“Jaago re! Wake up!” This is the slogan at the center of the marketing of Tata Tea’s signature middle-class beverage, Tata Gold. In the run-up to the Indian general elections in 2014, Tata Gold was relaunched as the official beverage of Indian women’s empowerment. “Tata Gold has 15 percent long leaves,” Tata product marketing proclaimed. These leaves “open up and release a superior aroma. Just like the leaves that open, the campaign … seeks to open minds to the power that the women of India have, to bring about the change they desire.”Footnote ¹

A 2013–2014 Tata Gold advertising campaign, entitled the “Power of 49,” featured a series of videos “giving a voice to the women of India to be heard in the political discourse of our country.”Footnote ² One video was of a conversation between a young politician and his wife. She says that, with the elections around the corner, he will be busy. He nods in agreement, without really listening, and continues working. She gets visibly frustrated and tells him to go and make her a cup of tea. He rips open a plastic packet of Tata Gold. We cut to a detailed shot of the tea leaves unfurling as the water comes to a boil.

“Look at the tea leaves opening,” she tells him. There is a dramatic pause, then she asks: “Has your mind also opened?” She explains that, while he might ignore her, he cannot afford to ignore India’s women, who account for 49 percent of the voter base. The politician takes a whiff of the tea and visibly awakens from his indifference. Thanks to Tata Gold, his mind has opened. This public figure now sees the public differently.

The tea cup the politician sips from – a delicate, transparent, glass one – is a deliberate juxtaposition to the heavy, Tata-branded, green ceramic mug that viewers normally see in Tata Tea ads. That mug is itself juxtaposed with the earthenware or stainless steel cups associated with lower-class Indian tea drinkers. The material appearance and sensory qualities of Tata Gold, with its long tea leaves and light color, signal ideas about middle-class refinement as well as political and economic transparency.

Transparency, or the ability to see what might otherwise be obfuscated or taken as the normative order of things, as many scholars working in India have argued, is often deployed as both conceptual foil and antidote to corruption (Mathur Reference Mathur2012; Mazzarella Reference Mazzarella2006; Sharma Reference Sharma2013; see also Gupta Reference Gupta2005). At the time of writing, three general elections have passed since the rollout of Tata’s ad. The political landscape has changed, especially in India’s tea-producing regions. An appeal to anti-corruption and anti-establishment politics undergirded the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) rise to power in 2014. The rhetoric of transparency and unveiling continues to animate Hindutva populism across the subcontinent. Transparency, then, is anything but a marketing ploy.

The story of “Jaago Re” is just one of many moments since India’s independence in 1947 in which the tea industry has been questioned, reaffirmed, and recalibrated, along with tea’s place in the country’s agricultural and economic future. Once an elite beverage reserved primarily for export, tea is now firmly part of the Indian national imaginary. The humble, affordable cup of chai is a central feature of both private and public spaces – from village homes to fancy urban hotels – across the subcontinent (Lutgendorf Reference Lutgendorf2012). At some symbolic level, tea unites Indians of all classes and regions. It is drunk out of clay cups in dusty bazaars, in shiny office buildings, and in newfangled urban corporate café chains aimed at the upper-middle class.

As a testament to the creep of tea into the national imaginary as commodified patrimony, India’s current prime minister from the Hindu-right BJP party, Narendra Modi, explicitly portrays himself as the son of a railway station chai-walla (tea seller). Tea in the current political zeitgeist in India has even become somewhat sacrosanct. Modi’s tea shop in the state of Gujarat is being turned into a monument. In the run-up to the 2021 elections in India, Modi even publicly disparaged Greta Thunberg’s commentary on and promotion of the Indian farmers’ protest toolkit. Thunberg called for a “disrupt[ion of] the yoga and chai image of India” as a means of drawing attention to the plight of the country’s farmers. Modi responded by decrying her comments as part of a larger “conspiracy to malign Indian tea.” Activists such as Thunberg, Modi lamented, have “stooped so low that they are not sparing even Indian tea.”Footnote ³

But tea’s symbolic place in Indian life is relatively new. Certainly, tea has been produced in India since the 1830s. Tea’s conversion from an exploitative colonial export crop to a national symbol came thanks to a series of efforts by the postcolonial Indian state to make tea and the industry around it more visible and accessible to political and bureaucratic scrutiny. When India gained independence in 1947, government officials sought to exert regulatory control over the tea industry. For decades, British plantation owners, brokerage firms, and other private industry actors had largely governed themselves. They had actively sought to ensure autonomy from colonial agriculture and land bureaucracies. Ensuring a successful transition to independence required making the Indian tea industry’s previously opaque operations visible. It required bringing tea production more firmly into state practice.

Tea as a national beverage, of course, comes from somewhere. The tea that Modi and his father sold on a railway platform in rural India and the tea offered in high-end urban retailers all originate from colonially rooted plantations in India’s northeast and southern regions.

In this chapter, I suggest that to understand programs to make colonial crops such as tea sit comfortably with state practice – and particularly with calls for “transparency” (market, political, or otherwise), ethical production, or even Hindu nationalism – it is necessary to situate them in longer, often state-led, regulatory histories. This story of a state’s attempt to “see” – and govern – what was happening within its borders differs from the well-known picture of mid twentieth-century state optics painted by James Scott (Reference Scott1999) in his Seeing Like a State. Independent India’s early attempts to make visible the workings of a colonially rooted tea industry were not undertaken in the name of managing and improving the lives of newly enfranchised Indian citizens through heavy-handed socio-ecological transformation. Rather, regulation through visibility – an aim for a kind of transparency on the part of the state – unfolded as part of the project of decolonization and independent nation-building. Since Indians had been systematically excluded from the workings of the tea industry throughout colonial rule, Indian regulators saw it as essential to open what had until 1947 been an economic black box. Since India’s independence from Britain in 1947, ideas of openness have dominated the state’s attempts to regulate the tea trade.

Despite the rise of right-wing political populism in India and beyond, talk of transparency in contemporary capitalism and democratic political life has tended to foreground the efforts of nongovernmental actors to bear witness to the processes of commodity circulation and governance. Such actors push to make the actions of capital and the state not just visible, but immediately visible, anywhere and at any time. Transparency projects aim to make spatial and temporal distance less of an obstacle to efficient trade and equitable governance. Nongovernmental agricultural certification schemes are one prominent institutional instrument for achieving transparency. The term of art in commodity circulation programs oriented toward transparency, such as fair trade, is “direct trade.” These third-party certifiers act as independent auditors who evaluate production practices against a set of standards abstracted from geographic, ecological, or cultural specificities (see Strathern Reference Strathern2000). In addition to auditing, agricultural certification programs like fair trade or organic, along with supply chain integrity projects such as the UTZ or Ethical Tea Partnership, frequently focus on promoting direct trading relations. They herald the elimination of intermediaries between plantations and buyers as means of hedging against corruption, price-fixing, and labor abuses. As a concept, non-state-fostered transparency in trade gestures to an opening to greater, more democratic participation; to greater public visibility; and to more abundant and accessible information.

These nongovernmental actors set themselves up against states and their byzantine regulations, tendency toward corruption, or supposed disinterest in the qualities of trade and governance. But the history of India’s experience with tea complicates this neat distinction. Whereas transparency amounts to a push for immediacy and a compression of spatial and temporal distance, the postcolonial project of industrial opening of Indian tea aspired to maintain the state’s regulatory position as spatially and temporally between consumers and producers.

I first discuss post-independence reforms to the tea industry in the early to mid 1950s, led by a newly formed government regulatory agency, the Tea Board of India (TBI). To assert sovereignty over an industry still dominated by British capital, TBI regulators set out to study and make visible the material infrastructure of tea warehousing, shipping, and sales. By exerting state oversight over this infrastructure, regulators believed, India could stake a stronger claim to tea’s profits. The TBI’s Auctions Enquiry Commission set into motion several reforms that vastly expanded trade infrastructure in India. Importantly, the Commission created seven auction centers in India’s tea-growing regions. The TBI’s regulatory aspirations were met with what can best be described as paternalistic resistance by the Indian Tea Association (ITA), the trade association that represented British tea interests after independence and was the pre-independence regulator of the industry. ITA members still operated the most lucrative tea plantations in the country. The ITA insisted that the TBI’s plan to move more auctions to cities such as Calcutta and Cochin would hamper “free trade.” Visibility – the ability to see tea and trace its movement – was central to the ITA’s conception of free trade. If auctions were moved to India, this would limit the ability of Indian tea’s primary customers – buyers and blenders in the UK – to see, touch, taste, and smell tea before they purchased it.

In the second part of the chapter, I describe the state’s efforts, which came to fruition in 2016, to convert the seven auction centers established in the decades after independence into a single, pan-India tea auction. By the early 2000s, the TBI was concerned about the stagnation – and potential corruption – of the market for Indian tea. The TBI blamed the decentralized auction system that Indian regulators had established in the 1950s for this corruption. By the 2000s, regulators had come to believe that a single, digitally mediated auction would allow wider participation and ensure transparent, free trade.

Post-Independence Reform

Ideas about transparency and opacity, as both material and metaphor, can be traced to the Enlightenment, when refined instruments allowed scientists not only to know nature, but also to represent that knowledge to others in new ways. Historian of science Theresa Levitt (Reference Levitt2009) describes the scientific work and political engagement of scientists in post-Enlightenment France. Describing the preceding years, she writes, “The Enlightenment project of the eighteenth century had in large part been built around the project of expanding visibility. The world was seen as eminently legible, if only one were looking correctly” (Levitt Reference Levitt2009: 2). Telescopes and microscopes were tools for looking correctly. Things that appeared unknowable or impenetrable were disaggregated. This was a period of “optical revolution,” but in the late 1700s and early 1800s, a new instrument came into use: the polarimeter. Capable of measuring the polarization of light, the polarimeter shifted the terrain of scientific inquiry. As Levitt explains, “Instead of rendering visible things that were too far away or too small to be seen, it gave form precisely to what the naked eye could not see” (ibid.). But scientists disagreed about what was actually being seen. Transparency, it turned out, was an open conceptual and material field. Scientific instruments – as well as the print media that circulated news of the effects of these instruments – revealed the inner workings and composition of things to a greater public, but they also raised new questions about what might (still) remain unseen. The work of transparency, then, can thus bring about a kind of rupture, a recalibration of thought about everyday materials and even thought itself.

In the years after Indian independence in 1947, the Indian government created multiple commissions composed of bureaucratic and techno-scientific experts to look inside the tea industry – to unmask its hidden economic structure. Enacted under the Nehruvian socialist vision for the independent nation, these commissions resulted in some clear social reforms, including new labor and housing standards as well as the encouragement of Indian “rupee companies” to join the tea trade and compete with British “sterling companies” (see Besky Reference Besky2017; Reference Besky2020). At no point, however, did the government consider eliminating, nationalizing, or otherwise radically reforming the plantation-based tea industry. Its strategy from the start was to make tea and the infrastructure that brought it to market more Indian, not to undo them. As a first step, in the early 1950s, the government of India rolled out a large-scale grassroots marketing campaign to persuade Indian consumers – rich and poor alike – to drink Indian tea (see Bhadra Reference Bhadra2005). The consumption of Indian tea would benefit the nation by stimulating agricultural production, providing employment for independent retailers, and ensuring greater productivity in mills, factories, and fields across the country. The government sought to transform the drink of colonial occupation into a “swadeshi” drink (Lutgendorf Reference Lutgendorf2012).Footnote ⁴

The TBI launched the Auctions Enquiry Commission at the end of 1954. The purpose of the Commission was to understand why, although some Indian tea was auctioned in Calcutta and Cochin, the bulk of Indian tea, even eight years after independence, was still auctioned in London. The Commission’s remit was simple: to enact changes to reverse the relative distribution of sales between India and the UK.

Tea auctioning began in London under the auspices of the East India Company in the late 1600s. In these auctions, traders bought tea acquired from China. With the expansion of colonial control in India and the development of tea plantations there, beginning in Assam in the 1830s and moving to what is now West Bengal by the 1850s, the tea auction infrastructure expanded to include Calcutta, where the first sales were held in 1861. Just before independence, in 1943, an auction center was established for the south Indian market at Cochin (Kochi). The Auctions Enquiry Commission was chaired by U. K. Ghoshal, chairman of the TBI, and it included British sterling company and Indian rupee company representation from across India’s tea-growing regions. The Commission interviewed and surveyed buyers, brokers, retailers, warehouse managers, and wharf and port representatives. Its members spent weeks traveling from Calcutta to Cochin, to Ceylon, and to London, investigating the infrastructure for Indian tea auctioning, storage, and circulation. True to the Indian government’s commitment to subtly Indianize the plantation system, rather than radically nationalize or abolish it, the Commission sought input from different stakeholders about its plans to move more and more of the auction trade from London to India.

Throughout the inquiry, the ITA (the guild of mainly British sterling tea companies) maintained that auction reform was “not … economically wise.”Footnote ⁵ The ITA argued that if auctions were shifted from London to India, tea buyers would simply buy teas grown in other places. In a pro-free trade move, the UK had abolished its tea duty, meaning that Indonesian, Portuguese East African, Chinese, and Formosan teas, all of which would still be for sale in London, could be acquired at lower prices. The discourse of free trade became a way of discouraging repatriation of auctioning to India.

Visibility was central to the free trade logic. In an interview with Ghoshal and the other study team members, Mr. Crossle, a representative of the London Tea Buyers’ Association, whose firm purchased tea at auction in London, Calcutta, Cochin, and Ceylon, explained: “I think that it must be said that any tea that is not available in London we tend to lose interest in. We appreciate tea that we can see at hand more than tea that is remote.”Footnote ⁶ A tea auction was not just a place for buying and selling. To put it in Levitt’s (Reference Levitt2009) terms, it was a technology that allowed potential buyers to look inside particular lots of tea on offer. Crossle continued:

At auction sites, tasting, smelling, and other organoleptic forms of valuation were as important as pricing (see Besky Reference Besky2020; Reference Besky2016). As Crossle put it, poetically invoking the language of visibility and transparency:

Visibility and tactility were important because each tea’s aroma, flavor, and color changed depending on the season, the time spent in warehouses, and packaging. Tea buyers purchased tea at auction with a view to their potential to serve not as stand-alone items but as parts of complex tea blends, packaged in loose-leaf containers or – as was increasingly the case over the course of the twentieth century – in tea bags. Whereas the contents of those bags were largely a mystery to consumers, buyers, brokers, and blenders needed to be able to see inside them. Storage and warehousing were thus key concerns for the Commission.

A few days after the visit of Ghoshal and the other commissioners, the ITA sent a circular to its members updating them on the Commission’s inquiry.Footnote ⁹ It warned that a shift in auctioning from London to India would result in “the concentration of buying into a few strong hands and the elimination of the UK small buyers.” The ITA emphasized that, in any reform, “the blending aspect must be considered.” It pointed out “that apart from Darjeeling and Assam Second flush teas and uncertain Autumnals, Northern India produces tea of no pronounced flavor and these teas can be replaced by teas from other parts of the world.” Blenders needed access to these low-cost teas. The ITA even expressed worry over the implications of the proposed shift for “the Indian producer’s position.” “Generally speaking,” the ITA stated, Indian companies’ standards of quality were, “as yet … not so high as the Sterling [companies’ standards].” If rupee companies were able to sell their lower-quality tea only in India, brokers would simply buy similar teas from other countries in London, making it difficult for the rupee companies to succeed and improve.

Despite these warnings, the Auctions Enquiry Commission insisted that more auctioning should take place at the already established centers in Calcutta (for the north Indian trade from Assam and Bengal) and Cochin (for the south Indian trade). Its report mandated the expansion of these auction sites and proposed limiting the amount of tea that could be sold outside the auction system.Footnote ¹⁰ Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the TBI set up additional auction centers in tea-growing regions across the country, at Coonoor (1963), Guwahati (1970), Siliguri (1976), and Coimbatore (1981). These auction centers were located in cities that were geographically close to key tea-growing regions. This geographical proximity gave potential buyers the ability to have the tactile, visual experience of tea that they saw as essential to making informed purchases. It also added a layer of regulatory control to the process. Each buyer had to be registered at a regional auction center. Every registered buyer was given access to samples of every lot of tea on offer in a given week. (If they bought a significant amount of tea at auction, these samples were free of charge; if not, they could be purchased for a nominal amount.) As a result, UK-based tea companies increasingly had to work through proxy buyers who were registered to buy at Indian auctions. Over time, tea retailers in the US and Europe started to buy from large-scale tea dealers in a global secondary market.

The TBI’s investigations brought the trade under the purview of India’s government, but they also revealed a hidden tension in the tea trade, between the quality of tea as a material product and the quality of the market itself. As a material product, tea was variable, susceptible to seasonal changes in weather and regional differences in growing climates, but as the TBI’s investigations were taking place, tea was being recast as a tactile, material symbol of India itself – a “swadeshi” commodity. Whereas “free trade” advocates measured the quality of the market in terms of the relative barriers to circulation (e.g., the lack of regulation, the reduction or elimination of duties), government regulators saw the quality of the market in terms of its geographical location and association with the nation. For them, an Indian tea auction was superior to a London tea auction because it could be regulated, taxed, and permitted by India’s government.

The Pan-India Auction

The establishment of the seven distinct auction centers across India between the 1950s and the 1970s had the effect of strengthening government oversight of the industry. In its first iteration in 1953, a regulatory act, the Tea Marketing Control Order (TMCO), mandated that 75 percent of all tea grown in India be sold at one of the auction centers.Footnote ¹¹ The creation of the auction centers also created seven discrete trading communities. In each site, brokers and buyers who were dedicated to a particular regional trade became intimately familiar not only with the seasonal and yearly variations in crop qualities but also with one another. As in London, the world of Indian tea brokerage was by and large one of well-educated middle-class men. Tea brokers attended the same schools, were members of the same clubs, and enjoyed the same sport and leisure activities. For brokers, “quality tea” could best be discerned by individuals with “quality” tastes, habits, and associations beyond the auction and tasting room floors.

By the 1990s, however, the landscape had begun to change. First, the Indian tea industry faced a major market crisis. For three decades, it had enjoyed a steady market in the Soviet Union, but after the fall of the USSR, that market began to dwindle. Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the government had begun steadily modifying the TMCO, allowing more and more tea to be sold outside the auction system, in “direct trading” relationships. As the market crisis deepened, tea companies began exploiting this opening, selling their most lucrative, highest-quality teas to buyers in the US and Europe.

It was in this period that new and old forms of transparency began to blend. The reductions in auction quotas under the TMCO were pushed by Indian leaders who favored a liberalization of the country’s economy – an opening up to international markets that had largely been stifled in the first three decades of postcolonial government. By the end of the 1990s, thanks in part to this liberalization, the global ethical trade movement had begun to find a niche in India’s tea industry. Plantations in Darjeeling, Assam, and other famed tea-growing regions began seeking fair trade certification, which offered not only an imprimatur of ethicality but also a direct market. Fair trade tea, by definition, must be sold directly to certified buyers. In fair trade discourse, intermediaries such as auction brokers (and governments) are held up as obstacles to ethical agriculture (Besky Reference Besky2014). By the 2000s, the fair trade movement was being joined by a host of other “partnerships” and start-up schemes that aimed to use e-commerce and the narrative power of web-based storytelling to fuse direct trade to market quality.

But back in auction centers, seasoned brokers saw in the push for direct trade relationships an abandonment of the longstanding emphasis on quality and variability that had long shaped the trade. Fair trade and other direct schemes included no mechanism for ensuring that the product consumers received was actually good, in terms of taste, aroma, color, or any of the other parameters valued by industry insiders. At Nilhat House, the imposing home of the Kolkata tea auction built at the height of the Nehruvian push to recast tea as a national beverage (the building was inaugurated by Nehru himself in 1961), brokers I interviewed between 2008 and 2016 insisted that fair trade could not guarantee quality in this sense.

But during the period of my fieldwork, the auction itself was starting to look anachronistic and corrupt. And bureaucrats at the TBI described it as such. Brokers’ and buyers’ esoteric valuation of tea and the manner in which they sold it in regional auction centers threatened efficiency. To the TBI, it was alarming (but not necessarily surprising) that more and more of the country’s tea was being sold outside the auctions. The system that the TBI had established – regional auction centers, registered buyers, strong government oversight – had been put in place in order to ensure that tea’s material qualities would not be forgotten in the effort to make a quality market that would benefit the Indian nation. But that same system had created its own kind of elitism, opacity, and potential corruption. The gentlemanly, face-to-face auction, bureaucrats claimed, allowed brokers to collude with one another to fix prices. Along the way, of course, the TBI was losing control of these relationships – and, along with them, the industry it was established to regulate. The only way to convince more producers to sell at auction would be to promote transparency.

To be clear, the TBI was adamant that it was not the auction itself that was the problem, just the social relations within it. The auction could be reformed and redeemed through technical intervention. A digital tea auction system was introduced – albeit with a great deal of resistance – between 2008 and 2016 (see Besky Reference Besky2016; Reference Besky2020), but digitization was only an intermediate step. The next step was to further open up the space of the auction center itself – to roll out what regulators called a “pan-India e-auction.” In the pan-India e-auction, launched in June 2016 after several years of repeated delays and false starts, buyers were no longer required to limit their bidding to the auction center (e.g., Kolkata, Cochin, Siliguri) in which they were registered. They could, in the words of TBI proponents of the system, “log-on and buy tea” from any center through an internet-based platform.

The explicit aim of the pan-India auction, as it had been with the electronic platform that preceded it, was to facilitate better “price discovery” and to push higher volumes of tea through the auction. Speaking about the rollout of the pan-India auction, Rita Teaotia, Union Commerce Secretary, told The Hindu, “The new system could prove to be a turning point for tea auctioning in India, which began in 1861 in this city.” Prior to June 2016, each of the auction centers ran according to its own – albeit different – rules mandating schedules for payment, timing of lots, warehousing practices, and other issues. The pan-India auction created one set of auction rules for all the centers. Bureaucrats described this as a means of “bringing uniformity to non-standardized trade.”

The emphasis on standardization is noteworthy here. In the 1950s, TBI investigators responded to British brokers’ concerns about the importance of organoleptically experiencing tea before bidding on it at auction by establishing the seven auction centers. The auction was a sociotechnical means for the broker to “see inside” the lots that were listed in the auction catalog, but it was also a means for the Indian state to better “see” the industry it had inherited from its colonial forebears (Levitt Reference Levitt2009; Scott Reference Scott1999). By the 2000s, however, messages about the importance of ensuring tea’s material quality were being drowned out by messages about the importance of ensuring the quality of the market. As India’s economy was opened up to global competition in a variety of sectors, a market dominated by an insular group of experts who had to be registered with a vast government agency seemed anathema to growth and efficiency. If the TBI had any hope of maintaining its regulatory authority, the space of auctioning had to be expanded from the regional scale of the seven centers to the national scale. The site of the auction could no longer be “Kolkata” or “Kochi” or “Siliguri,” but “India.” If the pan-India auction was successful, then the TBI would be justified in its parallel plan to alter the TMCO to increase the amount of tea plantations were required to sell through the auction. In the wake of the 2016 rollout of the pan-India auction, the TBI tried to raise the quota to 70 percent, but, facing resistance from plantation owners and managers, it eventually dropped the requirement to 50 percent, still 10 percent higher than the post-liberalization low of 40 percent.

Conclusion

The television ad for Tata Gold tea with which I opened this chapter may seem epiphenomenal to the history of regulation and trade. But I would argue that it captures tensions that emerge as the circulation of commodities becomes wrapped up in the language of transparency, or when commodity circulation is reformed through a desire to make visible social relations that have heretofore been occluded. Unfurling along with those long cylindrical twists of tea are tensions of material transparency and market transparency.

Tata Gold distinguishes itself through its materiality. Some 15 percent of its contents are what the company’s marketing material describes as “long leaves.” Most of the tea sold within India is not “long-leaf” but “cut-tear-curl” (CTC) tea, which takes the form of tiny, dark kernels – more reminiscent of instant coffee than a dried leaf. If any tea has become India’s “national beverage” since 1947, then it is CTC tea, which mixes perfectly with milk and spices and withstands harsh boiling much better than the delicate long-leaf variety. Tata Gold highlights the enduring aesthetic forms of colonial production.

Tata’s advertising is also about the market. Since the end of the colonial era, those long leaves have been tasted, priced, and valued for a foreign market. The inclusion of 15 percent, then, represents a kind of quota. The figure of the unfurling leaf signals the emergence of an educated, empowered middle-class consumer. That the consumer is also a voter makes sense in the context of a neoliberalizing India in which political and economic participation are so closely linked.

Yet the advertisement – not surprisingly – oversimplifies things. The material and market forms of transparency are more difficult to reconcile. Although the Tata Gold ad campaign rather firmly juxtaposes the empowered voter–consumer with the lethargic, corrupt state, I have tried to show in this chapter that much can be learned about the limits and possibilities of transparency if we situate it within a longer history of state regulation. Seen from the point of view of TBI bureaucrats, the Indian government’s role in the tea industry has always been to unmask the operations of a large, powerful economic institution. Postcolonial governments – often associated with opacity and corruption – are perhaps unfairly measured against governments in the Global North by their relative willingness to do such unmasking. Whether in the immediate aftermath of decolonization in the 1950s or in the wake of liberalization in the 1990s and 2000s, free trade as a regulatory priority clashes with national-level growth. At the same time, tea’s value and distinction on the market – seen in the juxtaposition between the “quality” of a long-leaf tea versus the abundance and coarseness of a CTC – clash with tea’s value as a symbol of national awakening and development.

My intervention here is to include stories like that of the TBI’s contradictory efforts at regulation within the longer history of transparency. After all, these efforts have been carried out on behalf of the same citizen–consumers that advocates of free trade, fair trade, and direct trade claim to be representing. Considering how many non-state efforts at material and market transparency tend to use the postcolonial state as an ethical or moral foil, it is worth understanding in more precise terms what role the state has played in creating or mitigating material and market opacity.

Transparent, Sustainable Supply Chains

For Traidcraft Exchange, there is clearly a causal link between the kinds of disclosures that constitute transparency and the kinds of sustainability outcomes they are hoping to promote: namely, improving the working conditions of women in the Assam tea industry. Of the four reasons that such disclosures could be a “game-changer” for women working on Assam tea estates, the idea that transparency is a way to reward and recognize social and environmental improvements offers the clearest insight into how, exactly, such disclosures are supposed to lead to sustainable outcomes. What Traidcraft Exchange is suggesting is that companies that disclose their sources and are therefore more transparent will be able to enjoy the financial benefits of more sustainable operations. Such disclosures will allow actors including supermarkets and consumers to see the improvements tea brands have made in, for instance, their suppliers’ treatment of workers or an estate’s contribution to deforestation. They are, in corporate sustainability jargon, suggesting that there is indeed a “business case” for transparency. In this implicit causal ontology, it is the market that mediates the relationship between consumers and farmworkers (via supermarkets, tea brands, brokers, producers, estate managers, and a host of other actors that constitute global tea supply chains), and it is the market that allows consumers to express their preference for ethically sourced tea over unethically sourced tea through a process often glossed as “voting with one’s wallet.” In this worldview, if it is transparency as the disclosure of information that affords recognition, it is the market that affords the reward.

Traidcraft Exchange goes on to claim that, by pressuring companies to disclose supplier lists, its campaign transformed the supply chains that facilitate the movement of tea from farms spread across the Global South to British kitchens and cafés into exemplars of transparency, empowering both consumers and workers. It is an astonishing statement, one that helps illuminate both the relative ease with which supply chains seem to be able to be rendered transparent through the disclosure of this kind of information and the grandiose claims that are causally attached to such disclosures. How is it that the simple publication of a few Excel spreadsheets and PDF lists containing basic information about suppliers – farm names, and in some cases the location, which tea brands would have already had on hand – can be justifiably framed as leading to the empowerment of both consumers and workers? How, in other words, is transparency causally related to sustainability?

Answering this question requires an examination of the causal ontology that structures the sociotechnical imaginary of neoliberal sustainability, which is characterized by a “techno-fideistic” belief in the ability of enhanced measurement and reporting infrastructures to provide the (big) data necessary for the market to solve climate change and other socio-ecological crises for us (Archer Reference Archer2024; see also Jarrige Reference Jarrige2016; Van Dijck Reference Van Dijck2014). Put differently, we have to open the black box of transparency initiatives and try to map out the mechanisms that connect the disclosure of information about various sustainability concerns – in this case, where tea is coming from – with some desired sustainability outcome – in this case, improved treatment of women farmworkers in Assam. In doing so, it becomes clearer that “the market” mediates the relationship between transparency and sustainability because it is the market that is supposed to make sense of – and act on – the information disclosed as a result of these transparency initiatives.

Traidcraft Exchange’s assessment of the impact of its campaign – its claim that the relatively banal disclosure of vague sourcing information marked a radical transformation of the tea supply chain in terms of its transparency and that this led (somehow) to the empowerment of producers and consumers alike – reflects a broader imaginary in which practices of transparency or what Sampson (Reference Sampson, August and Osrecki2019) calls “transparenting” are framed as ethically and politically fundamental to a wide array of desirable outcomes, chief among them sustainability. For sustainability standards developers, in particular, more than fifty of whom I observed and interviewed as part of a project on the role of voluntary certification schemes in the governance of the Kenyan tea supply chain between 2018 and 2021, transparency presents different opportunities as well as different challenges. In an interview with Robert, who works in the London office of a standards development organization, it becomes clear just how much a driving force the pursuit of transparency is for market-based sustainability organizations. He tells me that it is impossible to achieve sustainability without accountability, and that accountability is impossible without transparency. That, he explains, is why there is such a strong focus on auditing and why audit reports are always public. The effectiveness of the standards his organization designs and constantly revises is premised on the idea that they are trustworthy – that is, that the certificate or label awarded to compliant producers indicates that the standard was actually followed; such trustworthiness is necessary to take advantage of the purported (but empirically suspect) consumer willingness to pay more for sustainable products. But it is not only the global tea value chain that has to be rendered legible through standardization; standards developers themselves face pressure to be transparent about their budgets and salaries, and they try to obviate criticisms leveled at organizations like the Red Cross by publishing detailed information about their finances.

Transparency is also the motivation behind the resources these organizations commit to measuring and reporting the impacts of their standards. Susanna, who works on the measurement and evaluation team for a different standards developer in London, tells me that both consumers and companies expect to be able to see the value of a standard, and, just as importantly, to see how that value was derived. It is not enough, she argues, for people who have invested in sustainability – whether it is a consumer who paid a “sustainability premium” for a certified product or a company that has gone through the motions of procuring ingredients and other inputs from certified sustainable upstream producers – to trust that the standard has done what is promised; they also expect evidence that such actions are impactful. In this sense, transparency becomes one of the easiest things to evince, since a standards development organization can easily demonstrate that a producer followed the rules regarding the disclosure of information as stipulated in a particular standard, which is itself evidence of enhanced transparency. In other words, the disclosure of specified information in a specified form can be taken as evidence both that producers complied with the standard and that the standards development organization has enhanced the transparency of the supply chain.

Critics of mainstream sustainability standards such as Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance also focus on what they see as various failures to be sufficiently transparent within these organizations, especially regarding the way their standards are developed. At a trade show for tea and coffee in Hamburg, a Madrid-based coffee importer was critical of the “secrecy” surrounding Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance. She works instead with the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO), which she regards as open and democratic in its reliance on a set of general principles, the second of which is “Transparency and Accountability”:

A tea trader in London was critical of Fairtrade from a similar perspective, arguing that although Rainforest Alliance does not guarantee a much-needed price premium for certified tea, it is still better than Fairtrade because the latter is not transparent about the way the premiums are spent. She tells me that there is no oversight once the premiums get back to the farmers, no accountability that they will invest them as they should. Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade respond to these kinds of criticisms by aligning themselves closely with the ISEAL Alliance, an organization that provides standards and guidelines on how standards developers should go about developing standards and engaging with stakeholders, focusing in particular on the transparency of those processes. An auditor expressed similar concerns about the difference between NEPCon (since relaunched as Preferred by Nature), a popular Copenhagen-based certifier, and Africert, which has offices in Kenya, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. In particular, he was worried about Africert’s “lack of transparency” and its effects on the integrity of the audits they conduct, although he never specified how this lack of transparency manifested or what evidence he had to suspect that Africert’s operations were in some way untrustworthy.

Transparency is a buzzword in negotiations about sustainability more generally. When I attended several business-focused and corporate-sponsored events surrounding COP 21 in Paris in 2015 as part of my dissertation fieldwork, it was all anyone seemed to be talking about. Much of my work as a participant observer in Geneva between August 2015 and August 2016 focused on sustainability professionals working in a number of organizations who were trying to figure out ways to measure, report, and evaluate their social and environmental impacts in a way that was relatively easily commensurable with their financial performance. They looked for ideally quantitative indicators of sustainability that could be correlated with corporate financial performance metrics. This was especially important for publicly traded corporations and their investors. All of this work was motivated by the recognition – sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit – that disclosing information about social and environmental impacts made a company or organization more transparent, and being more transparent was correlated with being more sustainable. The goal was to make sustainability reporting as standard and standardized as financial reporting.

Recently, the European Union has attempted to codify this by requiring companies above a certain size and in certain industries to disclose sustainability data alongside their annual financial reports. Both the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) are framed explicitly around their capacity to enable investors to make more sustainable decisions as a result of increased corporate transparency. Under the banner of the Global Compact, the United Nations has been promoting the normalization of sustainability reporting for more than a decade. Laws such as the CSRD and the CSDDD often refer to these voluntary reporting standards frameworks.

Transparency has even filtered into design choices. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, an influential organization whose membership includes some of the world’s biggest corporations, rents office space for its Geneva headquarters from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, which is located in a building made almost entirely out of glass in the shape of flower petals, a design meant to evoke, as one of the building’s junior architects told me, both transparency (with its glass walls) and sustainability (with its petal-shaped towers).

From seemingly every angle, then, transparency is a hot topic among sustainability professionals, especially those who are interested in the more social and environmentally sustainable governance of global supply chains. This reflects what Birchall (Reference Birchall2011; see also Birchall Reference Birchall2014) observes as a seemingly universal assumption that more transparency is better: that is, that more transparency is desirable, especially in the area of both public and private governance (Fung et al. Reference Fung, Graham and Weil2007) of sustainability issues (Gupta and Mason Reference Gupta and Mason2016). Hansen et al. distill three themes in critical research on transparency that complicate this narrative. First, transparency is paradoxical, as the pursuit of transparency “itself produces new dimensions of opacity and obscurity” (Reference Hansen and Flyverbom2015: 119). Second, transparency is mediated in the sense that it is “ephemeral and always in the making,” relying on various “devices, operations and proxies” in order to emerge (ibid.: 121). Finally, transparency is “part and parcel of the emergence of ‘procedural’ and ‘flexible’ modes of governance” (ibid.: 124), inextricably linked to the rapid growth of, among other things, sustainability standards (see Busch Reference Busch2011; Loconto Reference Loconto2014). More generally, transparency is premised on a model of linear communication, one in which, proponents claim, information disclosure will produce an informed and engaged public that can hold people in positions of power to account. The technological mediation that is necessarily involved in the provision of information appears as a neutral transmission belt, obscuring the power that is involved in the selection and coding of what is made visible to us and what is not (Hansen and Flyverbom Reference Hansen and Flyverbom2015: 874).

What is clear here is that transparency is about information. Indeed, most definitions of transparency see it as the disclosure of information (or some variation on that theme, such as the reporting of information), a tendency that is as true among business-friendly definitions as it is among anthropologists and other critical scholars of transparency (Albu and Flyverbom Reference Albu and Flyverbom2019; Corsín Jiménez Reference Corsín Jiménez2011; Gupta Reference Gupta2023; MacLean Reference MacLean2014). According to UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD 2004: 3), for example, “transparency denotes a state of affairs in which the participants in the investment process are able to obtain sufficient information from each other in order to make informed decisions and meet obligations and commitments.” Tarus and Omandi (Reference Tarus and Omandi2013), drawing on case studies from Kenya in an attempt to make a “business case for corporate transparency,” refer to transparency several times as the “disclosure of information” about, among other things, investment decision processes, governance strategies, risk-return profiles, and social impacts.

Even critical scholars such as Hess (Reference Hess2007) conceptually reinforce the idea that there is a relatively straightforward cause-and-effect relationship between transparency, accountability, and sustainability. What they focus their critique on instead is improving the reliability of information through, for example, the structural integration of ostensibly independent, third-party intermediaries in the disclosure process, reflecting a view of uncertainty and ambiguity as merely technical problems with technical solutions (see Best Reference Best2007). Similarly, the WFTO approach preferred by the Madrid-based coffee importer we met above falls short of questioning the idea that the proliferation of relevant information by and among various supply chain actors and other stakeholders is an inherent driver of enhanced accountability. No criticism is leveled against this causal ontology; what critics take issue with instead is simply the quality of information provided, as well as the communicative and regulatory infrastructures that facilitate the flow of information, but rarely what people are supposed to do with that information to effect any meaningful change in terms of social or environmental concerns. Gold and Heikkurinen (Reference Gold and Heikkurinen2018) refer to this as the transparency fallacy, which rests on the overly optimistic (and, in their view, wholly unwarranted) assumption that “corporate disclosure on environmental, social, and economic performance will lead to more responsible business practices as corporations are exposed to public scrutiny, and can thus be held accountable for their actions.” What they find instead is in line with much of the critical literature on transparency, which emphasizes that calls for greater transparency often facilitate business-as-usual and pre-empt challenges to the status quo through the post-political language of win–win partnerships (Garsten and Jacobsson Reference Garsten and Jacobsson2011; Mason Reference Mason2008; Moors Reference Moors2019; Sharma Reference Sharma2013).

Information as Enclosure

If transparency is the disclosure of information, it is important to think about what information is and, crucially, what it does. For the linguistic anthropologist Paul Kockelman, “any meaningful process relates [signs, objects, and interpretants] in the following way: a sign stands for its object on the one hand, and its interpretant on the other, in such a way as to make the interpretant stand in relation to the object corresponding to its own relation to the object” (Kockelman Reference Kockelman2013: 120). What this means is that meaning is less about the relationship between a sign and an object (or between a signifier and a signified in the classic Saussurean sense) and is more about the correspondence between the relationship between a sign and an object, on the one hand, and an interpretant and an object, on the other hand; Kockelman refers to this as a relation between relations. Information, then, according to Kockelman, can be understood as the “enclosure of meaning”; this means, among other things, that the meaning of a certain piece of information becomes “relatively portable: not so much independent of context, as dependent on contexts which have been engineered so as to be relatively ubiquitous, and hence seemingly context-free” (Kockelman Reference Kockelman2013: 115, emphasis added), a semiotic anti-politics machine.

Kockelman’s theory of information strikes at the heart of neoliberal sustainability in the sense that it gives us a provocative, critical vocabulary for thinking about what transparency initiatives actually do. Rather than merely prompting the disclosure of information that corporations and other actors might have otherwise preferred not to publish, these transparency initiatives force us to reckon with the causal mechanisms that link such disclosures to their purported social and environmental objectives. It pushes us, in other words, to think about the context in which such causal ontologies make sense – in which claims about the disclosure of this kind of information as meaningfully related to some sustainability outcome seems legitimate – and, crucially, about the ways in which such a context is engineered and tacitly reproduced so that sustainability can be meaningfully linked to something as trivial as publishing a list of suppliers.

When Unilever decided to release a list of farms and estates supplying tea for its brands in the UK and Ireland, it was disclosing information in a relatively specific, quantitative sense. Although there are no data about the amount of tea sourced from each location, the document includes the names of producers, the selling marks (the actual farm, estate, and/or factory where the tea is produced), and the country where the producers are located. But through the publication of this document, Unilever was also disclosing information in a more general, qualitative sense, signifying through the act of releasing a list in the first place that the company is transparent about its production while at the same time defining what actions (e.g., releasing a list of suppliers) constitute transparency. Discursively binding assessments of a company’s sustainability or social responsibility to whether or not they disclose this kind of information – that is, whether or not they are transparent – reinforces this definition of transparency while at the same time establishing sustainability as (merely) the willingness to be transparent. What Unilever hoped to signify through the disclosure of its sourcing information was that it was committed to transparency – that it was, in other words, a transparent company (or at the very least that it managed a transparent supply chain) – and it hoped that such a signification would be interpreted as evidence that it was committed to sustainability in its tea supply chain.

Traidcraft Exchange’s glowing assessment of the success of its program helped establish and reinforce this correspondence between disclosure and transparency, on the one hand, and between sustainability and transparency, on the other. By late 2020, the organization felt confident enough to publish a “principles-to-practice guide for ethical businesses.” Throughout the report, market forces offer a dynamic background against which the social and environmental impactfulness of disclosures is established. The report opens with an appeal to sustainability before immediately relating this to the private financial benefits of transparency:

The report goes on to provide details about the different business benefits of transparency, followed by a list of nine steps companies can take to improve their supply chain transparency, most of which relate to information. These steps focus, among other things, on determining why a company wants to disclose certain information and what information will be included in its disclosure; what information a company already has available and what information it needs to actively collect; and, finally, how the information should ultimately be disclosed and the kinds of reflections that should take place before starting the process over again. Such an approach to transparency suggests an obvious correspondence between transparency and sustainability, but is ambiguous regarding the causal mechanisms through which the disclosure of the kind of information the report identifies as a bare minimum is meant to lead to different sustainability outcomes, leaving implicit its advice’s fundamental reliance on the market to generate social and environmental impacts.

Transparency for the Market

Efforts to make supply chains more transparent through the disclosure of information about sourcing locations are motivated by different goals, but not, as the above suggests, by different impact imaginaries. The people working at organizations such as Traidcraft Exchange and the WFTO are working with the primary goal of improving the living and working conditions of farmers and farmworkers, and transparency is supposed to facilitate this by increasing accountability. The people working at Unilever, on the other hand, while they would certainly agree that improved working and living conditions are a worthy goal, are motivated primarily by a desire to enhance the company’s financial performance. This is clear in Unilever’s 2020 annual report, where transparency is framed variously as a way to strengthen the management team’s “dialogue” with its shareholders, as contributing to employee loyalty and retention, improving risk management, and increasing consumer confidence in the company’s products (Unilever 2021a).

How is it that transparency, understood here as the disclosure of information about sourcing, can be wielded in service of objectives as different as increasing the share price of a multinational corporation and improving the lives of marginalized farmworkers? As Michael Mason (Reference Mason2008: 12) has argued, “any analytic examination of disclosure measures in global environmental governance that fails to grasp the broader politico-economic context of transparency practices and norms is likely to lose sight of the regimes of power in play.” Reflecting on the prerogative of civil society organizations (like Traidcraft Exchange) to speak on behalf of victims (like the marginalized workers on Assam tea plantations), he urges scholars of transparency to pay attention to “the question of political representation: for whom is transparency intended? And by which standards of accountability are disclosure-based governance mechanisms to be judged?” (Mason Reference Mason2008: 11).

In trying to answer this question for the various actors discussed so far – Traidcraft Exchange and the WFTO, Unilever and the Rainforest Alliance, the European Commission, and so on – we encounter a lot of ambiguity. On the one hand, such ambiguity can be constructive, as Jacqueline Best (Reference Best2007) has shown in her critique of analyses of uncertainty that frame it as a technical problem that more and better transparency solves. What Best argues, instead, is that such “technical ambiguities” are only one kind of ambiguity, and that a focus on contested and intersubjective ambiguities highlights the inherently political nature of transparency and opacity. These latter ambiguities arise as a result of political and conceptual differences, the recognition of which, Best argues, is essential to effective governance. This seems to be what organizations like the Rainforest Alliance and Traidcraft Exchange, as well as scholars such as Tarus and Omandi (Reference Tarus and Omandi2013), are trying to do when they appeal to the economic incentives of the actors whose activities they want to govern: by making a “business case” for transparency – by, for instance, arguing that transparency increases consumer confidence and brand loyalty – they are trying to create a space in which the social and environmental goals of NGOs can be aligned with the financial goals of large, multinational corporations.

On the other hand, organization theorists have long emphasized the extent to which ambiguity can be strategically wielded (Eisenberg Reference Eisenberg1984), particularly to the extent that transparency in one area often creates useful opacities elsewhere (Birchall Reference Birchall2011; Flyverbom Reference Flyverbom2019; Schade Reference Schade2023; Stohl et al. Reference Stohl, Stohl and Leonardi2016). As Schumann (Reference Schumann2007: 839) argues in an analysis of the Welsh parliament’s vocal embrace of transparency in the late 1990s and early 2000s, “transparency practices are a strategic resource utilized by institutional actors to advance the individual and party goals of elected officials.” Thus, in asking for whom transparency is intended, it is important to examine both the divergences and the overlaps between the motivations behind a transparency initiative and, crucially, the shared assumptions underlying assessments of its (potential) impactfulness. NGOs promote data-driven transparency with consumers, investors, and activists in mind, hoping that these various actors, equipped with better information about corporate activities, will be able to hold companies accountable for their negative social and environmental impacts. Companies, on the other hand, target a similar audience of consumers and investors but in service of a very different group of people: shareholders. Despite this, the assumptions underlying the effectiveness of such initiatives are similar. It is through the dynamics of the market that the disclosure of information is supposed to lead to sustainability outcomes. The market subsumes the diverse audiences of these transparency initiatives and becomes the primary target of disclosures, the thing that is supposed to make sense of the disclosed data and improve social, environmental, and financial performance.

Conclusion

In their Introduction, the editors of this volume identify what they call the paradox of transparency, “[t]he claim that transparency is a process of mediation which incorrectly understands itself to be a process of disintermediation.” Such a paradox speaks to Kockelman’s contention that information is the enclosure of meaning to the extent that the meaning of a piece of information may appear relatively context independent but only because certain contexts have been “engineered” to be ubiquitous. From this perspective, the paradox of transparency raises several interesting questions: What information is actually disclosed through a disclosure? What does such information mean, and on what context does such meaning depend? How was such a context engineered, and which actors were involved in its construction and reproduction?

Unilever disclosed a list of its suppliers in response to Traidcraft Exchange’s “Who picked my tea?” campaign, information that was supposed to empower workers and consumers alike. For Traidcraft Exchange, the disclosure of this information rendered the tea supply chain transparent, while for Unilever these disclosures were framed as a key element in their sustainability strategy, which at the time was called the Sustainable Living Plan (Unilever 2021b). But in disclosing this information, Unilever also disclosed another type of information, information about its willingness to be “transparent,” on the one hand, and information about what kind of information it would disclose as evidence of its transparency, on the other hand. This seems like the information that really matters if we want to understand the politics of transparency, its relationship to sustainability, and the role of the market in mediating that relationship.

Paying attention to the market’s opaque but fundamental role in the causal ontologies linking transparenting practices to sustainability outcomes highlights the role of organizations like Traidcraft Exchange and the Rainforest Alliance in reinforcing the correspondence between the disclosure of relatively low-stakes information and the lofty sustainability goals such organizations claim to be pursuing. In diverse contexts – from these kinds of organizations, to the European Commission and various UN agencies, to multinational corporations and their investors – reports, guidelines, and other documents about the importance of transparency reproduce the idea that the disclosure of information about production practices leads to more sustainable outcomes, a claim that increasingly relies on the assumption that it is “the market” that causally links transparency to sustainability. As new technologies emerge that enable and mediate the rapid proliferation of information in the form of so-called big data, Aarti Gupta has called for a “radical” approach to transparency “that shines a light on the still largely hidden (from governance) drivers of unsustainability and climate harm; a transparency that pinpoints where greatest responsibility for climate action lies” (Gupta Reference Gupta2023: 3, emphasis in the original). Among other things, such an approach should include a critical focus on the organizations that are responsible for proliferating an imaginary in which the market and its corporate–financial avatars are presumed to constitute the causal mechanism through which transparency leads to sustainability, as well as the ways in which such an imaginary gets reproduced as a seemingly ubiquitous, contextualizing background against which sustainability discourses take place.

Concealing, Revealing, and the Craft of Trading

The first day I joined Ismail Hajiar at the street-side market, he was in the thick of trading. When I arrived, he was cradling a large yellow sapphire, turning it around and around in his hand. The supplier who was selling it stood to his right. They were arguing about the price.

Ismail Hajiar dropped the stone into my hand: “Look at this. They are asking for 150 [150,000 rupees],” he said.

“How many carats?” I asked, peering at it. The color was good, yet one side had a number of inclusions. Still, the stone was large enough that if the wakkuwa (optic axis) was favorably oriented, they could still obtain a good price after cutting it.

He fished the stone from my palm and sent his nephew to check its weight: 27.5 carats.

“I’ll give you 115,” Ismail Hajiar offered.

“No, Hajiar!” the man replied. “Only above 150.”

“Aiyya [brother],” Ismail Hajiar said, placing his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Come, look at this stone with me.” He held the stone up toward the sun and began pointing out its flaws – a crack here, an inclusion there, an uneven distribution of color.

I looked on, amused. By now, I had come to understand that there was more to the discussion than an assessment of the stone. Buyers performed their distaste for a stone as a way to retain their bargaining power. Suppliers, in turn, quoted as high as they possibly could: “If you want to sell for 10,000,” a group of Sinhalese suppliers had once told me, “you have to ask for 200,000.”

Ismail Hajiar lowered the stone and looked expectantly at the man. “With all these flaws, brother, how can I pay 150?”

The supplier had his own cards to play. “Rizwan Hajiar offered me 150. He would leave it in the sun for three days and pay right away.” He looked on earnestly: “I’m not lying, Hajiar. There he is. Go and ask him.”

Ismail Hajiar seemed to take his word for it. Yet he held the man’s gaze, and waited. The supplier tried a different tack. He put his arm around Ismail Hajiar, and lowered his voice: “I’m only showing this to you. Because it is you, I’ll give it for 150.”

“How about 120?” Ismail Hajiar offered, placing his arm around the man in turn.

“No, Haji! I told you. I have an offer for 150,” he said, breaking away.

Ismail Hajiar turned to the other suppliers lining up to show him their stones. The man walked away, feigning exasperation. I sensed he wasn’t actually upset, as Ismail Hajiar had closed his hand around the stone rather than returning it. To hold onto the stone was to signal that the negotiation remained open.

Market relations, I was beginning to grasp, were a form of theater. There is a dramatic quality to these exchanges. As suppliers quote wildly high prices and buyers make unacceptably low offers, performances of outrage ensue – arms fly, voices are raised, people storm away. Often they come back and cajole. Folded into the drama is a kind of playfulness, where everyone is in on the game. Other traders stand around, teasing, making running commentaries, watching in anticipation to see how transactions unfold. Sometimes it seems, as Anna Tsing (Reference Tsing2015) describes in the Matsutake markets, that the point is the performance.

Yet it is a performance of a particular kind, a kind that draws in the front stage and backstage of social life (Goffman Reference Goffman1959). While the words exchanged between traders expressed the sentiments each person wanted the other to see, each one was also trying to discern what was not being said – the thoughts and feelings unfolding in the interior of the other’s mind. Standing there, it turned out that I was not the only one at the market who was trying to decipher the meanings of people’s winks and blinks. While the two men were debating the qualities of the stone and the prices, they were also scrutinizing each other, scanning each other’s faces, gestures, and expressions. They were attempting to discern the degree to which their counterpart had been captivated by the gem. They were constantly asking, in market parlance, how much the buyer was “hit by the stone” (gala wedunada). The notion that one is hit by a stone encapsulates the sense that the stone has taken hold of a person, has drawn him or her in. While traders scrutinize stones with exacting discernment, grading, assessing, and evaluating them for their color, clarity, and luster, they also speak of an ineffable quality of attraction. As Rafeek, a fourth-generation gem trader once told me, “When you see a beautiful stone, you feel something. You can’t quite describe it.”

Trading stones requires skill and expertise acquired over time by men who begin to go to the markets with their fathers as teenagers. It is an expertise they say can be gained only from experience, a form of knowledge they describe as distinct from “book learning.” It is a skill acquired from examining hundreds of stones a day. In the mornings I spent with Ismail Hajiar in the market, as the sun reached its peak, making the streets unbearably hot, he would teach me some of these skills, showing me how to handle the stone, how to detect the inclusions, holding it up to the sun, how to find its wakkuwa (optic axis). Alongside this, he would also tell me about the gem business.

Trading, he once said to me, is not only about knowing how to grade and select stones, but also about knowing how to trade. One part of this knowledge is to develop an eye for the stones, to assess them, and to sense this ineffable quality to captivate. Another part, it seems, is to acquire skills in observing people, in reading, situating those who buy and sell the stones, their gestures, their expressions, and, most importantly, their social locations within the gem-trading network. Deciphering these locations is critical, particularly for credit relations: the number of days over which credit is extended tends to mark social distance.Footnote ² Yet another skill I began to detect was a skill in mastering the art of concealing and uncovering intents and desires, one’s own and those of one’s trading partner.

In a gemology class that I took at the beginning of fieldwork, Sudath, a Sinhalese instructor, told his students, mostly young Muslim men aspiring to join the trade:

To learn the social codes of the market, then, is to learn to play with what one conceals and reveals. It is woven into the sociality of street-side trading. I remembered Sudath’s words as I waited to see what happened with the yellow sapphire in Ismail Hajiar’s hand.

Later that morning, the supplier returned. The two men continued to negotiate, going back and forth for over twenty minutes until Ismail Hajiar finally caved in. “Okay, 150,000,” he consented, “but ten days’ credit.” Shaking his head, feigning exasperation, the supplier agreed. Ismail Hajiar kept the stone. No money was exchanged. No receipt of the transaction was made. The man walked down the road and disappeared from view. Ismail Hajiar, I knew, would keep the stone in the sun for three days to see if the color would fade – an agreement between the two groups of traders to ensure that stones had not been treated. If the color remained unchanged, he would confirm his purchase of the stone. Given all his protestations about the flaws in the stone, I asked Ismail Hajiar how he felt about the price he paid. “It’s okay,” he told me, nonplussed by the fact that the supplier did not reduce the price. Lowering his voice just a fraction, he said, “It’s fine because it is a good stone. If I cut it right, I can get a higher price in Beruwala.”

Why did Ismail Hajiar point to the inclusions in the stone as a reason why the supplier should lower the price when he was actually willing to give him the amount he asked for? As I see it, this was not about deception, because what was transparent in the exchange was their shared understanding of a set of practices, tactics, and codes of conduct that included concealing their real interest in a stone and the amount at which each was willing to settle. This shared understanding of a repertoire of gestures, intimations of interest, and trading practices afforded them enormous flexibility to negotiate the prices of stones. What caught my attention about the exchange was not their bargaining tactics but the insights they revealed about the relationship between knowledge and its concealment among the traders. As the sapphire trade is credit-based, most traders sell to those whom they already know. They cultivate these relationships across various lines of social difference, sometimes across generations. If the buyer or seller is unknown, they will carry out the transaction through a broker known to both parties or ask someone within their network to vouch for the newcomer. Therefore, there is a great degree of familiarity, and in some cases a significant amount of closeness. Yet, it is a kind of intimacy that doesn’t require full transparency about one’s thoughts, perceptions, and interests. Secrets have their place. Trading relations are made and remade in daily interactions through what is concealed and revealed, and through when and how things are disclosed. The secret, like the gift, binds the teller and the person told into a relationship.

Sorting Stones, Grading Traders: Modalities of Asymmetric Exchange

While bargaining within the street-side market takes place within a shared set of meanings, to circulate the stones transnationally, traders also seek out those with whom they do not share the same ascriptions of meaning. This became most apparent to me one afternoon as I sat in a gem office in Beruwala, which a young trader named Aftab shared with his cousins. As suppliers streamed into the office, traders who were looking to replenish their stock were keeping an eye out for specific kinds of stones that were currently in high demand: unheated royal blue sapphires of two or three carats, without inclusions. “Royal blue mattum [only]. Natural venum [want],” Imtiaz, Aftab’s cousin, kept saying to the suppliers who came to him, underscoring that he wanted to see only unheated royal blue stones. Aftab, on the other hand, looked at everything. As he sorted the stones he was shown, he nonchalantly “passed” all the royal blue sapphires and selected blue stones with a greenish tint, many of which had inclusions. These were stones that I knew most traders would not buy. They were considered to be flawed and ascribed less value.

Imtiaz leaned over to me and said, “Can you see what he is doing? He is letting all these good stones go.” Noticing my confusion, he grinned, “There’s a reason for this. He has a customer in Shanghai who likes the green tint and doesn’t care about the inclusions. Don’t ask me why. But he can buy them here for nothing because no one else wants them and make a profit because the buyer in China is willing to pay the price he quotes. If you find a buyer like that, you are set.” Imtiaz shook his head at his cousin’s luck and ingenuity. Aftab made frequent visits to China, sourcing new customers who were further removed from Sri Lankan markets. He was able to take a stone that was devalued in Beruwala and engender a process of valorization by selling it to a buyer whose registers of value were different to those appraising stones in Sri Lanka.

The lack of shared meaning is significant here. Aftab was relying on a mismatch between the meaning and ascriptions of value to the stone between the suppliers in Beruwala and his buyer in China. Traders seek out such discrepancies when they travel to local and international markets, as they meet new customers, suppliers, and buyers. In these encounters, I noticed that while traders examine the stones, appraising them for their color, quality, and cut, parsing sapphires into low-grade “fancy” stones, valuable cornflower blues, high-end royal blues, and collectors’ quality stones, other kinds of scanning, grading, and sorting were also taking place. These entailed a reading of persons. With deep ethnographic curiosity, traders would ask each other who they were, where they were from, what kinds of places they traveled to, and what markets they had access to. If the work of assessment and sorting creates commodity value (Tsing Reference Tsing2013), in these markets, in addition to the stones, traders were also grading and sorting each other, evaluating differentials in status and access to networks. Like anthropologists, the traders I worked with were skilled in the “arts of noticing” (Tsing Reference Tsing2015).

This art of noticing was a particularly valuable skill in the colored stone trade. This came home to me one afternoon while I was having tea with a retired South Indian trader named Nawaz Hajiar. He had been impossibly difficult to reach. To arrange a visit with him I had to have multiple meetings with his family members, including two of his sons and three of his younger brothers, who, I learned later, had been asked to screen me before he agreed to make time. When I met him, he wanted to know about my family background, what I had learned about the gem trade, and whom I knew in the trading network before he was willing to speak. Halfway through our conversation, he told me, “Sapphires are not like diamonds, you know. The price of diamonds is standardized. If a robber finds a diamond, he can go anywhere in the world and sell it for a similar price. But if he finds a sapphire, he is out of luck. He won’t be able to sell it for what it is worth.”

“Why is that, Hajiar?” I asked.

Nawaz Hajiar leaned back in his chair, with a cryptic smile. “He doesn’t have the contacts,” he said. “With sapphires, it is whom you know that matters.”

I asked him to elaborate.

“The gem itself is invaluable. You can’t measure its worth. Valuation is in the hands of the men who trade; it depends on their capacities. I’ll give you an example. My family sourced a Sri Lankan stone decades ago. It was a rare blue sapphire. They sold it to a buyer in Geneva for $125,000. This buyer then sold it to an American trader in the United States for $300,000. The American trader finally sold it to the husband of a famous American actress for $1 million. Each time it changed hands, it doubled and tripled in price. But it was the same stone. So, here’s the thing you need to know – the price of the stone depends on the status of the buyer and the seller.”

I looked at Nawaz Hajiar, surprised to hear him speak so candidly about how valuation could be viewed as an index of differential status within an exchange. It struck me further that this insight, which for many of us requires conceptual analysis, was an unremarkable fact for him. What could be made of this? I suggest that Nawaz Hajiar’s theory of valuation requires explanation because it runs against the common sense assumption that the value of a commodity is a property of the commodity, as well as scholarly ideas that exchange requires equivalence. As Jane Guyer has argued, while the idea of equivalence has been fundamental to theories of exchange, asymmetrical exchange has long been a central feature of trade (Reference Guyer2004: 27). Guyer shows that, unlike the notion of equivalence, asymmetric exchange is shaped by the idea of comparative advantage, which rests on the assumption of difference among trading partners (Reference Guyer2004: 4). Asymmetry, she notes, enables people to gain through conversions that take place at distinct thresholds or moments in an exchange (Guyer Reference Guyer2004: 58).Footnote ³ In the sapphire trade, where the speculative qualities of exchange are not masked by price standardization, traders both acknowledge the social relations of asymmetric exchange and play with them to secure what Guyer describes as “marginal gains.”

Building on Guyer (Reference Guyer2004), I ask: Could it be that asymmetric exchange relies not only on a lack of equivalence but also on a lack of transparency? Does it require a certain kind of opacity that involves a lack of clarity and a lack of shared meaning? Does this opacity also enable particular kinds of circulation? I suggest that it does and propose that we think of asymmetric exchange as a process of moving gems across different registers of meaning. I see this most clearly when it comes to the exchange of stones that are purchased for their astrological value. For instance, yellow sapphires mined in Sri Lanka are traded between Sinhalese traders in hinterland towns and coastal Muslims who sell them to South Indian Muslim traders with whom they have shared ties of language and religion. Indian Muslims then circulate these stones in North Indian markets, where they are bought by Hindu buyers who wear them for astrological purposes. Neither the Sinhalese nor the Muslim traders share a belief in the astrological power of these stones. Yet they describe how Hindu customers who buy them believe that wearing them during “bad periods” could provide them with protection from harm. While hundreds of stones move weekly through this circuit, the traders who buy and sell them operate with a rough idea of why they are valued by those who ultimately buy them. Yet these gaps in shared value, I argue, are critical for circulation. Traders seek out those with whom they do not share notions of value, for this is what enables men such as Ismail Hajiar and Aftab to buy low in one market and sell high in another. Their actions reveal how speculative value is generated not only through the sorting of commodities but also through the sorting of persons.

Conclusion

Gem networks in the Indian Ocean region are segmented transnational networks – each node is run by collectives of traders who are distinct from each other in ethnicity, religion, language, and place of origin. As traders seek out partners who are different from them and have access to different markets, these differences become critical in determining negotiations about price, for each group has access to buyers with differing notions about the aesthetic, astrological, and investment value of the stones. Trading in gems, then, is about transacting in differences, for these differences enable gem dealers to make gains by engaging in arbitrage. Asymmetric exchange enables arbitrage through what Miyazaki (Reference Miyazaki2013), translating the Japanese word sayatori, describes as the “grabbing of a difference.” For Ismail Hajiar and Aftab, this practice is not only what makes circulation – and their livelihoods – possible; it is also a vital part of the craft of trade.