Book contents
- Rethinking Markets in Modern India
- Rethinking Markets in Modern India
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- 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
- References
13 - Building on Sand? Criminal Markets and Politics in Tamil Nadu
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2020
Book contents
- Rethinking Markets in Modern India
- Rethinking Markets in Modern India
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- 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
- References
Summary
For the Comaroffs criminality has become a global idiom for social and economic life. Here, eleven case studies of criminal markets in India (Harriss-White and Michelutti, 2019) are found to support the Comaroffs’ global model in which state privatization generates contested jurisdictions and plural sovereignties. But distinctively Indian characteristics of criminal markets are also found. As suggested by Jha, these are preconditions for the funding of electoral democratic politics. The recent history of riverbed sand markets in Tamil Nadu on which urbanization and infrastructure depend reveals the capture and complicity of all levels of the revenue and regulative bureaucracy and of entire party political hierarchies. Profits and tribute resulting from rapid technological aggrandizement, the formation of regional monopolies, and of mafianized cartels in sand are the object of both competition and collusion. Resistance expressed through PIL results in un-enforced judicial decisions. Tamil Nadu’s famed populism coexists with predatory, pork barrel politics. The implications of criminalized sand markets for theories of actually existing markets and institutional change are discussed.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rethinking Markets in Modern IndiaEmbedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction, pp. 343 - 364Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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