A Tangled Jungle of Disorderly Transactions? The production of a monetary outside in a north Indian town

Abstract

This article argues that, starting from the late colonial period, the Indian state in its correlated attempts to regulate and streamline the operation of monetary markets in line with capitalist development policies and to remove exploitative credit market practices instead produced a binary between a monetary outside and inside. While the state's efforts were intended to delineate the boundaries of the outside produced in this way, removing competing segments of Indian capital from the expanding monetary system, this process of delineation contributed to an already existing divergence in the operational modes. Correspondingly, it reinforced a process of differentiation that centred on the removal of liberal-bourgeois contractual law from market governance on the monetary outside that was gradually substituted by a reputational economy of debt. The monetary outside so produced constitutes one specific form of capitalist outsides in the Indian economy, interpreted as economic arenas and (extractive) accumulation regimes that functionally and procedurally differ from the dominant capitalist economic sector in modern India with which they co-exist. Both historiographic and ethnographic approaches are used to study the related processes of delineation and differentiation in the production of a monetary outside, with a special emphasis on the United Provinces/Uttar Pradesh and the north Indian town of Banaras (Varanasi).

Translating transactions: Markets as epistemic and moral spheres

“…32 Analogously, contemporary moneylenders in Banaras use reputational gossip as a tool for handling uncertainty because other socially embedded tools (like the modern regulatory state) fail to provide viable alternatives. 33 Markets-as the amalgamation of their participants -mobilize what is available to these participants, and what at least partially serves their participants' purposes, with the latter depending on the respective standing of participants in the market. The tools available to the market participants, at the same time, rest on their knowledge and information-the epistemic basis for exchange.…”

Trust amid “trust deficit”

“…Furthermore, linguistic and historical affinities between hundi and hawala point to an indigenous banking system for financing long‐distance trade, integrating far‐flung markets through credit networks (Martin 2009). While there have been attempts to define “informal credit markets” and bring them within the purview of formal financial governance, 5 such systems remain largely “opaque” and “impenetrable” to all but their practitioners, thus relegating informal credit to the “monetary outside” of a disciplined capitalist economy (Schwecke 2018, 1375). Resistance to neoliberal protocols of transparency have led detractors to label the realm of informal credit a “black economy,” crisscrossed by flows of illicit (i.e., untaxed) and counterfeit money that funds corruption, cross‐border smuggling, terrorism, and other “anti‐national” activities.…”

Selling with Prejudice: Social Enterprise and Caste at the Bottom of the Pyramid in India

“…Between August and November 2012, I followed the salesmen on their trips to weekly, rural markets or haats. The haats of southern Odishalike those across central and eastern Indiahave implicit social and symbolic logics; with formal properties and stereotyped modes of authority assigned to different actors, buyers and sellers (Gell 1982;Gill 2009, Schwecke 2018. In these spaces Big Light Earth's salespeople were strangers; outsiders with no prior commercial or social relationship to their potential customers.…”