Book contents
- Rethinking Markets in Modern India
- Rethinking Markets in Modern India
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Markets in Modern India: Embedded, Contested, Pliable
- 2 Banking in the Bazaar: The Nattukottai Chettiars
- 3 Space in Motion: An Uneven Narrative of Urban Private Property in Bombay
- 4 Magic of Business: Occult Forces in the Bazaar Economy
- 5 Vernacular Capitalism, Advertising, and the Bazaar in Early Twentieth-Century Western India
- 6 The Artifice of Trust: Reputational and Procedural Registers of Trust in North Indian “Informal” Finance
- 7 Mandi Acts and Market Lore: Regulatory Life in India’s Agricultural Markets
- 8 The Market and the Sovereign: Politics, Performance, and Impasses of Cross-LOC Trade
- 9 Brandism vs. Bazaarism: Mediating Divinity in Banaras
- 10 Black Money in India: Fighting Specters and Fostering Relations
- 11 Market Making in Punjab Lotteries: Regulation and Mutual Dependence
- 12 Liquid Assets: Transactional Grammars of Alcohol in Jharkhand
- 13 Building on Sand? Criminal Markets and Politics in Tamil Nadu
- Index
- References
10 - Black Money in India: Fighting Specters and Fostering Relations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2020
Book contents
- Rethinking Markets in Modern India
- Rethinking Markets in Modern India
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- 1 Markets in Modern India: Embedded, Contested, Pliable
- 2 Banking in the Bazaar: The Nattukottai Chettiars
- 3 Space in Motion: An Uneven Narrative of Urban Private Property in Bombay
- 4 Magic of Business: Occult Forces in the Bazaar Economy
- 5 Vernacular Capitalism, Advertising, and the Bazaar in Early Twentieth-Century Western India
- 6 The Artifice of Trust: Reputational and Procedural Registers of Trust in North Indian “Informal” Finance
- 7 Mandi Acts and Market Lore: Regulatory Life in India’s Agricultural Markets
- 8 The Market and the Sovereign: Politics, Performance, and Impasses of Cross-LOC Trade
- 9 Brandism vs. Bazaarism: Mediating Divinity in Banaras
- 10 Black Money in India: Fighting Specters and Fostering Relations
- 11 Market Making in Punjab Lotteries: Regulation and Mutual Dependence
- 12 Liquid Assets: Transactional Grammars of Alcohol in Jharkhand
- 13 Building on Sand? Criminal Markets and Politics in Tamil Nadu
- Index
- References
Summary
Since the 1950s, public discourse in India has referred to black money: undeclared or illicit income, sometimes in foreign accounts. Black money - so as to circumvent state taxes and controls - pervaded ordinary exchange and political financing. Today, large purchases have white and black ratios; public figures vow to retrieve black money in Swiss accounts. Black money is, at once, a means to transact business, a barometer of value, an elusive specter, and a moral outrage. It suggests how money can be differentiated, converted, corrupted, and disguised. This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of a Mumbai neighborhood marked by migration and informality. It examines the generation of black money from the diversion of publicly subsidized goods, the community’s assessment of these practices, and possible conduits for such income. Black money, I suggest, can be understood as a moral critique of money’s spectral and pernicious character, as well as a productive hinge between transactional orders and an expression of relational ties.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rethinking Markets in Modern IndiaEmbedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction, pp. 269 - 293Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
References
Acharya, SN &Associates 1985, Aspects of the Black Economy in India: Report Submitted to the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Amrith, S 2013, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migration, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Appadurai, A 2000, “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” Public Culture, 12, 3: 627–51.Google Scholar
Berenschot, W 2010, “Everyday Mediation: The Politics of Public Service Delivery in Gujarat, India,” Development and Change, 41, 5: 883–905.Google Scholar
Booth, G 2008, Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios, Oxford University Press, New York.Google Scholar
Chandavarkar, AG 1983, “Money and Credit (1858–1947),” in Kumar, D & Desai, M (eds.) The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2: C.1757–C.1970, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 762–803.Google Scholar
Chibber, P 2011, “Dynastic Parties: Organization, Finance and Impact,” Party Politics, 19, 2: 277–95.Google Scholar
Chibber, V 2003, Locked in Place: State Building and Late Industrialization in India, Princeton University Press, Princeton.Google Scholar
Das Gupta, C 2016, State and Capital in Independent India: Institutions and Accumulation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Goswami, M 2004, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Gupta, A 2012, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, Duke University Press, Durham.Google Scholar
Guyer, J 2004, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Hansen, TB 2005, “Sovereigns Beyond the State: On Legality and Authority in Urban India,” in Hansen, TB & Stepputat, F (eds.) Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, Princeton University Press, Princeton.Google Scholar
Hewitt, V 2008, Political Mobilisation and Democracy in India: States of Emergency. Routledge, Oxford.Google Scholar
High, M 2013, “Polluted Money, Polluted Wealth: Emerging Regimes of Value in the Mongolian Gold Rush,” American Ethnologist, 40, 4: 676–88.Google Scholar
Huberman, J 2012, Ambivalent Encounters: Childhood, Tourism, and Social Change in Banaras, India, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Indian Ministry of Finance 2002, White Paper on Black Money, Ministry of Finance, Department of Revenue, Central Board of Direct Taxes, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Kapur, D & Vishnav, M 2011, Quid Pro Quo: Builders, Politicians, and Election Finance in India, Center for Global Development, Washington.Google Scholar
Kar, D 2011, “An Empirical Study on the Transfer of Black Money from India: 1948–2008,” Economic and Political Weekly: 45–54.Google Scholar
Kochanek, S 1987, “Briefcase Politics in India: The Congress Party and the Business Elite,” Asian Survey, 27, 12: 1278–301.Google Scholar
Madsen, ST 2011, “Ajit Singh S/O Charan Singh,” in Madsen, ST, Nielsen, KB, & Skoda, U (eds.) Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia, Anthem, London, pp. 73–102.Google Scholar
Markovits, C 2000, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge.Google Scholar
Martin, M 2009, “Hundi/Hawala: The Problem of Definition,” Modern Asian Studies, 43, 4: 909–37.Google Scholar
Maurer, B 2006, “The Anthropology of Money,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 35: 15–36.Google Scholar
Michelutti, L 2019, “The Inter-State Criminal Life of Sand and Oil in North India,” in Harriss-White, B & Michelutti, L (eds.) The Wild East: Criminal Political Economies in South Asia, UCL Press, London, pp. 168–93.Google Scholar
Parry, J 1989, “On the Moral Perils of Exchange,” in Parry, J & Bloch, M (eds.) Money and the Morality of Exchange, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 64–93.Google Scholar
Parry, J & Bloch, M 1989, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in Parry, J & Bloch, M (eds.) Money and the Morality of Exchange, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Piliavsky, A 2014, “India’s Demotic Democracy and Its ‘Depravities’ in the Ethnographic Longue Durée,” in Piliavsky, A (ed.) Patronage as Politics in South Asia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 154–75.Google Scholar
Puri, SS 2014, Speculation in Fixed Futures: An Ethnography of Betting in Between Legal and Illegal Economies at the Delhi Racecourse, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Robbins, J & Akin, D (eds.) 1999, Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh.Google Scholar
Ruud, AE 2011, “Democracy in Bangladesh: A Village View,” in Madsen, ST, Nielsen, KB, & Skoda, U (eds.) Trysts with Democracy: Political Practice in South Asia, Anthem, London, pp. 45–70.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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, L 2013, “Constructing Prestige and Elaborating the ‘Professional’: Elite Residential Complexes in the National Capital Region, India,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 47, 2: 271–302.Google Scholar
Sharma, K 2000, Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum, Penguin, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Shenoy, B 2010, Lessons Learned from Attempts to Reform India’s Kerosene Subsidy, International Institute for Sustainable Development, Winnipeg.Google Scholar
Shipton, P 1989, Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and some African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities, American Ethnological Society Monograph Series no. 1, American Ethnological Society, Washington.Google Scholar
Sooudi, O 2012, “Art Patron as ‘Taste Scapegoat’? Complicity and Disavowal in Mumbai’s Contemporary Art World,” Etnofoor Anthropological Journal, 24, 2: 123–43.Google Scholar
Tarlo, E 2003, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. Hurst & Company, London.Google Scholar
Tomlinson, BR 1979, The Political Economy of the Raj 1914–1947: The Economics of Decolonization in India, Macmillan, London.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wanchoo, KN 1971, Direct Taxes Enquiry Committee Final Report, Ministry of Finance, Government of India, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Weiner, A 1992, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, University of California Press, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Weinstein, L 2014, The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.Google Scholar
Zickgraf, J 2017, “Becoming Like Money: Proximity and the Social Aesthetics of ‘Moneyness,’” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7, 1: 303–26.Google Scholar