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India’s Market Society:
Three Essays in Political Economy MARKET society is the kind in which societal exchange is dominated by markets to the increasing exclusion of other forms like reciprocity and redistribution. A pure market society can neither exist nor is feasible, as it is not the job of the markets to guarantee livelihood and life. It is the job of the markets to convey signals to production and to create, extract and distribute the surpluses that contribute to the reproduction of a society. Karl Marx saw the state as supplying the pre-conditions for markets to work, for commodification, to grind away and for accumulation to concentrate and centralise under capitalism. The author says that there are institutions other than market and state that shape market society. In three essays, he has analysed the market society by saying that non-market and non-state institutions are important, with which markets function and with which society protects it from the markets. In performing these roles, both regulate and resist the process of commodification, at full gallop in India. The first essay introduces the problem from various theoretical perspectives. These are found to be suffused with romanticism or these theorise institutions at levels of abstraction far above that at which institutions and markets operate. The author has explored distinctly unromantic contemporary literature on India's rural and small-town economy, which is informal or informally state regulated. Two-thirds of Indian economy is reckoned to be socially regulated, accounting for 90 per cent of livelihoods and getting bigger all the time. This essay reports on the role of Indian market institutions in structuring the behaviour of some of the basic markets that South-Asian society could not possible reproduce. In the second essay, the author examines caste and shows how it is being reworked in the contemporary era to be an instrument of corporatist regulation. The ways the caste works as economic regulator depends upon the position of the castes in the ruins of the collapsed caste system. The essay is inspired by a detailed field study of caste and business associations in a south Indian town. The third essay is in the form of a question that most of the scholars are reluctant to pose: what are the implications of the economy of there being a plurality of religions in India? Religions are bodies of disputed understanding of divine doctrine and ethical norm. Sometimes, these are conveyed in the form of a myth. To trace the slippage of influence from myth to custom and law and examine their modifications in practice is completely beyond the scope of author's enquiry. However, religions also define the organisations of their adherents. This question can be tackled by asking where are India's minority sited in the economy. There is ethnographic divine throughout India that can be brought to bear on this question. The author has suggested some higher-order propositions about the impact on the public sphere of plurality of norms of complaint behaviour and of divine authorities. The author has analysed the linkages between small-town economies and the working of capital. She examines the ground realities of the markets that form the building blocks of Indian capitalism and the attendant crisis of democracy and the deprivations of the people especially the minorities. The book is an original work of Barbara Harris, who has carried out empirical research on the subject. This book is useful for all those who are keen to know the ills of casteism and the realities of ritual religions. |
