Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T14:57:35.656Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - The Artifice of Trust: Reputational and Procedural Registers of Trust in North Indian “Informal” Finance

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

This chapter studies the operation of trust on financial markets in the North Indian city of Banaras (Varanasi). It emphasizes an interpretation of trust on markets as an artifact and artifice based on an experiential category of practical knowledge used to handle exchange under conditions of high uncertainty, and identifies two distinct patterns in its handling, marked as procedural and reputational registers of (handling) trust. The first case analyzes the difficulties faced by locally operating banks in the mid-twentieth century to shift from reputational to procedural registers of handling trust, using banking advertisements and other archived material. The second case outlines the shifts in the manner reputational registers of trust are used in extra-legal money lending in the wake of Indian legislation against these financial practices, contrasting an ethnographic study of contemporary practices to historical sources on money lending in the first half of the twentieth century.

Type
Chapter
Information
Rethinking Markets in Modern India
Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction
, pp. 147 - 178
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

Appadurai, A 2015a, “Afterword. The Dreamworld of Capitalism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 35, 3, 481–5.Google Scholar
Appadurai, A 2015b, Banking on Words. The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayly, CA 1983, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars. North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Bayly, CA 2011, “Merchant Communities: Identities and Solidarities,” in Kudaisya, MM (ed.) The Oxford India Anthology of Business History, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 99121.Google Scholar
Bhattacharya, B 2008, “The ‘Book of Will’ of Petrus Woskan (1680–1751): Some Insights into the Global Commercial Network of the Armenians in the Indian Ocean,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Indian Ocean, 51: 6798.Google Scholar
Birla, R 2009, Stages of Capital. Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India, Duke University Press, Durham.Google Scholar
Carey, M 2017, Mistrust. An Ethnographic Theory, HAU Books, Chicago.Google Scholar
Cirvante, VR 1956, The Indian Capital Market, Geoffrey Cumberledge Oxford University Press, London.Google Scholar
Corsin Jimenez, A 2011, “Trust in Anthropology,” Anthropological Theory, 11, 2: 177–96.Google Scholar
Dalmia, V 1997, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions. Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Dietrich Wielenga, K 2016, “Repertoires of Resistance. The Handloom Weavers of South India, c. 1800–1960,” International Review of Social History, 61: 423–58.Google Scholar
Guérin, I 2014, “Juggling with Debt, Social Ties, and Values. The Everyday Use of Microcredit in Rural South India,” Current Anthropology, 55, Supplement 9: 4050.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardiman, D 1996, “Usury, Dearth and Famine in Western India,” Past and Present, 152: 113–56.Google Scholar
Harriss-White, B 2018, “Awkward Classes and India’s Development,” Review of Political Economy, 15 May (https://doi.org/10.1080/09538259.20181478507).Google Scholar
Harvey, D 2004, “The ‘New’ Imperialism. Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register, 40: 6387.Google Scholar
Haynes, DE 2015, “Advertising and the History of South Asia, 1880–1950,” History Compass, 13, 8: 361–74.Google Scholar
Liisberg, S 2015, “Trust as the Life Magic of Self-Deception: A Philosophical-Psychological Investigation into Tolerance of Ambiguity,” in Liisberg, S, Pedersen, EO, & Dalsgard, AL (eds.) Anthropology and Philosophy, Berghahn, New York, pp. 158–76.Google Scholar
Luhmann, N 1979, Trust and Power, Wiley, Chichester.Google Scholar
Luxemburg, R 1913/2003, The Accumulation of Capital, Routledge, London.Google Scholar
Markovits, C 2014, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs. Indian Business in the Colonial Era, Permanent Black, Ranikhet.Google Scholar
Mauss, M 1970, The Gift. Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, Cohen & West, London.Google Scholar
Pedersen, EO & Liisberg, S 2015, “Introduction: Trust and Hope,” in Liisberg, S, Pedersen, EO, & Dalsgard, AL (eds.) Anthropology and Philosophy, Berghahn, New York, pp. 120.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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sainath, P 2016, “In Marathwada, a Bank’s Humiliating ‘Gandhigiri’ Tactics Tighten the Squeeze on Desperate Farmers,” The People’s Archive of Rural India (https://ruralindiaonline.org/).Google Scholar
Schwecke, S 2018, “A Tangled Jungle of Disorderly Transactions? The Production of a Monetary Outside in a North Indian Town,” Modern Asian Studies, 52, 4: 1375–419.Google Scholar
Seabright, P 2010, The Company of Strangers. A Natural History of Economic Life, rev. ed., Princeton University Press, Princeton.Google Scholar
Shetty, SL 2013, Microfinance in India. Issues, Problems, and Prospects, a Critical Review of Literature, Academic Foundation, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Shirras, GF 1920, Indian Finance and Banking, Macmillan & Co, London.Google Scholar
Simmel, G 1950, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Free Press, New York.Google Scholar
Timberg, TA & Aiyar, CV 1980, “Informal Credit Markets in India,” Economic and Political Weekly, 15, 5/7: 279302.Google Scholar
Tiwari, BK 2014, “A Case Study of Benares State Bank Ltd. (BSB) with Bank of Baroda (BoB),” Asian Journal of Management Studies and Education, 3, 1: 3548.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org 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
×