Abstract
The recipient of the ritual Indian gift embodying the sins of the donor was the brahman, a representative of the highest caste. The gift involved no expectation of its being returned or repaid. The underlying idea is that it is ethically dubious to atone for sins with money or solely by ritual. In the eighteenth century, many Indian villages still maintained on a collective basis so-called village servants who were paid for their services by the village as a whole. Ensuing colonial rule, however, broke down the old sense of community and the Indian culture of negotiation between the elites and the people. This contributed to making the famines of the nineteenth century more devastating than previously.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ageron, Charles-Robert. 1991. Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present, trans. and ed. Michael Brett. London: Hurst & Company.
Anderson, Perry. 1977. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: NLB.
Bayly, Susan. 2001. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. The New Cambridge History of India, Vol. IV: 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burghart, Richard. 1978. Hierarchical Models of the Hindu Social System. Man 13 (4): 519–536.
Chandra, Satish. 1982. Standard of Living: Mughal India. In The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 1, c. 1200–c. 1750, ed. Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, 458–471. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chrétien, Jean-Pierre. 1974. Échanges et hiérarchies dans les royaumes des Grands Lacs de l’Est africain. Annales ESC 29 (6): 1327–1337.
Davis, Mike. 2002. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London and New York: Verso.
Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Dube, S.C. 1967. Indian Village. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row.
Dumont, Louis. 1980. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Complete Revised English Edition), trans. Mark Sainsbury et al. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Finley, M.I. 1978. The World of Odysseus. New York: The Viking Press.
Fukazawa Hiroshi. 1991. The Medieval Deccan: Peasants, Social Systems and States, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Fuller, C.J. 1993. Misconceiving the Grain Heap: A Critique of the Concept of the Indian Jajmani System. In Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. J. Parry and M. Bloch, 33–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guha, Sumit. 2004. Civilisations, Markets and Services: Village Servants in India from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 41 (1): 79–101.
Heim, Maria. 2004. Theories of the Gift in South Asia: Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Reflections on Dāna. New York and London: Routledge.
Histoire de l’Inde moderne (1480–1950). 1994. Ed. Claude Markovits. Paris: Fayard.
Kiernan, Ben. 2017. Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kolenda, Pauline. 1981. Caste, Cult and Hierarchy: Essays on the Culture of India. Kirpa Dai Series in Folklore and Anthropology 3. Meerut: Folklore Institute.
Kulke, Hermann, and Dietmar Rothermund. 2006. Geschichte Indiens: Von der Induskultur bis heute. Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck.
Lerche, Jens. 1993. Dominant Castes, Rajas, Brahmins and Inter-caste Exchange Relations in Coastal Orissa: Behind the Facade of the ‘Jajmani’ System. Contributions to Indian Sociology 27 (2): 237–266.
Marx, Karl. 1972. Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Bd. 1, ed. Erster Band, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. Werke. Bd. 23. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Mauss, Marcel. 1954. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison. Glencoe: The Free Press.
Mayer, Peter. 1993. Inventing Village Tradition: The Late 19th-Century Origins of the North Indian ‘Jajmani System’. Modern Asian Studies 27 (2): 357–395.
Morris, Ian. 1986. Gift and Commodity in Archaic Greece. Man 21 (1): 1–17.
Neale, Walter C. 1957. Reciprocity and Redistribution in the Indian Village: Sequel to Some Notable Discussions. In Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, ed. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson, 218–236. Glencoe: The Free Press.
Parry, Jonathan. 1986. The Gift, the Indian Gift and the ‘Indian Gift’. Man 21 (3): 453–473.
Parry, Jonathan. 1993. On the Moral Perils of Exchange. In Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. J. Parry and M. Bloch, 64–93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parry, Jonathan P. 1994. Death in Banares. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Raheja, Gloria Goodwin. 1988a. India: Caste, Kingship, and Dominance Reconsidered. Annual Review of Anthropology 17: 497–522.
Raheja, Gloria Godwin. 1988b. The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Class in a North Indian Village. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Raheja, Gloria Goodwin. 1989. Centrality, Mutuality and Hierarchy: Shifting Aspects of Inter-caste Relationships in North India. Contributions to Indian Sociology 23 (1): 79–101.
Raychaudhuri, Tapan. 1982. Non-agricultural Production: Mughal India. In The Cambridge Economic History of India, c. 1200 –c. 1750, ed. Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, Vol. 1, 261–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stein, Burton. 1980. Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Thapar, Romila. 2002. Early India from the Origins to AD 1300. London: Allen Lane/Penguin.
Weber, Max. 2011. Abriß der universalen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Mit- und Nachschriften 1919/20. Max Weber. Gesamtausgabe. Abt. III. Bd. 6. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).
Wilson, Jon. 2016. India Conquered: Britain´s Raj and the Chaos of Empire. London: Simon & Schuster.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kujala, A., Danielsbacka, M. (2019). The Indian Gift and Village Servants. In: Reciprocity in Human Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96056-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96056-2_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96055-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96056-2
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)