Rethinking Markets in Modern India

Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction

Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, Douglas E. Haynes, Sebastian Schwecke

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781108486781
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108806855
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

To people operating in India's economy, actually existing markets are remarkably different from how planners and academics conceive them. From the outside, they appear as demarcated arenas of exchange bound by state-imposed rules. As historical and social realities, however, markets are dynamic, adaptative, and ambiguous spaces. This book delves into this intricate context, exploring Indian markets through the competition and collaboration of those who frame and participate in markets. Anchored in vivid case studies – from colonial property and advertising milieus to today's bazaar and criminal economies – this volume underlines the friction and interdependence between commerce, society, and state. Contributors from history, anthropology, political economy, and development studies synthesize existing scholarly approaches, add new perspectives on Indian capitalism's evolution, and reveal the transactional specificities that underlie the real-world functioning of markets.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• 1 Markets in Modern India: Embedded, Contested, Pliable
• 2 Banking in the Bazaar: The Nattukottai Chettiars
• 3 Space in Motion: An Uneven Narrative of Urban Private Property in Bombay
• 4 Magic of Business: Occult Forces in the Bazaar Economy
• 5 Vernacular Capitalism, Advertising, and the Bazaar in Early Twentieth-Century Western India
• 6 The Artifice of Trust: Reputational and Procedural Registers of Trust in North Indian “Informal” Finance
• 7 Mandi Acts and Market Lore: Regulatory Life in India’s Agricultural Markets
• 8 The Market and the Sovereign: Politics, Performance, and Impasses of Cross-LOC Trade
• 9 Brandism vs. Bazaarism: Mediating Divinity in Banaras
• 10 Black Money in India: Fighting Specters and Fostering Relations
• 11 Market Making in Punjab Lotteries: Regulation and Mutual Dependence
• 12 Liquid Assets: Transactional Grammars of Alcohol in Jharkhand
• 13 Building on Sand? Criminal Markets and Politics in Tamil Nadu
• Index