This monograph is a study of the semiotic aspects of giving and receiving,
/en-den as it is called, in the Hindi-speaking region of northern India. It is
based on eighteen months of fieldwork, carried out mostly in the village
of Pahansu, from September 1977 to March 1979. More specifically, it is
a study of the way in which three important aspects of intercaste and
kinship relations-aspects that I have called centrality and mutuality, as
well as hierarchy-are differentially foregrounded and implemented in
the contexts of the giving and receiving of particular named prestations.
My inquiries in the field, in Pahansu, came to address what Trautmann
has called "the central conundrum of Indian social ideology," what
Heesterman has referred to as "the inner conflict" of Indian tradition,
what Dumont has characterized in terms of a distinction between religious ideology and "temporal power," and what Marriott has analyzed
in terms of the varying transactional strategies of jiitis and vart:tas engaged in givings and receivings that transform the natures of the participants. My fieldwork came to be focused largely upon the relationship
between Ksatriya and Brahman or, in local terms, between the Gujar
landholders and cultivators and the Gaur Brahmans of Pahansu. In this
locally enacted relationship between the dominant caste on the one hand
and the Brahman and service castes on the other, as well as in the textual
discourses concerning king and Brahman upon which Trautmann and
Heesterman relied, the giving and receiving of prestations is central. The
most important of these prestations is diin.