Village Studies of Indian Commerce
One reason for the longevity of nineteenth-century biases about Indian society is that there have been remarkably few studies of the operation of even contemporary Indian commercial and other economic systems. Anthropologically, the focus has tended to fall on operations of the so-called jajmani system, a putatively India-wide redistributive system that operates within strictly local village contexts. According to standard models of jajmani , members of occupationally specialized castes exchange
their services for shares of agricultural produce controlled by members of the dominant landed caste in a village.[9]
But there is growing reason to believe that the entire anthropological orientation toward and emphasis on jajmani models of village economic life merely reflect an untenable presumption about the noncommercial autonomy of precapitalist peasant villages. Recent systematic and detailed studies of village economic transactions have begun to show that the jajmani does not represent a pan-Indian phenomenon and that where jajmani or jajmani -like systems do operate, they make up only part of the total village economy (Commander 1983; Fuller 1989; Good 1982, 1991). Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of anthropological emphasis on jajmani is the impression it gives of India's economy as consisting of nothing else. Against any such misapprehension, it must be remembered that throughout Indian history, 40 percent to 60 percent, and under extreme circumstances perhaps as much as 80 percent, of village produce has left the village (Habib 1969; MBPEC 1930 1:35–85; Nicholson 1895; Rajayyan 1964–65; Robert 1983; Thorner 1960).
A large part of this exported village surplus takes the form of taxes in kind or money levied by various governmental institutions. Although not studied by anthropologists, such expropriation of village surplus has received attention from historians attempting to understand the financial basis of the great Indian empires, Mughal and British (Chandra 1966; Chaudhuri 1971; Habib 1969; Ludden 1985; Marshall 1976; Stokes 1978). Other historians, strongly influenced by anthropological concerns with indigenous ethos and world view, have attempted to integrate values believed to underlie village jajmani transactions with values believed to underlie the interactions between regional kings and local peasants (Dirks 1988; Greenough 1983; Price 1979). This last set of important studies identifies hierarchical values of "royal generosity" and "indulgence" as structuring the behavior of two sets of roles, as Greenough puts it: "the first set comprising powerful, resource controlling 'parents,' the second set comprising helpless needy 'children.' The roles in each set are equivalent in the sense that those in the first (kings, gods, masters) are all destined providers of subsistence ... while those in the second (devotees, subjects, dependents) are all persons requiring nurture" (1983: 841).
Studies such as these break down the artificial boundaries that existed between village geography and Indian economy. But they still ignore a major sector of the Indian economy not governed by parent/child values of hierarchical indulgence and generosity. What they miss are the relatively egalitarian values governing commercial relationships. Role sets of persons engaged in a commercial transaction are not split into two asymmetrical
categories of "subsistence providers" and "nurture requirers." Instead, they involve elaborate chains of lenders and debtors who are often mutually lenders and debtors to each other. For example, on one occasion, an agriculturalist may borrow money to purchase land, seed, or fertilizer. On another occasion, he may deposit excess profits from his harvest with a banker for investment on his account.[10] Moreover, a landholder or trader who borrows money from a moneylender may loan out that money himself. And the original moneylender may easily borrow up to 90 percent of the monies he loans out (Robert 1983). In such relationships, values taken to underlie behavior cannot be understood as any simple transformation of generosity and indulgence from holders of parental roles to holders of child roles. Rather, the operative values seem to entail nonhierarchical relationships of trust and trustworthiness, often created and symbolized by religious gifting on the part of those engaged in commerce.
In other words, anthropologists and historians have paid little attention to an entire range of significant economic activities occurring beyond the level of the village. This observation applies to trade at a variety of periodic markets and especially to money-lending and banking activities involved in sophisticated indigenous systems for providing credit to farmers, traders, and governments. Without institutions of credit extension, India could not have maintained either its notorious tax levies or its extensive system of medium- and long-distance trade in agricultural and nonagricultural commodities.