Jajmani system and caste as social capital

Jajmani organised caste interdependence in the agrarian village: services for grain, honour and hereditary claims.

• Jajmani is a traditional village service economy linking landowning jajmans with specialist jatis who supply craft, ritual and menial services for grain, rights or customary dues.
• William Wiser’s The Hindu Jajmani System framed it as a hereditary, multi-generational exchange web—not a spot market.
• Typical features: hereditary occupation, patronage, ritual interdependence, payment in kind, and moral language of duty alongside hierarchy.
• Debate: some read it as organic reciprocity; others as structured exploitation of landless service castes by dominant cultivators.

• Decline drivers: cash wages, urban migration, factory goods, land reform shocks, political assertion of service castes, and breakdown of exclusive jajman control.
• Continuity: ritual specialists, life-cycle services, and prestige payments can survive even when daily craft jajmani weakens.
• Teaching cases often contrast Wiser’s ‘integrated village’ picture with later restudies showing marketisation and conflict.

Caste can function as a network resource—help for insiders, barriers for outsiders—even as classic jajmani fades.

• Social capital here means networks of trust, information, credit and mobilisation that caste membership can provide.
• Positive face: mutual aid, business networks, migration chains, voting blocs and educational coaching circles.
• Negative face: exclusion of outsiders, capture of institutions, and reproduction of inequality through closed networks.
• Modernisation does not simply dissolve caste capital—it often relocates it into urban professions, politics and entrepreneurship.