as a research assistant on a demographic survey in India. During an initial visit in 1978-9, I became interested in the effects of occupational and educational change on caste, on which subject I subsequently wrote my honours thesis, Stablility and Challenge: Caste Responses to Changes in Occupation and Education in an Indian Village. While reading for this subject I became interested in the concept of the jajmani system. As described in the anthropological literature, jajmani is a system whereby the services of a range of craftsmen, which may include barbers, washermen, carpenters, and blacksmiths, are provided in return for fixed annual allocations of harvested grain rather than for payment in money or payment for each service tailored to the size of the service. The services are provided only by the appropriate castes and may include other specified ritual duties. Jajmani relations have been identified as being hereditary and as involving duties and responsibilities on the parts of those giving and those receiving the service. The literature on the jajmani relations interested me but did not seem to describe the relationships I had noted in the field. During my next visit in 1979-80, I was determined to explore this matter but at first I made little progress. I asked the chief landlords of the village in which I was working, Mayasandra, in Karnataka State, South India, whether they made the annual payments of grain to their labourers that anthropologists held to characterize the jajmani system. They uniformly said that they did not but paid their labourers in cash, usually on a purely casual basis. Conversations I had with the labourers reinforced this information. It was only when I had cross-questioned a much wider range of people, that I found that harvest payments were made, but only by the smaller farmers of Mayasandra and in the outlying hamlets. They were paid not to the labourers, but only to the so-called service castes, the Barbers, Washermen, Blacksmiths etc. (When an occupation is spelled with an initial capital letter it designates the caste which traditionally undertook that work.) On rereading the literature, I found that I had made several unwarranted assumptions. Firstly, although theoretical models of the jajmani system generally cover all occupational groups (see Wiser, 1958; Dumont, 1980), most ethnographic descriptions (including Wiser’s) only mention the service castes, and the few exceptions are highly suspect