ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, I explored the practical difficulties affecting the likelihood of structural change within the Sikh Jat community. I did so purely as an academic exercise. Also, however, I had been accustomed to hearing the familiar characterization of patronage systems as ‘unjust’ and ‘corrupt’ and I was interested to see whether this was really so. Among the Jats, I found that such a system need not, by its nature, exclude the notion of or practice of equality in human relationships. Thus the question posed on p. 203 as to what would disrupt the present system of socio-political relationships in the rural areas implies no evaluation on my part that change is desirable in the Punjab. Rather the reverse. For, let us say, if A and Z (A and Z being representative of two different categories of people) can be brought together by a network of linkages ramifying through the entire structure of a society, then with the communication that implies and the polarization it evades, there is no reason why those linkages should be destroyed. Inevitably I could not but compare the Punjab cultural context with my own European one. It seemed that in societies characterized by patronage and egalitarianism, as indeed (though to a lesser degree) by patronage and inegalitarianism, a man was never so detached from others that either his concern about them or his hatred for them became an abstraction, i.e., a product of his ideas and values rather than of his interactions. By contrast, the society to which I belonged had achieved precisely that. 1 It is one of the unhappier expressions of our structural complexity that it has fostered enormous distance and lack of communication between individuals. A man is overburdened by the duties and activities attached to his role, ‘taken over’ by it and characterized accordingly. Only in this sort of system (I believe it is called ‘highly differentiated’) could the writings of certain philosophers and social and political theorists have had the influence they did. Had they not lived in ‘an academic world’, socially separate and distant by virtue of their role and their ‘specialized knowledge’, it is doubtful if they would have been accorded their semi-prophetic status. It was the significance of this development that prompted Benda to write in 1927: ‘Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.’ 2
