Changing Rural Class Structure and the Jajmani System

Abstract

In Pauline Kolenda's paper we have been introduced to the jajmani system, one of the major units of Indian social organization. Here, I wish to discuss the ways in which this system is being reinterpreted and is adjusting to meet the needs of an aggressively upward mobile caste community in a period of rapid social change. In presenting data on the contemporary functioning of the jajmani system for the Noniya caste of Village Senapur, I shall describe the emergence of a nascent middle-class group which utilizes aspects of the jajmani system primarily to maximize its power position in the multicaste village and to secure for itself necessary goods and services on credit terms.