Owing to the difficulty, in both regions, of distinguishing ‘farm-labouring households’ from households which are mainly dependent on farming their own land; and owing, as we have seen, to the very low proportions of ‘non-farming households’ whose members never work on the land – it seems practicable to regard the latter type of household as anomalous to the degree that in most contexts we can effectively regard the entire population as organised in ‘farming households’, the working members of which all contribute to the household income. On the one hand farming households (or households as I shall often call them) are seen as the basic productive unit; on the other hand it is necessary to emphasise the high degree of economic interplay between them, especially owing to the importance of farm-labouring. It follows that economic inequality, which is one of the most inherent features of our dry grain mode, has to be conceptualised and assessed in terms of households (not individuals) – households which come in many shapes and sizes and have many varying characteristics.

As we have seen in Chapter II, the basic kin structure of farming households in the two regions is remarkably similar. Since very low proportions of household members are unrelated to the household head, whether by blood, marriage or adoption, I shall not clutter these pages with a detailed analysis of the kin structure of all the households, but shall rather plunge into a discussion of the most central organisational issue determining the size, strength and viability of individual households, namely the degree to which fathers (or widowed mothers in Anekal) are successful in retaining the services of their married sons.