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
8 - The Market and the Sovereign: Politics, Performance, and Impasses of Cross-LOC Trade
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
This chapter examines the complex entanglements of commerce and sovereignty in the modern artifact of cross-border trade that was inaugurated in 2008 between the India- and Pakistan-controlled parts of Kashmir. The exchange was devised as a nontaxable, nonmonetized form of barter, and strange customs evolved to ensure that the trade could be neither “internal” nor “external.” Yet for traders who engaged cross-border commerce in all its absurdity and elasticity, its artifactual form served as an opportunity for activating transversal ideas of autonomy, community, and profit otherwise not permissible under the regulatory regimes of nation states. Drawing on the historical emergence of markets as sites of political claims-making, I examine recent boundary wars between licit and illicit trade at the Line of Control to show how both traders and the state continually improvise law and exchange express distinct - and often incongruous - ideas of fairness and freedom.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rethinking Markets in Modern IndiaEmbedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction, pp. 206 - 233Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
References
Bayly, CA 1988, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Birla, R 2009, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India, Duke University Press, Durham.Google Scholar
Birla, R 2011, “Law as Economy: Convention, Corporation,” UC Irvine Law Review, 1, 3: 1015–37.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, D 1992, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Gaze,” Economic and Political Weekly, 27, 10–11: 541–7.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, M 2016, “Bandh Politics: Crowds, Spectacular Violence, and Sovereignty in India,” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 17, 3: 294–307.Google Scholar
Elias, JJ 2003, “On Wings of Diesel: Spiritual Place and Religious Imagination in Pakistani Truck Decoration,” RES: Anthropology and Ethics, 43, Islamic Arts: 187–202Google Scholar
Foucault, M 1979, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books, New York.Google Scholar
Freitag, SB 1989, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India, University of California Press, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Gandhi, A 2016, “The Hermeneutics of the Bazaar: Sincerity’s Elusiveness in Delhi,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31, 1: 126–48.Google Scholar
Gilmartin, D 1988, Islam and Empire: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan, University of California Press, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Hansen, TB 2004, “Politics as Permanent Performance: The Production of Political Authority in the Locality,” in Zavos, J, Wyatt, A, & Hewitt, V (eds.) The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 19–36.Google Scholar
Haynes, DE 1991, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haynes, DE & Prakash, G (eds.) 1992, Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, University of California Press, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Jaoul, N 2007, “Dalit Processions: Street Politics and Democratization in India,” in Strauss, JC & O’Brien, DC (eds.) Staging Politics: Power and Performance in Asia and Africa, I.B. Taurus, London and New York, pp. 173–93.Google Scholar
Kak, S (ed.) 2011, Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir, Penguin, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Kira, AH 2011, Cross-LoC Trade in Kashmir: From Line of Control to Line of Conquest, Working paper, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai.Google Scholar
Martin, M 2012, An Economic History of the Hundi, 1858–1778, dissertation submitted to the Department of Economic History, London School of Economics.Google Scholar
Mir, KF & Gattoo, MH 2018, “Cross LOC Trade Between India and Pakistan – Contours and Dynamics,” Pakistan Business Review, 19, 4: 843–60.Google Scholar
Pandey, G 1990, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi and New York.Google Scholar
Puett, M 2008, “Ritual and the Subjunctive,” in Seligman, AB, Weller, RP, Puett, MJ, & Simon, B (eds.) Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.Google Scholar
Qadri, A 2013, “India Pakistan Hostility Kills Trade on Kashmir Border,” New York Times, October 23.Google Scholar
Robinson, C 2013, Body of the Victim Body of the Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists, University of California Press, Berkeley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roitman, J 1998, “The Garrison Entrepôt,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 38, 2–4 : 297–329.Google Scholar
Saraf, A 2019. “‘Interference: Terror, Tourism, Trade,’ Contribution for Collection on ‘Volumetric Sovereignty,’” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space blog (https://societyandspace.org/2019/03/03/interference/).Google Scholar
Schaffer, T 2005, Kashmir: the Economic of Peace Building, The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Schwecke, S 2018, “A Tangled Jungle of Disorderly Transactions? The Production of a Monetary Outside in a North Indian Town,” Modern Asian Studies, 52, 4: 1375–419.Google Scholar
Sökefeld, M 2013, “Jammu and Kashmir: Dispute and Diversity,” in Berger, P and Heidemann, F (eds.) The Modern Anthropology of India: Ethnography, Themes and Theory, Routledge, London and New York.Google Scholar
Van Schendel, W and Abraham, I 2005, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.Google Scholar
Washbrook, DA 1981, “Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India,” Modern Asian Studies, 15, 3, 649–721.Google Scholar
Yang, AA 1998, Bazaar India : Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Gangetic Bihar, University of California Press, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Zargar, S “‘Our Lives and Property are at Stake’: As Cross-Loc Trade Halts, Kashmiri Traders Lament Losses,” Scroll.in May 04, 2019 (https://scroll.in/article/921849/our-lives-and-property-are-at-stake-as-cross-loc-trade-halts-kashmiri-traders-lament-losses).Google Scholar