Rethinking markets in Modern India: embedded exchange and contested jurisdiction

Space in Motion: An Uneven Narrative of Urban Private Property in Bombay

Vernacular Capitalism, Advertising, and the Bazaar in Early Twentieth-Century Western India

MandiActs and Market Lore: Regulatory Life in India’s Agricultural Markets

Brandism vs. Bazaarism: Mediating Divinity in Banaras

This article returns to what was once an ethnographic staple in the sociology of India: the post-harvest grain heap. Having long occupied centre stage in analyses of a moneyless, redistributive transactional order widely known as the jajmani system, it has also been the subject of influential critique, where it has been argued that the misconceived heap sustained a powerful anthropological fiction. Moving beyond these positions, which seem to have left the heap grounded in the past, the grain heap in this work is reconceptualised as a critical entry point and analytic for the study of contemporary commodity markets. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in an agricultural market (mandi) in Madhya Pradesh, it finds that it is along the seams or internal margins of the market, at routine sites of physical transfer and exchange, assembly and dispersal, integration and disruption, that heaps of agricultural produce materialise. An analysis of critical aspects of the heap—its position, composition, measure...

Mekhala Krishnamurthy

Papers

Reconceiving the grain heap: Margins and movements on the market floor