Jan Breman is the pre-eminent ethnographer of labour at the bottom of the Indian economy. Beginning in the early 1960s and returning to the same villages of south Gujarat for more than fifty years, he produced a rare thing in sociology: a longitudinal record of how agrarian dependence was dismantled and replaced, not by free wage labour, but by insecure, mobile and often unfree work. Two of his coinages have entered the discipline's common stock — footloose labour and neo-bondage — and a third, informalisation, reframed the informal economy from a residual sector into the normal condition of the Indian workforce.
His work is doubly important for Indian sociology because it arrived as a direct empirical refutation of a dominant model. Where functionalist accounts of the village described jajmani relations as reciprocal, multi-stranded and consensual, Breman found domination that had shed its obligations while keeping its coercions.
Life and fieldwork
Born in Amsterdam in 1936 and trained in non-Western sociology, Breman first went to India in 1962 and settled on two villages in the Surat and Valsad districts of south Gujarat, working across the divide between Anavil Brahman landowners and the landless Dublas or Halpatis who laboured for them. He taught for most of his career at the University of Amsterdam, where he held the chair in comparative sociology and helped build the Amsterdam school of Asian labour studies. The method matters as much as the findings: repeated restudy of the same households over decades, combined with tracking labourers along their migration routes, allowed him to distinguish real structural change from the appearance of change.
Patronage and exploitation
Patronage and Exploitation (1974) examines the hali system, a form of attached agrarian servitude in which a Dubla labourer and his household were bound to an Anavil master, receiving grain, a hut site, loans and protection in return for lifelong service and often inherited debt. Breman's argument is historical rather than static. The old bond was undeniably exploitative, but it was also multi-stranded: the master's dominance carried customary obligations of subsistence and security.
Colonial commercialisation and, later, the spread of cash-cropping and market agriculture broke this reciprocity. The master became an employer who wanted labour by the season, not dependants for life. The result was not liberation but what Breman called a transition from patronage to exploitation — the removal of protection without the removal of subordination. Legal abolition of bonded labour, and even the labourers' own preference for the exit from the hali tie, did not produce security; it produced casualisation.
Against the jajmani harmony model
This finding put Breman in direct conflict with the patron-client model of the Indian village. That model, canonised in the literature on jajmani and congenial to structural-functionalist readings, treated caste-based service relations as an integrating mechanism resting on consensus, ritual duty and mutual need. Breman objected on three counts. Empirically, the relation was grossly asymmetrical, resting on control of land and on the labourer's inability to survive without an advance. Conceptually, the language of patronage naturalised inequality by describing coercion in the vocabulary of kindness and duty. Historically, the model was frozen; it could not see that the village economy was being pulled into capitalist agriculture and a wider labour market. Against the harmonious village he insisted on rural class formation — an agrarian structure to be analysed through property, class and antagonism, though one in which caste and class overlap heavily, since the landless are overwhelmingly Dalit and Adivasi.
Footloose labour and circular migration
Wage Hunters and Gatherers (1994) and Footloose Labour (1996) follow labourers out of the village. Breman describes an enormous army of workers who migrate seasonally and repeatedly — to brick kilns, sugarcane fields, salt pans, quarries, construction sites and the diamond workshops of Surat — and then return home. This is circular migration, not the one-way rural-to-urban transfer assumed by modernisation theory. Workers are recruited in gangs through intermediaries, or mukadams, paid through advances, housed at the worksite, and sent back at the close of the season; whole families, including children, migrate together.
Footloose does not mean free. Mobility is imposed, not chosen: workers are detached from land, from any single employer, and from the entitlements attached to place, and they arrive in the city as workers without becoming citizens of it. His metaphor of wage hunters and gatherers captures the resulting existence — a restless search for whatever work can be found, with no accumulation of skill, seniority or security.
Neo-bondage and the informal economy
Breman's most contested concept is neo-bondage. Unfreedom, he argues, has not disappeared with the hali system; it has been modernised. Debt advances now bind workers for a season rather than a lifetime, are monetised rather than paid in grain, are contracted through labour brokers rather than personal masters, and carry none of the paternalist obligations of the older tie. Bondage is therefore shorter, more purely economic, and in an important sense harsher — the worker is immobilised by debt but abandoned in every other respect.
From this he derives a broader claim about informalisation. The informal economy is not a backward sector destined to shrink as the formal one grows; the two are linked, and the traffic runs the other way. In The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class he traces the collapse of Ahmedabad's textile mills and the sliding of a settled, unionised workforce down into casual work, showing formalisation reversed within a single generation. Informality, for Breman, is a strategy of capital, and the great majority of Indian workers — well over nine in ten — live inside it.
Criticisms
Some economists argue that Breman's picture is too bleak, understating rising real wages, diversification and the bargaining power that tight labour markets have given some migrants. Others question the analytical precision of neo-bondage, holding that seasonal wage advances are a credit contract rather than unfreedom and that stretching the concept blunts it. His concentration on south Gujarat raises the usual question of generalisation from a single region, and critics note that his labourers appear mainly as victims, with relatively little attention to Dalit and Adivasi assertion, unionisation or political mobilisation as sources of change.
Legacy
Breman established the study of Indian labour as a field grounded in long-term ethnography rather than aggregate statistics, and his concepts now organise the research agenda: circular migration, labour intermediaries, the migrant as non-citizen, informalisation as process. The findings have fed policy debate on bonded labour law, interstate migrant worker protection and social security for informal workers — questions that became unmissably public during the mass reverse migration of 2020.
For the UPSC answer
Breman is your best empirical weapon in two places: any question on the informal sector, labour and society in Paper I, and any question on agrarian social structure or bonded labour in Paper II. Deploy him as the counter to the functionalist village — a single line noting that Patronage and Exploitation found reciprocity replaced by naked exploitation is enough to dismantle the jajmani harmony model, and it pairs neatly with Béteille on power and with Marxist accounts of rural class formation. Use footloose labour and neo-bondage as named concepts with a concrete illustration, such as sugarcane cutters or brick-kiln gangs recruited on advances, since examiners reward the specific example over the abstract claim. On contemporary questions about gig work, migrant distress or social security, cite his informalisation thesis to argue that precarity is structural rather than transitional.
References & further reading
- Breman, J. (1974). Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Breman, J. (1985). Of Peasants, Migrants and Paupers: Rural Class Formation and Capitalist Agriculture in South Gujarat. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Breman, J. (1994). Wage Hunters and Gatherers: Search for Work in the Urban and Rural Economy of South Gujarat. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Breman, J. (1996). Footloose Labour: Working in India's Informal Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Breman, J. (2007). Labour Bondage in West India: From Past to Present. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
- Breman, J. (2013). At Work in the Informal Economy of India: A Perspective from the Bottom Up. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.