The Jajmani System in North India: An Examination of its Logic and Status across Two Centuries

Abstract

As the universality of political economy has receded before the myriad instances of particular economic rationalities, it has become increasingly clear that most non-capitalist structures are organized around a multi-centric set of dynamics. In this regard one would expect to find that the economic as a category possesses less univocal clarity and its precise sense is only vouchsafed through a cognisance of the broader, integrating set of validating principles. This would be true as much in Mauss's analysis of the Gift as it would be in relation to the dynamics of a feudal economy. In the first instance the transactional medium and symbolic sense of the act contains within it the premises of an entire system, while in the second example the implied free-play of economic indices rests, in reality, on the intervention of extra-economic factors, in this case, the intervention of the seigneury. From the case of one transactional exchange to the dynamics of an entire system, common to both is the reallocation of the category ‘economic’ and its merger with criteria and principles of a wider and more diffuse nature.