In the jajmani system of village India, families who provided services were tied to patron families, the jajmans. Britannica describes the bond: “These relations are supposed to continue from one generation to the next.”
The tie was a duty of the family, not of one person. “The hereditary character allows for certain forms of bond labour, since it is the family obligation to serve its hereditary patrons,” Britannica adds.
Brijmohan Lall Munjal, who led Hero for decades, met every dealer before the company appointed them. Dealers called him their “guru, guide, mentor and father figure.” When Hero and Honda ended their partnership, many expected the dealer network to break apart. “Not a single dealer left the Munjals in spite of the doomsday projections,” wrote Bhupesh Bhandari in Business Standard after Munjal’s death in November 2015.
Bhandari added that Munjal “never let Hero MotoCorp (earlier Hero Honda) become a faceless and impersonal corporation.”
In August 2016 Business Standard reported that the carmaker Maruti Suzuki was “witnessing the emergence of the second and even third generation at many dealerships.” The company set up a forum called Junoon for the next generation of dealers.
R S Kalsi, Maruti’s executive director for marketing and sales, said the company had to “retain them, offer them a sense of security on the professional as well as emotional front.” A dealer from Udaipur, Priyank Mathur, explained: “I was a little reluctant to join the family business which my father had started in 1986.”
C V Krishna Murthy opened Kusum General Stores on Avenue Road in Bengaluru on December 10, 1960. It sold toothpaste, soap, face powder and other household items. His family later took it over. When the family closed the shop after sixty years, Deccan Herald reported that it had a loyal customer base, “with many being third generation regulars.”
“Many of them have even become his friends,” the paper wrote of the founder. The owner said that online shopping and malls had drawn the younger customers away.
In Haridwar, around 2,000 pandas, priests of the holy city, “preserve the lineages of their clients in the ‘Bahi khatas’,” the registers they keep. “The clientele of a particular panda is decided on the basis of the village, district and the state they come from,” DT Next reported in 2021.
Before written records, the pandas “used to memorise the names, clans and places of origin, and pass down the information orally to their next generations.”