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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2020

By
Sebastian Schwecke  and
Ajay Gandhi
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

“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.”

Keywords

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

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