Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction

Description

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.

Ajay Gandhi is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Barbara Harriss-White is Emeritus Professor and Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Douglas E. Haynes is Professor of History at Dartmouth College, Hanover. Sebastian Schwecke is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

'Working across South Asian history and ethnography, this volume builds creatively on the existing literature on vernacular capitalism and market governance with rich data and diverse approaches to customary and underground transactions. Exploring finance, small-scale industry and agricultural commodities, as well as advertising, risk and trust, the essays delve deeply into the local contexts of market practice in India, productively reactivating debates on the temporalities, performatives and regulation of 'the bazaar.'' Ritu Birla, University of Toronto 'This timely volume offers a rich range of social science insights into the ways in which gray markets, criminality, informality and law interact to produce the formation of capitalism and culture in contemporary India. It will be of interest to anthropologists, economists, sociologists and other readers who wish to learn how every national society is corrupt in its own way' Arjun Appadurai, New York University 'India's rise as an 'emergent market' in the global economy has prompted much hype around a 'new' India. In this volume, anthropologists and historians of India demonstrate with great authority and insight that markets in India are old and deeply entrenched in complex social and cultural institutions. Anyone who wishes to understand the dynamism of contemporary Indian capitalism must understand such institutions and exchange relations and this volume will be a rich resource in this quest for scholars in many fields.' Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University 'Markets are more than acts of buying and selling. Markets are also a cluster of relations and practices, some legal and some not. Gathering together a set of rich case-studies, Rethinking Markets offers unique insights into what these relations and practices were and how they shaped modern India.' Tirthankar Roy, London School of Economics