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The Setting: Jats, Camars, Rampur	3
Caste and the Jajmani System	81
	Earlier authors (Wiser, Opler and Singh) "drew an essentially
	benevolent picture of how the _jajmani system provided 'peace and
	contentment' for the villagers.  [Lewis] however, has quite a
	different assessment, for it seems evident that the relationship
	between jajman and kamin lends itself to the exploitation of the
	latter.  ALl the village land, including the house sites, is owned by
	the Jats, the other castes are thus living there more or less at the
	sufferance of the Jats.  It was this crucial relationship to land,
	with the attendant power of eviction, which made it possible for the
	Jats to exact _begar service from the Camars in the past, and still
	enables them to dominate the other caste groups p.81
Land Tenure and Economics	87

Review by Morris E. Opler, Cornell U

The investigation which resulted in this volume was not planned as a rounded
community study with full ethnographic coverage. It was necessarily
problem-oriented. In 1952 the author took a position as consultant for the
Ford Foundation in India and was assigned to work witth the Program
Evaluation Organization of the Planning Commission. Though he concentrated
his attention on a single village for eight months, he had to pay particular
attention to those aspects of village life of immediate importance to the
practical programs which had been initiated. A series of reports and papers
about the village resulted, and a number of them were eventually
published. This book is mainly a compilation and republication of the printed
material, with some additions to provide setting and the necessary bulk. This
is therefore not a very balanced picture of an Indian village, but it is,
like most of Lewis' work, provocative and at points quite interesting. I say
that it is interesting at points only, because such sections as the analysis
of the village accountant's records and the lengthy description of the
changing political alignments, through the ages, of "factions" of the village
do not make particularly sprightly reading.

    Rampur, the village in which Lewis gathered material with the aid of
seven young Indian students, is in Delhi State, 15 miles west of the national
capital. It has a population of 1080 people and a total land area of 784
acres. There are 12 castes living in the village, but a number of them have
token representation only. For example, there is only one family of the
blacksmith caste, a single merchant family, and but two families of the
tailor caste living in the village. Eighty-five percent of the people belong
to the four most populous castes and the other 15 percent to the eight
others. The Jat, a cultivating caste of intermediate status, is the most
populous group by far, with a membership of 648 or nearly two-thirds of the
population. The Jats are not only the largest group numerically but the
predominant group in terms of wealth and power, for they own all of the
land. Rampur and villages of the area which resemble it demo- graphically and
with which it is traditionally linked, are consequently called "Jat
villages." There are 110 Brahmans in the village and the Jats rent land to
them and treat them with respect. But the rest of the people are of low caste
and many of them are "untouchables."  Lewis concludes that the low castes are
badly exploited by the Jats. He blames this on the jajmani system, the
hereditary arrangement whereby arti- sans and workmen render services
appropriate to their caste to others, and he scolds writers who have had a
good word to say for the traditional system. Yet he provides no convincing
evidence to prove that the low castes, in the face of the numbers, wealth,
and political control of the Jats, would fare better without the jajmani
system.

   One of the interesting findings on the economic side has to do with the
degree to which the village depends financially on positions which members of
Rampur families hold outside. Over 9000 rupees are remitted to the village
each month by those with outside jobs. Again the Jats, and not the landless
and more needy, gain the most. Forty-seven Jats, from 42 of the 78 Jat
households, have found outside employment. On the basis of such data Lewis
warns that the expansion of outside opportunities may not inevitably aid the
villagers who need it most, but may further reward those who are best
educated, influential, and mobile.

The author dwells at some length on a social unit he names a "faction."
This he describes as a cohesive unit within a caste which carries on
cooperative economic, social, and ceremonial enterprises and which has
sufficient economic resources to be independent of other factions. He finds
groups that meet most of these criteria but which do not have the wealth to
stand alone. He says that these "can hardly be con- sidered as independent
factions of the same order" as the others, but he does not ex- plain just
what they are. That there is a special solidarity among castefellows who are
close enough spatially to have face-to-face relations is well known, and
Lewis does no service by burdening the biradari with criteria which it does
not always meet and does not need to meet to be a recognizable entity.

Probably the author's most important contribution in this volume is his
discussion, in the last chapter, of the need for a typology of peasant
societies and his comments on the effect of village exogamy and village
endogamy on social organization and general outlook. The excellent
photographs which illustrate the book are one of its most pleasing and
instructive features.