Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T00:09:34.967Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Markets in Modern India: Embedded, Contested, Pliable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2020

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
Get access

Summary

“From the outside, the market in India is often seen as an exchange arena bound by state-imposed rules. Those within - buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, brokers and advertisers, financiers and debtors, police and inspectors - understand it differently. Such parties collude and compete in myriad everyday activities. These include those of accumulation and circulation, of production and speculation, and of arbitrage and management.

Involved actors, in short, experience the Indian market dissimilarly from the ways in which many planners and policymakers comprehend it. This market is best understood as an ensemble of practices and institutions. It has active and reactive patterns of economic and sociocultural practices, flexible adjustment and coping mechanisms, unforeseen contingencies and aberrations, and strategies of ambiguity and transgression. Transactional agents navigate gray areas and tacit understandings. They reproduce durable informal relations and customary practices. These dynamics only partially relate to state-led market-framing processes.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Rethinking Markets in Modern India
Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction
, pp. 1 - 28
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abraham, I & van Schendel, W (eds.) 2005, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, Indiana University Press, Bloomington,Google Scholar
Ali, TO 2018, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta, Princeton University Press, Princeton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amrith, S 2013, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migration, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Anderson, K 2010, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Appadurai, A 1986, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in Appadurai, A (ed.) The Social Life of Things, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 364.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Appadurai, A 1996, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.Google Scholar
Appadurai, A 2015, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barth, F 1981, “The System of Social Stratification in Swat, North Pakistan,” in Barth, F (ed.) Features of Person and Society in Swat: Collected Essays on Pathans, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp. 1654.Google Scholar
Basile, E 2017, “Civil Society and Small Town Capitalism: The Case of Arni,” Decision, 44, 2: 133–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, C & Mio, M (eds.) 2015, Cities in South Asia, Routledge, New York.Google Scholar
Bayly, CA 1996, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Bayly, CA 1998 [1983], Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Bayly, CA 2011, “Merchant Castes: Identities and Solidarities,” in Kudaisya, MM (ed.) The Oxford India Anthropology of Business History, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 99121.Google Scholar
Bear, L 2015, Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt Along a South Asian River, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto.Google Scholar
Besky, S 2014, The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India, University of California Press, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Bhagwati, J & Panagariya, A 2013, Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries, Public Affairs, New York.Google Scholar
Bhatia, J 2019, “Crime in the Air. Spectrum Markets and the Telecommunications Sector in India,” in Harriss-White, B & Michelutti, L (eds.) The Wild East? Criminal Political Economies Across South Asia, UCL Press, London.Google Scholar
Birla, R 2009, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India, Duke University Press, Durham.Google Scholar
Bohannan, P & Dalton, G (eds.) 1962, Markets in Africa, Northwestern University Press, Evanston.Google Scholar
Breckenridge, C (ed.) 1995, Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.Google Scholar
Breman, J 2013, At Work in the Informal Economy of India. A Perspective from the Bottom Up, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, D 1989, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940, Princeton University Press, Princeton.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, D 2002, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Permanent Black, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Chandavarkar, R 1994, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chandavarkar, R 1998, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Chandavarkar, R 2009, History, Culture and the Indian City, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Chari, S 2004, Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto.Google Scholar
Chibber, V 2003, Locked in Place: State Building and Late Industrialization in India, Princeton University Press, Princeton.Google Scholar
Cohn, B 1996, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, Princeton University Press, Princeton.Google Scholar
Cross, J 2014, Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India, Pluto, London.Google Scholar
De, R 2018, A People’s Constitution: Law and Everyday Life in the Indian Republic, Princeton University Press, Princeton.Google Scholar
Dodd, N 2014, The Social Life of Money, Princeton University Press, Princeton.Google Scholar
Dossal, M 1991, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1845–1875, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Farooqui, A 2006, Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay, Three Essays Collective, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Ferguson, N 2008, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Penguin, New York.Google Scholar
Fuller, C & Benei, V (eds.) 2001, The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, Hurst, London.Google Scholar
Galbraith, JK 1967, The New Industrial State, Mifflin, Boston.Google Scholar
Gell, A 2006 [1999], “The Market Wheel: Symbolic Aspects of an Indian Tribal Market,” in The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, Berg, Oxford, pp. 107–36.Google Scholar
Gooptu, N (ed.) 2013, Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India: Studies in Youth, Class, Work and Media, Abingdon, Routledge.Google Scholar
Goswami, M 2004, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Graeber, D 2011, Debt: The First 5000 Years, Melville House, New York.Google Scholar
Gregory, CA 1997, Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange, Harwood, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Gupta, AD 2001, The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant 1500–1800: Collected Essays of Ashin Das Gupta, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Gupta, CD 2016, State and Capital in Independent India: Institutions and Accumulation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Guyer, J 2004, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Hansen, TB 2005, “Sovereigns Beyond the State: On Legality and Authority in Urban India,” in Hansen, TB & Stepputat, F (eds.) Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, Princeton University Press, Princeton.Google Scholar
Hardiman, D 1996, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Harriss-White, B 2003, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Harriss-White, B 2005, “Commercialisation, Commodification and Gender Relations in Post-Harvest Systems for Rice in South Asia,” Economic and Political Weekly, 40, 25: 2530–42.Google Scholar
Harriss-White, B (ed.) 2015, Middle India and Urban-Rural Development: Four Decades of Change, Springer, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Harriss-White, B & Jan, MA 2012, “The Three Roles of Agricultural Markets. A Review of Ideas About Agricultural Commodity Markets in India,” Economic and Political Weekly, 47, 52: 3952.Google Scholar
Harriss-White, B & Michelutti, L (eds.) 2019, The Wild East? Criminal Political Economies Across South Asia, UCL Press, London.Google Scholar
Haynes, DE 1999, “Just Like a Family? Recalling the Relations of Production in the Textile Industries of Surat and Bhiwandi, 1940–60,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 33, 12: 141–69.Google Scholar
Haynes, DE 2012, Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870–1960, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodgson, GM 2001, How Economics Forgot History. The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science, Routledge, London and New York.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huws, U 2003, The Making of a Cybertariat. Virtual Work in a Real World, Merlin Press, London.Google Scholar
Jain, K 2007, The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, Duke University Press, Durham.Google Scholar
Kar, S 2018, Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA.Google Scholar
Kudaisya, MM (ed.) 2011, The Oxford India Anthropology of Business History, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Kumar, A 2002, The Black Economy in India, Penguin, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Laidlaw, J 1995, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society Among the Jains, Clarendon Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
Lambert, H 2000, “Village Bodies: Constitution, Locality and Affection in Rajasthani Kinship,” in Böck, M and Rao, A (eds.) Culture, Creation, and Procreation: Concepts of Kinship in South Asian Practice, Berghahn, New York, pp. 81100.Google Scholar
Ludden, D 2004, “The Formation of Modern Agrarian Economies in South India,” in Chaudhuri, BB (ed.) The History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture: Vol: VII, Economic History of India, 18th–20th Centuries, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 140.Google Scholar
Machado, P 2014, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, C. 1750–1850, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Markovits, C 2000, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Markovits, C 2008, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era, Permanent Black, Ranikhet.Google Scholar
Marriott, M 1976, “Hindu Transactions: Diversity Without Dualism,” in Kapferer, B (ed.) Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Philadelphia, 109–42.Google Scholar
Martin, M 2009, “Hundi/Hawala: The Problem of Definition,” Modern Asian Studies, 43, 4: 909–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mazzarella, W 2003, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, Duke University Press, Durham.Google Scholar
Mines, D & Lamb, S (eds.) 2010, Everyday Life in South Asia, 2nd edn, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.Google Scholar
Mines, M 1996, Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Nakassis, C 2016, Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Osella, F & Rudnyckyj, D (eds.) 2017, Religion and the Morality of the Market: Anthropological Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Pande, A 2014, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India, Columbia University Press, New York.Google Scholar
Pandian, A & Ali, D 2010, Ethical Life in South Asia, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.Google Scholar
Parry, J 1989, “On the Moral Perils of Exchange,” in Parry, J & Bloch, M (eds.) Money and the Morality of Exchange, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 6493.Google Scholar
Parry, J & Bloch, M 1989, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, in Parry, J & Bloch, M (eds.) Money and the Morality of Exchange, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Parthasarathi, P 2009, The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850, Oxford University Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
Parthasarathi, P 2011, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1650–1850, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Perlin, F 1993, The Invisible City: Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500–1900, Variorum, Aldershot.Google Scholar
Piketty, T 2014, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Polanyi, K 2001 [1944], The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times, Beacon, Boston.Google Scholar
Puri, SS 2014, Speculation in Fixed Futures: An Ethnography of Betting in Between Legal and Illegal Economies at the Delhi Racecourse, University of Copenhagen Press, Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Raheja, GG 1988, The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Ray, RK 1995, “Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800–1914,” Modern Asian Studies, 29, 3: 449554.Google Scholar
Roy, A 2003, City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.Google Scholar
Roy, T 2018, A Business History of India: Enterprise and the Emergence of Capitalism from 1700, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Rudner, D 1989, “Banker’s Trust and the Culture of Banking Among the Nattukottai Chettiars of Colonial South India,” Modern Asian Studies, 23, 3: 417–58.Google Scholar
van Schendel, W & Abraham, I 2005, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.Google Scholar
Searle, L 2016, Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Sen, S 1998, Empire of Free Trade. The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.Google Scholar
Srivastava, S 2007, Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class, and Consumption in India, Routledge, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Tomlinson, BR 1979, The Political Economy of the Raj 1914–1947, Macmillan, London.Google Scholar
Tomlinson, BR 2013, The Economy of Modern India From 1860 to the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Vatuk, S 1972, Kinship and Urbanization: White Collar Migrants in North India, University of California Press, Berkeley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Virdee, S 2019, “Racialized Capitalism. An Account of its Contested Origins and Consolidation,” Sociological Review, 67, 1, 327.Google Scholar
Weber, M 1958 [1916–1917], The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, Free Press, Glencoe.Google Scholar
Wiser, W 1936, The Hindu Jajmani System: A Socio-Economic System Interrelating Members of a Hindu Village Community in Services, Lucknow Publishing House, Lucknow.Google Scholar
Yang, A 1998, Bazaar India: Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Bihar, University of California Press, Berkeley.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×