First published in 1998. The efficacy of the modern village or community studies lies in their deriving better understandings of the structure and function of institutions. They perform this office of social science by analysing the living workings of institutions in the experience of human beings struggling between traditional values and modern imperatives of change. the book before us is a community study, in that it lays bare before us a living village, in an interesting and too little reported region of the great and complex land of India. It is also, most importantly, the study of a local variant of a traditional economies institution, called elsewhere the Jajmani system, better the traditional economy of clientage and patronage, uniting service castes in ritual and craft services to the landowners and cultivators of a corporate village. an object of interest and seminal for social science since its discovery in the seminal historical studies of Sir Henry Maine.