Civilisations,markets and services: Village servants in India from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries

Abstract

This article focuses on the history of the set of practices labelled jajmani. These practices have been cited as evidence that a fundamentally inegalitarian spiritual principle could transcend and limit the economic domain. That idea underpins the belief that human beings must be grouped in mutually exclusive 'civilisations'. Projected geo-politically. the 'civilisation' is then endowed by Samuel Huntington with the Hobbesian, self-aggrandising traits of the nation- state. I suggest that we eschew grand unifying principles and try understand the meanings and motives that generate the repetitive patterns of meaningful interaction which we refer to as a 'society', a 'social practice or an 'institution'.