The village barber was not only a barber. He carried marriage proposals, delivered invitations, officiated at parts of the wedding ritual, shaved the mourners after a death, and knew every household's business because he entered every house.
He was paid under the sepidari arrangement, in grain at harvest, like the blacksmith and the carpenter.
That role gave him a specific standing: indispensable, in every house, and at the bottom of the caste order. Bhagat Sain Ji, one of the fifteen Bhagats in the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, was a barber, and the Sain community takes its name from him.
The role has gone. Invitations are printed, proposals go through bureaux, and hair is cut in a shop for cash.
The village dai, the midwife, occupied a parallel position: present at every birth, from a specific community, paid in kind, and displaced by the clinic.
Both were information systems as much as service providers, and a village lost a good deal more than a haircut and a delivery when they went.
The nai cut hair and shaved, and he also carried the marriage messages, made the arrangements, kept the family connections in his head and performed a set of ritual duties at every ceremony.
That second role is the one that mattered. The nai was the village's information system and the negotiator between families who could not approach each other directly.
The barbering survives as a trade in the towns. The other function has gone entirely, and with it a body of genealogical knowledge nobody wrote down.