Chapter 5 India 177Though the specific set of castes varied from region to region, many fea-
tures turned up almost everyplace. In a typical village you find a dominant
caste that is the major landowner, owning much or all the land, or even the
whole village. In Madhopur (Cohn 1955) and Sirkanda (Berreman 1963) it was
the Rajputs. In Kishan Garhi it was the Jats (Marriott 1955). In Kumbapettai
(Gough 1954) and in Karimpur (Wiser and Wiser 1963) it was Brahmans. In
Pahansu it was Gujars (Raheja 1988). In Rampura it was Okkaligas (Srinivas
1963). Note that these villages are distributed across India: Uttar Pradesh,
Gujarat, Mysore, Madras.
These dominant castes may be high or low in the varna hierarchy, but they
are invariably powerful as a result of the resources they control and, usually, the
number of their households. For example, in Rampura village, the dominant
Okkaliga caste was by far the largest, with 735 persons; the next largest was the
Kuruba, a sheepherding caste of 235 persons. The Okkaligas were the most
powerful caste, but not the highest ranking; that was the Brahmans with a
grand total of 15 persons. Because of their control of the most crucial
resource—land—the dominant caste is linked with other village castes in a
complex economic and ritual network. The others provide extra labor during
tilling and harvesting and provide services to the landowners’ households. The
landowner is the patron (jajman) and the economic system that connects his
caste with others is known as the jajmani system. It is about economic and rit-
ual interdependence.
Case Study: Two Hundred Years of Caste in a
North Indian Village
In contemporary India, these village jajmani systems have undergone
changes that have been documented by more recent anthropologists. A particu-
larly vivid example comes from the state of Bihar in the northeastern part of
India (Chakravarti 1986, 2001a, 2001b). The village of Aganbigha was founded
200 years ago by a man named Ishwar, a member of the Bhumihar caste, who
was granted land by the maharaja. He immediately set about assembling a full
complement of serving castes to establish a classic jajmani system. These Bhu-
mihars considered themselves too high ranking to personally cultivate the land,
so they brought in lower-caste cultivators to actually work it. Under British law,
both the Bhumihars and these lower caste cultivators had rights in the land.
In order to expand cultivation to marshy land nearby, the Bhumihars
brought in members of a tribal group, the Santhals, to reclaim the land, work-
ing on it for half the produce. However, when the Santhals began to claim offi-
cial cultivation rights to this land, the Bhumihar landowners attempted to
replace them with Yadavas, a more pliable caste willing to accept their place in
the caste hierarchy. At the same time the Bhumihar landowners began calling
themselves “farmers” (kisans) rather than the more prestigious “landowners”
(zamindar) in order to claim land rights for themselves. Throughout the 1930s
there was a great deal of agitation by various agricultural castes over land rights