This chapter explores the role and function of occult forces in South Asian bazaars. Drawing mainly, but not exclusively, on material from eastern South Asia, it challenges the repeated attempts by scholars to read these forces along functionalist lines. Instead, it demonstrates that there is a substantial body of formalized textual knowledge which theorizes the nature, role, and application of these forces. This knowledge is available, in the bazaar itself, in a specialized genre of printed books. The chapter argues against mapping the knowledge produced in these books within the category of “religion,” since the emphasis on belief and bounded identities that have become germane to modern ideas of “religion” are inapplicable to the practices of the occult bazaar. The occult bazaar, it is argued, should be treated as a distinctive sphere of abstraction that is separate from, though interacting with, the more formalized and well-known abstraction of “the economy.”

In 2002, India embarked on a plan to promote itself for investment, trade, and tourism with its “Incredible India” campaign, which brought together every possible government sector to market the nation. Now, after a huge influx of multinational products and shopping malls that feature them, global capitalism has transformed India’s commercial culture. “Brandism” has arrived. The bazaar, however, is a site of resistance and mediation to this process. It is an economic and moral system, where products and people are entangled in complex networks, creating, disciplining, and sacralizing various moods and modes of behavior. This is especially the case within the bazaars of the Pakka Mahal in Banaras - a center for religion, culture, and commerce for millennia. Based on nearly two decades of research in these bazaars, my chapter examines the logic and practice of what I call “Bazaarism,” with a focus on the role of reputation and trust in creating solidarities.

This chapter examines the way small manufacturing firms in western India began to use advertisement in the print media to develop markets for their goods during the early twentieth century.The chapter suggests that advertising gave small producers an opportunity to create the cultural meanings of commodities far away from the point of production.In many cases, they sought to usurp the role of local mercantile actors in fashioning product meanings; that is, they attempted to disembed the process of meaning construction from their local contexts.The chapter explores how advertisements became central to the operations of three firms involved in making indigenous medicines: Amritdhara, Jadibuti, and Dhootapapeshwa.Though the efforts of small manufacturers to undercut the role of local agents were only partially successful and often led to new forms of embedment, advertising was crucial to the creation of a “vernacular capitalism” that has largely been ignored by scholars.