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4 - Magic of Business: Occult Forces in the Bazaar Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2020

By
Projit Bihari Mukharji
Edited by
Ajay Gandhi ,
Barbara Harriss-White ,
Douglas E. Haynes  and
Sebastian Schwecke
Ajay Gandhi
Affiliation:
Universiteit Leiden
Barbara Harriss-White
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Douglas E. Haynes
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
Sebastian Schwecke
Affiliation:
Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta
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Summary

This chapter explores the role and function of occult forces in South Asian bazaars. Drawing mainly, but not exclusively, on material from eastern South Asia, it challenges the repeated attempts by scholars to read these forces along functionalist lines. Instead, it demonstrates that there is a substantial body of formalized textual knowledge which theorizes the nature, role, and application of these forces. This knowledge is available, in the bazaar itself, in a specialized genre of printed books. The chapter argues against mapping the knowledge produced in these books within the category of “religion,” since the emphasis on belief and bounded identities that have become germane to modern ideas of “religion” are inapplicable to the practices of the occult bazaar. The occult bazaar, it is argued, should be treated as a distinctive sphere of abstraction that is separate from, though interacting with, the more formalized and well-known abstraction of “the economy.”

Keywords

occultreligiongrimoiresmagicprint culturebazaarCalcuttaIndia
Type
Chapter
Information
Rethinking Markets in Modern India
Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction
 , pp. 85 - 115
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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