Reproducing Inequality: Spirit Cults and Labor Relations in Colonial Eastern India

Abstract

Understanding how unequal relations are reproduced over time is as significant as comprehending inequality itself. For unequal relations exist only in human practices that reproduce them. More than a play on words, the coupling of production with reproduction in recent anthropological studies highlights processes that provide the basis for production. The necessity of reconstructing practices that reproduce social relations is perhaps nowhere more neglected than in the study of South Asian history. When it comes to explaining how unequal relations between social groups were maintained, the caste system is the perennial favorite. This is particularly so where relations between landlords and landless laborers are concerned. Thus, even Jan Breman's sophisticated and rich study of dependent laborers in South Gujarat points to thejajmanisystem, the institutional form of caste relations in the agrarian context, as the basis for relations between laborers and landlords in the past. While his study illuminates how bonded labor relations can be understood in the light of thejajmanimodel, it fails to explain how these relations were reproduced. Are we to assume that the transactional norms of the caste system, once in place, simply drove laborers and landlords into actions that reproduced bondage?