A main characteristic of rural caste is the coming together of various caste-sections living in a village in order to produce food and goods and services needed locally. In other words, the caste system at the village level is locked into the production system and vice versa. Thus the household of a landowner has enduring symbiotic relations with particular households of blacksmith, carpenter, potter, oilman, barber, washerman, priest and tenants or labourers.

The symbol of this is what is called the jajmani system, in which specified quantities of grain-with-straw are paid by the landowner after harvest to the heads of the artisan, labouring and servicing households who have worked for him during the previous agricultural year. Traditionally the rates remained stable over long stretches of time, and a landowner was expected to keep his workers so long as they did not persistently default on their tasks, and in turn the workers could not change their masters without serious reason.

Indeed, patron-client and master-servant relationships tended to be hereditary, a landowner inheriting, as it were, a body of specialists to work on his land just as the latter inherited him. Inter-caste and inter-familial relations in the village were enduring and multi-stranded.