3 ideas
Under jajmani ties, a landowning family pays a service caste in grain, food, and protection instead of wages or property. This keeps the labourer alive, but it also removes any route to independence, because survival depends on staying loyal to one household. The patron's kindness and the servant's confinement are the same arrangement seen from two sides.
Protection given through personal affection between a landowner and a servant does not pass to the landowner's heirs. The heirs inherit the land and the claim on the servant's labour, but not the obligation. When the patron who remembered the friendship dies, the dependent loses everything the relationship gave him and keeps only its duties.
Read the lives of the dispossessed for gradual erosion rather than dramatic cruelty: small withdrawals of respect, affection denied, hopes abandoned, until the person simply fades. Seen this way, the harm of a hierarchy shows up in lives that quietly shrink and disappear unnoticed, not in open conflict.