South Asia
John Harriss
I distinguish four themes in the economic anthropology of South Asia. The first concerns the ‘jajmani system’, a phrase that refers to the ways that economic transactions may be embedded in the social relationships of caste in Indian villages. This is the classic theme in the economic anthropology of South Asia, and it leads logically into a second, the commercialization and commoditization of the rural economy. Third is a consideration of recent research on the environment and the management of natural resources. Finally, I consider the economic implications of caste and religion more generally, a theme with a considerable historical pedigree. This theme is linked with the increasing interest within economics in culture, and in the relationships between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ institutions.
Rural economic transactions and the ‘jajmani system’
The ‘substantivist’ view of the economic anthropology of India was set out by Walter Neale, one of Karl Polanyi’s students. Neale aimed to show ‘that the structure of the village economy … can be far better explained by the concepts of reciprocity and redistribution than they can by the more usual terms of economic theory’. Central to his analysis was the notion of the redistribution of the ‘grain heap’ after the harvest through the allocation of shares to different village servants and officials (for example, the blacksmith, carpenter, washer-man and barber), who were themselves all connected through relationships of reciprocity within the caste system. The ruler too had a share, which came to be called ‘land revenue’ and which, Neale argued, ‘is not a phenomenon of the market order and cannot be translated into market terms. To ask whether land-revenue was a rent or a tax was to misconstrue the economic organization of pre-British India.
At around the time that Neale wrote, and for many years later, anthropologists observed these sorts of transactions; I saw the village temple priest, artisans, barbers and washer-men receiving their shares on the threshing floors in south Indian villages in the 1970s. By this time the idea of the ‘jajmani system’ was widely referred to in the many ethnographies of village India (though this term seems to have been unknown to villagers themselves). This reflected the influence of a study of a north Indian village by W.H. Wiser, first published in 1936, which referred to ‘a system of redistribution in Indian villages whereby high caste landowning families called jajmans are provided services [including ritual ones] and products by lower castes [while] purely ritual services may be provided by Brahmin priests’. The idea of the jajmani system, symbolized in the grain heap, is one of a non-market economy regulated by customary rights and privileges and intrinsically bound up with caste relationships.
There was extensive debate about whether the system should be considered to be ‘integrative’[1] or ‘exploitative’[2], in which the balance lay with integration, a position put by Louis Dumont (1970: 105), the outstanding modern theorist of caste: ‘The needs of each are conceived to be different, depending on caste, on hierarchy, but this fact should not disguise the entire system’s orientation towards the whole’. Epstein (1968), meanwhile, sought to show how jajmani relations provided some minimum guarantees of subsistence for artisans and labourers, in an argument that anticipated the later formulation by James Scott (1976) of the idea of ‘the moral economy’.
More recently, Fuller (1992; and after him Mayer 1993) argued convincingly that, while there is no doubt that there are customary relationships in many Indian villages in which payments are made in kind, the whole idea of the jajmani system is a construction of the anthropological imagination and a misleading simplification[3]. Most important for the argument is the strong historical evidence showing that, as early as the thirteenth century, the ‘king’s share’ was very often paid in cash and that the consequent demand for cash was one major factor integrating villages into a wider monetized economy. There is evidence, too, from pre-colonial India of the existence of private property rights and of a market in them. So, although there were (as there remain) redistributive systems in Indian villages, there were also private and exclusive rights which stood ‘as the antithesis of [the idea of] complementary interdependence [emphasized by Dumont]’ (Fuller 1992: 50). Fuller’s work points to the significance of commercialization and to the development of a market economy even at an early stage in Indian history, and these are also significant themes for the anthropology of contemporary India.
‘Agrarian structure’, commercialization, class and caste
The village studies that were the stock in trade of South Asian anthropologists until the 1980s were generally preoccupied with aspects of caste and religion, heavily influenced by the structural-functionalism that underlay the idea of the jajmani system.2 Beteille’s village ethnography in the Thanjavur region of south India started to break this tradition with an investigation of the relationships of caste, class and power. It showed how these were once largely coincident, but have latterly become increasingly distinct (Beteille 1965; see also Beteille 1974). His lead was followed in work on ‘agrarian structure’, the network of relationships among groups of people deriving their livings from the land, and on the impact upon it of the commercialization and commoditization that were taking place, especially following the ‘green revolution’ in the 1960s. This had significantly increased both farmers’ needs for cash and the further commoditization of agriculture.
Agrarian structures throughout the South Asian region are characterized by inequality and asymmetries of power. Although large landed estates are relatively unusual (except in parts of Pakistan) and the largest landowners in a village may own no more than twenty acres or so,3 commonly a handful of village households own as much as half of the land, while half of the households own virtually nothing. Also, women’s rights in land are severely constrained (Agarwal 1994, which is also a major source on gender relations in South Asia).
In Marxist terms (see Robotham chap. 3 supra), the peasantry is highly ‘differentiated’. ‘Rich peasants’, the dominant landholders (certainly less than 10 per cent of the rural population), exercise power in land, labour, money and commodity markets, as well as in politics. Large numbers of ‘poor peasants’ and of landless, casual wage labourers are locked into personalized relationships of dependence in all these markets with rich peasants, moneylenders or traders (roles sometimes combined in the same person). Because of the extent of such personalized relationships, the markets themselves are imperfect (‘fragmented’): there are significant price differences that cannot be explained by the calculus of supply and demand. Such personalized relations constrain rural productivity because the returns on money-lending and trading are likely to be greater than on agricultural production, so that there is little incentive for productive investment. These relations can also hinder collective action and hence adversely affect the development of irrigation (see Thorner 1956 for a classic statement on such agrarian relations; Boyce 1987 on problems of collective action in irrigation; Bharadwaj 1985).
These agrarian production relations do not coincide perfectly with caste differences (or their local equivalents in Bangladesh and Pakistan) but there is a good deal of overlap. Rich peasants mostly come from dominant castes, labourers come from low-caste groups, and the relationships between them may well have a religious significance given that, because of their caste positions, some of the labourers are responsible for performing ritual services. Thus, class relationships may actually be perceived by those concerned in them in terms of caste (Harriss 1982, 1994), and the by now highly commercialised rural economy remains, in significant ways, embedded in caste relations. Rural labour markets, for example, remain fragmented spatially between villages, depending upon differences of caste structure and upon whether rich peasants are concerned to maintain their social and ritual as well as economic dominance (for example, Bardhan and Rudra 1986; Harriss 1991b). Labour markets are also fragmented by caste, as Breman (1985) has shown in south Gujarat, where local lower-caste people remained unemployed even while the dynamic regional economy drew in labour from outside. Generally, caste influences the ways in which people get jobs, and members of scheduled castes are usually excluded from some occupations.4
One particular aspect of production relations in the context of the more intensively commercialised rural economy is that of the persistence or not of patronage in the relations of cultivators and labourers. There is evidence, like that of Epstein (referred to above), that patron–client relationships were widespread and acquired legitimacy because they offered some minimum guarantees of subsistence, exactly as Scott’s argument about ‘the moral economy of the peasantry’ suggests. As the rural economy has become more commoditised it seems that there are possibly different trajectories of change.5 In some cases the dominant caste cultivators have clearly aimed to rid themselves of their historical moral and material commitments to lower-caste labourers (see Breman6 (1974) 1989, in Alavi and Harriss 1989: 153). In yet other cases, however, it appears that dependence, perhaps with elements of patronage involved, is re-established where it is in the interests of landholders to attach dependent labourers to themselves through long-term debt, in order to reduce their labour costs (see Ortiz chap. 4 supra). Whether this kind of attachment, and the ‘unfreedom’ of labour which it implies, can be described in terms of ‘patronage’ is a matter of considerable debate.7
The management of the commons
A relatively new theme in the economic anthropology of rural South Asia concerns the environment and people’s perceptions of and ways of using natural resources. An early but still important study is Guha’s (1989) on conflicts over forest management between forest dwellers and the state in the hills of Uttar Pradesh, while more recently Sivaramakrishnan (1999) has contributed research on state formation, forest management and environmental change in southwest Bengal. His work has moved Indian environmental history beyond the romantic simplifications of the nationalist environmentalism exemplified by Guha (and by Gadgil and Guha 1992, 1995).
The increasing interest among scholars in the possibilities for local, community management of natural resources, which are either ‘open access’ or ‘common pool’ resources, has followed from concern about resource degradation. Stimulated by Hardin’s (1968) paper ‘The tragedy of the commons’, a number of scholars came up with empirical cases of successful local management, and Elinor Ostrom (1990) developed a general theory, within a rational-choice framework, to explain the conditions for such success. More recently it has come to be widely accepted that the involvement of users in the management of resources is probably generally desirable in the interests of efficiency and sustainability, as in the Indian Joint Forest Management schemes (see Poffenberger and McGean 1996).
A significant contribution to this literature from South Asia was Robert Wade’s (1988) study of the development of local institutions for the management of irrigation water in parts of Andhra Pradesh. His explanation for the existence of these institutions is couched within a rational-choice framework, and he may underrate the significance of Reddy dominance in villages where water management institutions exist. More generally, it has been argued that the approach reflected in Wade’s research can be enriched by ‘the analysis of power [as his might have been had he taken greater account of Reddy dominance] and … the study of how political asymmetries across social groups affect their interactions and resource management related outcomes’ (Agrawal 2001: 186; work of this kind includes Agrawal 1999; Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan 2001; Mosse 2003).
Caste, religion and economic activity
Many observers of South Asia in the twentieth century argued that caste and the religious ideas associated with it, notably the doctrines of karma (commonly translated as ‘fate’) and of samsara (the idea of the cycle of rebirth), powerfully constrain economic development. A recent statement of these ideas is by the Nepali anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista (1991), but the locus classicus for the idea that caste and religious values hamper development is Max Weber’s The religion of India. Weber argued that Hinduism and Buddhism have no equivalent of ‘the Protestant ethic’ that he had seen as being intrinsically bound up with the development of capitalism in the West, and also that the caste system prevented the emergence of a capitalist free market. The ethics of ‘this-worldly asceticism’ that Weber observed among Calvinists in particular and which appeared to be so important for their ‘rationalisation’ of their conduct – and thus for the development of capitalism – had no equivalent in India, he thought: ‘The conception that through simple behaviour addressed to the “demands of the day”, one may achieve salvation … is alien to Asia. This is as excluded from Asiatic thought as the pure factual rationalism of the West, which practically tries to discover the impersonal laws of the world’ (Weber 1967 [1916–17]: 342). In one way or another, his conclusion that cultural conditions have constrained the development of capitalism in South Asia has been reiterated by more recent scholars (for example, Myrdal 1968).
Weber’s arguments were first subjected to ethnographic scrutiny by Milton Singer, who studied ‘the industrial leaders’ of Madras in the early 1960s, ‘the most relevant group for a test of Weber’s thesis’ (1972: 284). Generally, Singer says, these businessmen stressed the philosophical foundations of Hinduism and the idea of Hinduism as a ‘way of life’ and a code of ethical conduct, rather than ritual observance.8 He felt that they could generally be described as ‘this-worldly ascetics’, just like Weber’s Protestant capitalists, and he concluded that, far from acting as fetters on development, Hinduism can be seen as having very positive effects for entrepreneurship. This was part of his wider argument that ‘the cultural ideology of “traditionalism” [may be] one of the major instruments of modernization’ (1972: 384). He also pointed out that there is a structural parallelism between the Hindu joint family and the modern corporation, and that it could provide a strong basis for the development of large industrial organizations.
Singer also noted, however, that caste was significantly reflected in employment patterns and labour markets, with the caste hierarchy being reproduced, albeit imperfectly, in the different categories of jobs in modern companies. These patterns, which persist, show the long-standing connections between caste background and educational opportunity rather than caste prejudice per se (on caste and labour market structure, see Breman 1996; Harriss 1986; Holmstrom 1984; Parry, Breman and Kapadia 1999). Caste differences also continue to influence industrial relations, as when personnel managers try to avoid having substantial blocs of employees from particular castes or communities. Writing of the extensive informal economy of India rather than of the corporate sector, Harriss-White (2003: chap. 7) has shown the continuing economic significance of caste in her studies of the economy of a small market town in northern Tamil Nadu. She shows that economic liberalization and modernization have not dissolved economic relations based on caste, but have reinforced them, in what she calls ‘caste corporatism’. The role of caste in the economy is also the subject of several studies of particular business caste communities, of which David Rudner’s, on the Nattukottai Chettiars of South India, is outstanding (other important works include Laidlaw 1995; Mines 1972, 1984; Timberg 1977). Rudner (1994: 134) takes issue with Singer’s presumption that business leaders needed to establish the kind of ‘dichotomy between secular and transcendental realms [that] was the stimulus to Protestant ascetic individualism’. He shows that members of the Chettiar elite ‘made rational use of economically “irrational” ritual’ (1994: 135), and that the caste and religious institutions of the Chettiars created the basis for a powerful banking organization.
Rudner’s study shows how strong trust, which facilitates economic transactions, may be built up within business caste communities such as the Chettiars. A critical question, then, is that of whether such specific or personalised trust, developed within a particular group of people, provides the basis for generalised trust that runs through society as a whole. The economist J.-P. Platteau has argued that such generalised trust is necessary for an effectively functioning market economy, in which, the argument runs, it must be possible to trust strangers. Platteau is pessimistic with regard to South Asia, arguing that these societies remain under the strong influence of traditional patterns of social relations, in particular the primacy of family and caste relations. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that rights and obligations associated with these patterns still tend to predominate over the rules and norms rooted in the abstract individual (as opposed to the concrete person) which are the typical products of western history. (Platteau 1994: 797; original emphasis)
This neo-Weberian argument resonates with the work of the Indian anthropologist Satish Saberwal, who argues that because of the ‘traditional autonomy of segmental codes [for conduct, related to differences between caste groups] the idea of extensively binding normative orders [across society as a whole, and] effective down to particular persons has been relatively alien to India’s historical experience’ (Saberwal 1996: 65; this argument assumes that what is ascribed to the West by Weber or, more recently by Platteau, really does exist, rather than representing an ideal).
It is important that Saberwal says ‘relatively alien’, because there are ‘binding normative orders’ within the Hindu tradition and because, as Mines argues with reference to business people in Chennai, change is taking place: ‘To a considerable extent the need to establish trust through enduring personal ties [often within caste communities] has been replaced by impersonal contractual relationships, law and governmental bureaucracy’ (Mines 1994: 79). Yet change may not be quite so straightforward as Mines implies. Garrett Menning (1997: 63) argues on the basis of research in Surat (Gujarat) that ‘In some respects it appears that the very strength of personalized trust … may have actually inhibited the development of other types’. The kind of trust that is strong is among groups of people within specific social networks, and this has allowed the development of great business enterprises. This selective trust has to be relied upon when institutionalized sanctions and incentives are weak, as they are in India. But the weakness of institutionalized sanctions also has to do with the strength of selective trust, reflected in the problems of corporate governance. At the centre of these is ‘the culture of compliance’, a boardroom culture shaped by traditions of deference, and of promoter control of boards within the great family businesses, a culture resistant to external scrutiny.
Business families have always sought to retain control within a tight circle of kin and resisted the claims of what one of them9 refers to as ‘explicitly stated principles and ethical norms’. But then, the lack of consistently applied principles in the external environment justifies or leads to reliance on selective trust in a kind of a vicious circle. The problem of business management in India in the context of economic globalization is that of bringing about a change in the institutional framework and in business behaviour, but in a context in which these changes confront the culture of ‘selective trust’. Change is taking place, but only against the resistance that derives from the strength of selective trust.10 Harriss-White (2003: 197) makes the same point with regard to the vast informal economy: ‘Market exchange does not always lead to “contracts” replacing “custom” [while] contracts prove compatible with [and may need to be underlain by] a certain amount of custom’.
A note by way of conclusion
While the development of the economic anthropology of South Asia since Neale’s Polanyian essay of 1957 has shown the severe limitations of his substantivist perspective, it has retained the central idea of the embedding of economic activity in social, political and cultural structures. Putting it a little more precisely, economic anthropology studies the inter-relations of formal institutions with the informal social order in which they are embedded, and hence it shows the importance for the economy of shared patterns of thought and behaviour, or culture. At present in South Asia these commonly have to do with caste and religion; they are not satisfactorily explained by mainstream economics and they remain exogenous in the currently fashionable new institutional economics.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank David Rudner and, as so often, my colleague Chris Fuller for valuable comments on a first draft of this chapter.
Notes
1.
2. Classics include Marriott (1955), Mayer (1960) and Parry (1979).
3. It must be noted that there is a huge difference over most of South Asia, in terms of value and productivity, between irrigated (‘wet’) and non-irrigated (‘dry’) lands. Twenty acres of well-irrigated land is a really substantial holding; twenty acres of dryland may have little value.
4. Harriss-White (2003: 176) comments that ‘Caste still screens access to employment in the agrarian no-farm economy’, and refers to Jeffery (2001) for Uttar Pradesh and to Jayaraj (2003) for Tamil Nadu.
5. See the comparative work of Jens Lerche on labour relations in different regions of Uttar Pradesh (Lerche 1995, 1999); and for contrasting accounts from different parts of Tamil Nadu the work of Gough (1989) and Harriss (1982, 1991a ).
6. Breman’s is the classic study of patronage and agrarian production relations in India (1974; with a second revised and updated edition, 1993).
7. There is debate about whether this kind of attachment, and the ‘unfreedom’ of labour which it implies, can be described in terms of ‘patronage’, see Breman ([1974] 1989, in Alavi and Harriss 1989). A major study of the ‘freedom’ or ‘unfreedom’ of agricultural labour in India is Ramachandran (1990).
8. My studies of ‘industrial leaders’ in the same city in 2000, and of Singer’s field notes, showed that he did not sufficiently recognise the importance of ritual and ecstatic religion for the businessmen (Harriss 2003).
9. M.V. Subbiah of the Muragappa Group, at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s ‘Family Business Conclave’, Bangalore, 2000.
10. My points about boardroom culture are supported in Banaji (2001). My argument may seem to support Platteau (1994), but I think his approach misses the inter-relationships of institutions and societal systems of values that I have described here.
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