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Jajmani System a socio-economic institution of the pre-industrial self-subsistent village economy. The system has two institutional connotations-one religious and the other economic. Religiously, a jajman is one who employs a brahman for the performance of any solemn or religious ceremony. Normally, the very same Brahman is invited to perform a ceremony in a particular locality and the fee payable to him becomes customary and even hereditary. A jajman is usually under obligation to pay the customary fees even when the Brahman does not perform the ceremony. Religiously, it is an institutional arrangement that makes the Brahman dependent for subsistence on the jajmans who constitute his clients. From religious, the term passed to socio-economic relations. In the age of self-subsistent and non-monetised rural economy, the exchange of products and services between the followers of various occupations took place within the framework of jajmani institution. The use of money as an exchange medium, be it cowrie or any metal, was minimal under the jajmani socio-economic relations. The village people themselves produced most of their necessaries of life within the limits of caste and occupation. Peasants produced food crops, and the non-farm artisans
and manuals supplied other needs. The artisans and manuals needed food, and the agriculturists needed things that they could not produce themselves. For implements, clothes, medicines, transports, fish, salt, sugar and so on they depended on others. Jajmani system settled this interdependence. Villagers exchanged their respective produces between themselves under a customary system of trading and swapping. The food producing peasants played the pivotal role in the game. The artisans, weavers, boatmen, barbers, cleaners, doctors, etc supplied their products and services to peasant families in return for some share in their harvest which cleared everybody's dues accumulating during the crop season. The peasants, like the religious husbandman, who fed the Brahman under a different type of exchange system, became the jajmans of all non-farm elements catering to their needs. The pre-industrial Bengal economy worked fairly efficiently under the jajmani system. It made the village independent of the external world. Under the jajmani exchange system they could well survive without depending on the outside world to any material degree. This explains a great deal the unchanging character of Bengal society and economy in the pre-industrial era.
Jajmani system came under threat for the first time when
the European maritime companies came to Bengal by sea-lanes from the sixteenth
century and introduced the cash nexus in their respective trading settlements.
Every company brought treasures with it for collecting the Bengal products
for the world market. Artisans, whom they engaged for supplying their
manufactures for cash, were thus the first people to break away from the
jajmani system and get integrated to the world market of cash and competition.
With improved transportation and growth of urbanism and modern industries
accompanied by the rise of wage labour from the early nineteenth century,
the system began to disintegrate. It lost its effectiveness when the Bengal
economy became fairly modernised by the close of the nineteenth century.
[Sirajul Islam]
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